Banner Blind
J. Shakir Ramsey
Growth Driver | Marketing Innovator | Fusing Creativity, Data & Digital Futures to Transform Brands
Who’s got banner blindness?
Do you got banner blindness?
I got banner blindness. We all got banner blindness.
In fact, in 2013, Infolinks released a proprietary study that 86% of consumers suffer from banner blindness, yet some marketers choose to remain blind to this fact — a sad case of the banner blind leading the banner blind. And I am guilty as well….
I used to work for an ad tech start up that served up banner ads on publishing sites. In defense of that company we made beautiful video banner ads that did not suck!
Like any start-up, ambling towards growth, there were long days and nights. Fears of ad inventory shortage, and workers churning and burning out. But life was simple. The business model, and the math was straight forward.
High click through rates for pennies on the dollar piled up fast into gobs of money and secured growth for acquisition. Content was king and page views were the holy grail of ad effectiveness, birthing millions of robot sites hungry for a click. DoubleClick (now part of Google) ate the lion’s share of page impressions, organizing the web with its millions of pages into a standard ad unit.
Since then the ad tech ecosystem has evolved immensely with more players like Verizon, an old guard mobile carrier purchasing AOL for its ad stack and audience reach. Facebook, as well, with its universal ID and fund of user data is automating buys and retargeting across its ad network and exchange. Consequently, I am excited that marketers are surfing the technology wave beyond the banner ad and seeing the value of surgically reaching audiences at massive scale. They are building a better customer mouse trap, with buzzwords like “automation” and “big data” leading the way.
Advanced ad tactics like programmatic ad buying are mainstream, no longer the private asylum of tech-geeks, trading algorithm notes around a water cooler. According to eMarketer, in 2015 programmatic will comprise of 1/3 of the $60B total digital ad spending pie. Marketers have become mad data scientists applying data to everything–ad campaigns, social media, PR and sales techniques.
At the same time as machines rise up to streamline the buying and selling of digital media, ad agencies (paid on commission of spend) are being dis-intermediated. For instance, the promise of programmatic ad buying removes the need for RFPs (request for proposal), FTE negotiations, manual insertion orders, paperwork and trafficking. It is software using machines to buy ads, place them on websites and optimize them against inventory available.
The online advertising world is so much more complex and variable than I remember it, in a way that makes it impossible for individuals to make targeted ad insertion decisions. Ad serving is but a tiny slice of an ecosystem which now includes ad exchanges, analytics platforms, ad networks and then some; more akin to trading desks on Wall Street than a 30 second compelling video ad during the Super bowl. There are a plethora of acronyms of technologies one must master before setting bids and campaign budgets:
- DSP – Demand Side Platform
- Decision engines that calculate the best value of an ad impression
- DMP – Data Management Platform
- Facilitates access, organization, analysis and segmentation of data
- RTB – Real Time Bidding
- Real time auctions of online ad impressions
- SSP – Supply Side Platform
- Facilitates the buying and selling of inventory from many ad networks
- PMP – Private Market Place
- Private closed premium exchange where buyers and sellers interact
It is simply not enough for agencies to launch sexy creative campaign unless it generates measurable sales. The old adage, “I know half of my advertising works, but I don’t know which half”, is unacceptable as agencies sit atop of ad exchanges and technology, crunching real time data for brand clients to use in cross-device campaigns. I don’t miss invasive pop ups and ad units blinking neon and spinning like a pinwheel. With consumer pressure to deliver the right messages on time, data science with some good story telling can bury the banner ad for good. Stop the blindness. The data shows it is dead.
Digital Marketing and Channel Strategy Lead for Multicultural at T-Mobile
9 年So what are the bots and data telling us about creativity?