"My Children Tell Me That Inventing The Banner Ad is Like Inventing Smallpox" - The Rise of Retail Media!

It's a familiar, Christmassy sight: a fleet of twinkling Coca?Cola trucks making their way across a snowy landscape. This is how you know that 'Holidays Are Coming'.

The trucks have become Christmassy icons since they were launched on TV in?1995.

No doubt they not only helped maintain a timely front of mind 'Coca Cola' brand message for all those years but also helped to keep those festive sales going. But do we now see it as an 'advert' or simply an accepted part the westernised, commercialised, consumer view of what's supposed to be a religious celebration?

One things for sure the great sugar drink maker has had more than their bang for their buck with this creative over the years and is now a perennial advertising must have on all our screens.

Despite all the evidence showing the continued groundswell of support for 'ad blocking, ad skipping, and the increasing concerns around data privacy and security' around the world the 'ad industry' still seems to cling onto analog thinking in a digital world.?

Advertising whether you like it or not has been a huge business for as long as we can all remember, but do we think the great days of admen creativity has gone forever as the digital Tsunami of 'programmatic' adtech has turned the medium into a machine gun speed commodity that spews out ad after ad which has eventually shot advertisers in the digital foot?

We see that greater controls on cookie tracking, GDPR, and several other data capture initiatives have managed to calm things down somewhat, but we also know with an industry purported to forecast predicted digital ad spending worldwide to reach $756.47 billion by 2024, however due to global economic pressures they now expect it to reach only $695.96 billion. Source Insider Intelligence

So what's a brand to do when it still needs to remain front of mind, drive revenues, and out pace a competitor in the digital wild west?

As retail embraces digital transformation, opportunities for advertisers to invest within ecommerce have grown. The Financial Times reports that brands increasingly favour spending ad budget with retailers thanks to their direct means of reaching shoppers and more sophisticated data.

As part of their broader shift away from bricks and mortar, large retailers have developed increasingly influential digital advertising arms that give consumer brands powerful new ways to reach shoppers. From Woolworths Group in Australia to Canada’s Loblaws, retailers in a range of global markets are with varying degrees of success positioning themselves as compelling ad venues for the world’s biggest consumer brands. source FT.com

Paying a premium for prominent positioning within retailers’ websites, so-called “retail media” is rivalling traditional publishers and big tech, and is set to grow five times faster than social media this year.

Some experts consider the momentum so great it could usher in a new era of digital advertising. Still, industry heads say retailers must take care not to create overly commercialised environments in which every conceivable space becomes an advert. Source LinkedIn

Aisle End Promotions in Supermarkets; The practice has been around for decades in Supermarkets and other outlets.Well-advertised promotions drives store visits, increasing sales of all their products, not just the promoted ones.?

What’s less well known, at least outside the industry, is that in-store promotions are a direct source of revenue for retailers. Notice how promo displays are often at the end of an aisle, close to the entrance of the store or next to the cash registers? That’s not an accident.?

Retailers charge the brands a fee to put promotional displays in the best places. Timing is coordinated to the brand’s advertising. Some retailers make as much selling promotions to brands as they do selling groceries to consumers. It’s a great deal for the brands because promotions are so effective at increasing awareness and selling product. Source Sensize.net

Do we ever learn?

My Children tell me that inventing banner ad is like inventing smallpox.?J.McCambley (inventor of the banner ad)

There was a time, in another century, when people used to click on banner ads. Source The Atlantic

Back when they were still a novelty some 20+ years ago, people even shared links to banner ads or, at least, to the first one ever, anyway.

The banner ad that’s widely described as the first ever was a little rectangle purchased by AT&T on HotWired.com in 1994. About 44 percent of the people who saw it actually clicked on it. The ad set off a chain reaction that altered the course of the advertising industry and any other industry that overlapped with it.?

by 1996, people were already complaining about cyberspace’s new billboards as “boring and ineffective,”?according to?The New York Times?that year . Today’s display ads fare even worse, with a click through rate of about .05 percent,?according to the marketing research firm SmartInsights .

Behavioral advertising - aka targeted ads has come to dominate the online ad market, fuelled by platform dynamics encouraging a proliferation of tracking technologies and techniques in the unregulated background.?

A couple of years ago (pre GDPR) circa 86% of ads were using behavioral targeting, a practice which is now becoming more difficult to do as the public grow more aware of how ad tech, and social media companies are using personal data without any real visibility of its value and end use.

This has had the effect of squeezing out non-targeted display ads, such as those that rely on contextual factors to select the ad e.g. the content being viewed, device type or location.

For example, for years DoubleClick, the world’s largest ad server (owned by Google) counted ads when they were “served” without any proof that the ad ever arrived in the browser to be shown.?

How many of people woke up today morning saying: “I so wish to see an advertisement now ?” Probably none, but why then do marketing departments come to work and say “let’s make another advertisement.”

Not only are there now 1 in 4 people adopting ad blocking software, not only is their forecast to be circa $100 Billion in ad fraud by 2023, but without a doubt, 2018's introduction of the GDPR has at last started to make companies think about the madness of ad tech and how the wild west mentality and blatant abuse of personal data is simply switching you and me off in our millions.?

And then there's the 'ROX' - (return on experience) and the extremely high level of fraud to account for.

• P&G turned off $200 million of their digital spend, and saw NO change in business outcomes.
• Chase turned off 99% of the sites showing their ads, and saw NO change in business outcomes.
• Uber turned off $120 million of their app-install spend and noticed that app installs continued.

They were being ripped off by 100 mobile exchanges, committing fraud by claiming credit for app installs that had already occurred, falsifying transparency reports, and fabricating log level data when no ads were even run. Source Dr. Augustine Fou

I don't know about you but I use my phone constantly, I'm aware of how much I use it because each week it lets me know what my usage has been. Now that's a great feature, along with the?'Block this Caller'?function, and as a result I'm more conscious around how much time I spend looking at 'things' on my phone.?

The whole advertising experience on mobile is quite frankly shit, I use my phone like most other people I know to stay connected with business and family activities. Combine that with the growing use of free to use communication tools like 'Messenger, Whatsapp' etc and the fact we're making even less of those calls via the paid celluar network, and its not going away - if you want to know how to get something for free go and speak to Generation Z.

We all are addicted to our phones, I'm not sure how healthy it is, not for me to say, but take a look at photographs from the days before the 'mobile' was widely available and you would see pictures of people on the morning and evening commute reading a paper, primarily for the news and entertaining stories, but also to help fill in the journey time.

All those newspapers carried their 'advertisers' message, which they hoped would subliminally encourage us to buy the headache tablets, new tracksuit, investment package, insurance, or luxury holiday to 'Wales'.?That's how the model worked, its how they tell you how they subsidise the cost of the newspaper, and with print media in significant decline what have they done?.

The same advertising mentality has now carried itself across every single device we use today, but without really accounting for change in consumer behaviour, and in this example 'user experience'.?

Now I know that phone screens have become larger over the years, there's even phones coming onto the market that you can fold?

But, I don't know any of them that come with an enlarged thumb to help you get rid of that intrusive advert with the close here 'X' that's so small when you try and get rid of the advert you inadvertently open the damn thing up!!!

I'm pretty sure that all those 'mistakes'?get counted as part of the number of 'clicks' the advert achieved so - Mr/Miss Brand please pay up.

We use the mobile phone to access this information, and more, all the time, it's become our 'de facto' newspaper or favourite magazine, but it's also become the place where we can now check out what our friends and other people think about that story, your products and company.

It sure as shit isn't the place to be intruded with your spammy non relevant, fraud ridden adverts.

There is a massive challenge ahead for marketing teams and the fraud ridden ad-tech industry, without a doubt you/me still want to access our flavour of content on any device in any location, but we don't really want to pay for it, but it can't come free, nothing is free;

So what is the answer, is it to keep interrupting what we are doing with those intrusive adverts, is it to introduce paywalls that people can turn off in an instant, or is there any other viable alternatives out there yet to surface?