When was the last time you paid attention to a display ad? Today? Last week? Last month? Don’t remember? Stats suggest it’s probably one of the latter, with average click through rates (ctr) in low single percentage figures at best.

The concept of ‘banner blindness’ seems to be very much alive. The constant presence of advertising in standard page locations coupled with short attention spans has led to the significant reduction in likelihood of engaging people through display ads.

Depsite this the online display ad market is already up 21% in the first four months of 2009, with the majority of spend coming from the retail and financial services sectors.

So how do you ensure clicks are valuable?

Firstly be relevant, e.g. after Mike changed my relationship status on facebook to ‘engaged’ (congrats by the way mate), banners about wedding photographers started appearing. Cloud computing will also help targeting take hold. Gmail for example scans your emails and serves ads based on the content.

Be more engaging, less ‘in your face’ about selling, by providing experiences that are rewarding or enjoyable; create conversation topics. Rich media banners are good way forward with interactive expandable banners, especially – exploiting the available technology and beginning to understand the mindset of the web user.

Take this very clever 3D “Spot the Bull” ad for Orange. It’s interactive, engaging and raises a smile: the selling message isn’t blatant – but it’s got a curiosity to it and packs a promotional mechanic into engaging content.

‘Playable’ banners like this show what you can do if you understand the medium and the user better and use the technology to engage with them in a more interesting way.

(Thanks to Georgia B for this post)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Advertising, Digital, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.