Saturday, July 3, 2010

Is the Banner Ads -- Dead?

Digital media buyers have been trying to kill the banner ad for years. With MSNBC's decision on Monday (June 28) to ban banner ads might be a start of major changes to come in digital marketing.


Once the bread and butter of Internet Marketing, will Banner Ads soon become the thing of the past? If the banner ad is not dead, is it undergoing an evolution?

There are many interesting discussions on certain sites on the future of banner ads.

But even more radical is MSNBC.com’s decision to no longer serve banner ads, long the Web industry’s bread and butter. “The banner is dead on our site,” said Tillinghast. “They’ve become too commoditized,” particularly when they are served every time a user clicks to a new page, no matter how quickly they depart or whether they even see the whole page. But the new MSNBC.com is designed to be anti–page view to bring more content to the surface and require far less navigation by users.

...

“If someone says they are going to stop running banners, the question is why? If people have told you by their activities or communications that they don’t like banners, that’s wonderful reason to stop doing that.”
-- link

I do agree with many of the decisions to stop banner ads. Web ads are eminently ignorable, and rarely move one to laugh or cry. Interruptive marketing has seen its day, and with the increasing popularity of social media, advertisers and brands have to adapt to the changing landscape -- Engage.

Even with the animated banners, many companies find that they may get page views, however with video, photos, comments, that stuff was all disparate. Banner Ads are simply not engaging, and even if they bring traffic to a site, people leave the site and have no interest in staying.

I welcome this new vision of innovation for online marketing, and the new evolved large format ads on MSNBC looks pretty interesting and dynamic content ads will increasingly replace static ads going forward.

We are in the age of change, get with the program or be obsolete!

-- Robin Low

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