Kitchen Contents - Issue 16

Ah Banners. Pt 1

(from MM 16 December 1996)

All links checked August 1998

The article by Joan Voight in WIRED 4.12 bemoaning the rise and fall of ad banners was as honest and accurate as you are likely to see in a publication with vested interest. WIRED after all, was amongst the first to use banner ads on its HotWired site in the 'old days' of the web, October 1994. Quoting 'click-through' rates as low as 1 to 6% (IBM's ad dept. figure) it points out one of the big problems facing Web advertising. I can remember the demos I did with Murdoch Magazine's Tim Trumper, where we extolled the virtues of the strip banner, the jump page and their cross site links. Here was the answer to how you'd advertise on the web, we chortled. Find a high traffic site and just slap your banner in front of them, the new interactive audience will actually seek out more information!

Wrong.

All the rules of advertising, hard learnt, still applied. If I'm not interested in the product, I won't read (or click) it. This was made all the more difficult if I knew I was going to a slow loading graphics bloated advertiser's page, and loose my place reading the site I was on. The analogy I use is, imagine that the magazine advertisement on the right hand page of a magazine you were reading consisted of a small strip ad asking you to turn to the back of the magazine, to see the actual advertisement. If the advertiser starts with that disadvantage in mind, then the design of that that small strip ad becomes crucial.

Sample early HP ad December 1996 You may need to refresh the page to see the animation

GIF animation has helped. A multi-line message that changes can at least expand the small screen real estate of the strip. Simple animation also attracts your eye on a page. There's a message to be learnt from the X-Rated sites who seem to be the only people making money, and their cross site advertising. You know that the formula will be identical, if you go to the site you'll first strike an Over 18 disclaimer page, a few free pics to tease you, and then you'll have to sign up on the credit card for any more. If they're all the same when you get there, then the banner has to do all the work. It works for conventional sites as well. If I'm not thinking of buying, offering a low price won't tempt me to click on your banner.

There are alternatives, such as the 'don't touch that dial' page refresh and WORD's in-between 'sponsored by' pages (a static sample here, refreshes automatically back to here). If you remember, first these were server push, then page refresh from within the browser, now you have to 'click here' to get past). This was meant to be the equivalent of TV's 'just sit back and view the ads and we'll get to the program real soon'. Except that I'm not sitting back, I'm upright and clicking, and this adpage is a distraction so you'd better make me feel good about it.

HotWired have produced an advertising effectiveness report that says there is still an 'ad impression' received from the ad banner even without click-through. This and the 'highly targeted' audience they conclude still make for advertising effectiveness.

We'll see. The enormous figures quoted for projected online ad revenue make certain that the topic, like those few square pixels of our screen real estate, won't go away.

OK, that's enough, I'll dry, if you put away.

Want to see what we cooked up in the previous Kitchen?