A Radical Proposal to Save Advertising on the Web
8th September 10
Posted in creativity, interactive
Author: Calle Sjoenell, Executive Creative Director, BBH New York
(Follow Calle here: @callesjonell)
After reading Chris Anderson’s piece in Wired about the web being dead, long live the Internet, I got a really uneasy feeling. Banner advertising has always been the weird step child of advertising. Few creatives wants to do them, clients don’t know how to approach it and nobody clicks on the ads. I always argued that it’s the ultimate test of stripped-down creativity, with lots of constraints, just 40K to play with and super-restricted space. It’s like creating wonderful music out of an old synth; just a few dials, but turn the right ones at the right time and wonderful things happen. On occasion, that can happen with banners. But maybe we have all missed the real problem. The first trouble with display ads is that people don’t know how to look at them. I believe the reason for this is the creative and the instruction for interacting with the creative is all over the place.
Right now, internet display advertising is like driving through different towns where every town has invented their own traffic sign system. You need to look really carefully at every sign and interpret what they mean instead of brainstem reactions that would come with a unified signage system. Learn more, Click here, Fold There, plus signs, single arrows, >>, all in a box, or not. Underlined. Bold. !!!!
We are just not sure what to do. So, in over 99% of instances, we do absolutely nothing at all.
This is connected to a second problem with display advertising: that there is no clear way of knowing if you will leave the site or interact where you are. In the early days it made sense that you left the site you were on and went to the advertisers’ websites. That was how you used the web back then, hence the idea of ‘surfing’. Now people are on fewer and fewer sites and are reluctant to leave where they are. They’re also afraid of viruses and malware.
Is there a solution? I propose we separate creative from instruction.
I propose we create a clear set of universal instructions letting users know if they are staying on a site or leaving it. Or, to push it even further, what if every ad had two standard buttons at the same location, “Save for Later” (like Instapaper for display) and “Go to Website”. That way ads would behave more like we use the web today. A Universal System for display, in which everyone knows what to expect. A system that respects the user.
Few have got this right to date. Google come to mind, with their Adwords text ads (& look at the impact of a user-focused design approach on their revenues). With Google, the parameters are tight and everyone knows what to expect. Facebook is also on to this with their standardized format that provides a static picture and lots of text. These are fairly low on the creative side, but I think the creative part of a banner can be wonderfully executed through animation, API interaction or just a plain old static picture that says it all. Whatever it is, the instructions should be standard, simple and clear.
This is one reason why I have joined the IAB and their Rising Stars forum, to drive forward this question of standardization. It might point to the way forward for creative AND functional display ads on the web that users know how to interact with. But there are a lot of people who need to agree and compromise to make this happen.
So to save advertising on the web, who is willing to come to the table?
This is brilliant. Perhaps the next step would be to test this and accumulate data on whether it boosts or depresses response. One critique may be this risks further commoditizing the lowly banner, so data that shows it works would be helpful to steer adoption.
Nicely done – count us in if we can help.
Spot on. Creatives I’ve come across don’t really get it, but potentially it can be a nice media to play with.
I’m in.
Commoditizing the functionality when it comes to instruction, but that should be separated from the creative part of the banner, which could also be freed up if the ad networks would allow more social connections to FB, FSQR and Twitter. Now banner creativity lives in isolation from the rest of the web, but it should be the opposite.
Make this happen Calle, and you will forever have my love.
This is among the best suggestions yet. As a member (though relatively absent from recent meetings) of this group I will do whatever I can to support this direction. In fact, I’m meeting with Peter this Friday to talk about stuff like this and will make sure to push for this simple suggestion. There’s a lot more that’s needed to, if anyone’s to even click, but this takes down a huge barrier.
Thanks Edward. Let’s connect with IAB and push this together.
Great idea!
And we should also think about building a clear set of instructions for i.e. print, too. A fixed place for the URL would save a lot of looking around on the page, same with other contact details and the product that’s being advertised. This should have a fixed place roughly 1/3rd down the page so this is clearly seen by everyone and nobody asks the question “now, what could this ad be for?”
I’m sure we should also build some rules for TV, OOH etc.
Come on! You must be kidding – or did I miss the “satire”-feature somewhere on the page not being “native” to the English language?
People do not not click because they are uneasy about what to do, where to click or what happens, if they click (the malware issue has some truth, I agree, but it’s not that big in peoples minds). They do not click because the ad itself is crap, they have seen it 100 times and are fed up, they are annoyed because the animation is stupid or they are just plain not interested in the product advertised. Real simple.
So instead of saying the consumer is too stupid to understand what he’s supposed to do we should think about
a) better ideas
b) better executions
c) targeted advertising
d) frequency capping
A little work for the creative department – a little work for the media department.
Doing this lets CR rise to 1-5% and CCR to 5-10% on average. At least that’s what we are doing and seeing over here in Germany.
I have to agree with you Tobias. I didn’t quite understand the ‘malware’ comment, unless you’re on a dodgy site to begin with, but that’s another story. Banners have their place and they will for the foreseeable future. But with better targeting, a bit of control on frequency capping by ‘impression happy’ media agencies who abuse the broad reach media networks and importantly better creative – some of it can be helped if sites slightly increase file size (eg. how is it that 10 years ago when everyone was on dial up 12-15k ads were the standard and now when some claim to have 2-50MB broadband pipes, we’ve only managed to increase the standard ad size to about 25k) – there might be some life those banners after all.
Calle, if I understand you correctly, then the biggest issue with banner ads is that people a) don’t actually know what to do and b) are not sure what will happen once they actually do something. While I agree with b) I think people do know what to do, whether there are arrows, or text that says different things. And despite the Facebook example, they actually changed their “do” with the introduction of the Like button, even though the old system worked well.
It’s been said before, but I think the greatest standardization might come from the iAd and not the IAB. The iAd’s realization of rich media online advertising within modal windows (and without leaving your browsing site until you’re ready to go) provides a model and standard for all online advertising.
I happen to love great online advertising, though examples are few and far between. I hope we get to a place where we see more of it.
most banners suck. that’s ok most ads suck too.
i think if we re-frame what we consider banners to be, what they are for, it might help
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/advertising-as-distributed-content-sampling.html
My biggest issue with interacting with a banner is the fear of having my experience interrupted.
In fact, the only place I interact with banners is on http://www.bannerblog.com.au
Would be nice to have all the relevant banners I come across, saved in one stream for later consumption.
(Kind of like the envelope my grandmother keeps her coupons in)
In theory I totally agree and that’s what makes Facebook so compelling – you are in a more standardized environment.
However you can imagine a situation where after a few years some bright spark says, ‘you know how we would get more clicks? If we broke away from the standardization and did a big flashing, perhaps even on fire, CLICK HERE’ button. And they would be right. But in so many ways wrong. People would inevitably find ways to game the system.
It’s certainly a tricky subject. The banner is in dire straits. We have done research where parents have told their kids that clicking on banners is the equivalent of talking to strangers – you just don’t do it, it’s not safe.
I guess also the penny dropped for me when I was working on a brand we owned at Anomaly and were 100% responsible for all media spend. Someone asked me if we should do some banners, as I was the digital guy, and I said, ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous, no one clicks on banners’.
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I love the idea. And I have to say I’m surprised an ECD would offer up a creative restraint such as this. However the end goal can outweigh that.
I have to ask though, do you think focussing on the growth areas of the Internet would be more profitable than trying to fix banners in declining areas? The question is whether average CT rates have declined from 2% when the web was unfamiliar in ’97 to 0.1% when we are all so familiar with it today, because we don’t know how to interact with ads or because we don’t want to.
I’d have to agree with Tobias on this and say that the two questions that are posed miss the greater truth. People don’t know how to look at display ads because they’ve been programmed to ignore them (and, look, they’re getting better at it as the declining CT stats attest). The metaphor of travel signs is actually a good illustration, as travel signs are useful and necessary things to help you get from point A to point B. Display ads are not that. They aren’t navigation or context, so they are the first things that are tossed aside as your brain is trying to make hay of the page. So if we want to be honest, the first barrier for to making display ads that work is overcoming their inherent invisibility.
Search marketing works because the placements match the use case – contextual ads that may be just as relevant as the contextual result. Similarly, focused targeting/contextual relevance is what makes Facebook placements effective. iAds will do better because of the experience standards that Apple applies to its platform but they still suffer from the fact that they are interruptions. Finding the cure for display ads will require a more radical approach, as Faris suggested in his link, of rethinking what these placements should be and what we can expect them to accomplish.
Awesome. Banners is the very super-essence of a storytelling format. Mastery lies within the limitations.
I guess the 1 million dollar question is – how do you implement an idea like this?
How would media owners/outlets agree on a standard?
Calle raises a great point about the problem with “display” advertising (a “banner” to me connotes 1998, no rich media, and a guarantee to be kidnapped from the site you are on). Consumers have been taught by the industry to ignore display ads for many reasons, one of these is the sheer anarchy that exists in the space. Will a few new laws to end the lawlessness solve the issue? No. Will it help. Yes. Lots.
I see online ads as the third world of the advertising planet: the haves and the have nots (custom home page takeovers vs. the run-of-network dross); thinly developed and barely followed rules; commodity dependent; unstable institutions; and dominant, predatory oligarchs–not to mention the many coups and revolutions.
No wonder brand marketing dollars aren’t rushing into online advertising. This is very, very bad for the industry, for many reasons. On the one hand, we should be advertising where our audience is spending time; this is self evident. On the other hand, the lack of real money means that agencies have to scrape by on the table scraps of brand marketing budgets. And this means a serious underinvestment in innovation. (Ironically, this has not manifested itself as badly as it could have, as the agency community is packed with highly motivated creators).
What else is needed to make display effective as a brand communications vehicle (ie. NOT counted on the vacant ctr)? Laws, yes. Metrics, yes. And, rich media standards so we don’t have to recreate an ad 27 times to fit the web (and deal with a spread sheet of tech requirements along with a creative brief).And, let’s not let the publishers off too easy. They must offer a better context consistently (check out the new Vogue carousel, as an example — no excuse not to do great work for that)
Now time for full disclosure: I am leading the IAB initiative that Calle mentions above. I am also thrilled to listen to all of you in this process.
[...] Labs posted a Radical Proposal on Wednesday. It’s gotten a great deal of reads for sure, but also a generous amount of [...]
I can see why Calle believes that more standardization in the online banner world would ultimately result in more clicks and more ROI for our clients. However, as the semantic web continues to be accessed in places that aggregate content from other sites, the ‘surfing’ aspect of the web will change dramatically. With the rise in popularity of magazine-like start pages like Feedly, the inventions of newspaper-like RSS or twitter readers (paper.li or twittertim.es), or the reality that people spend 41.1 billion minutes a month on Facebook, shows that people desire a single ‘log-in’ to the web through which they consume their content. I do not believe that this change in behavior can be discounted, it must be factored into whatever changes the IAB and the industry decides to take moving forward.
With that said, the fault of this problem lies a lot with the publishers, I would say. It is important to not allow too many banners on a particular page, because as you alluded they all have very different call to actions. Some want you to click, some want you to watch an in-banner video, some want you to vote on an answer to a question right in the banner itself. When executing one of my campaigns, I purchased a large specialty banner for a specific launch date that began as a skinny banner and expanded to an oversized flash banner that pushed content down on the page. It was a very prominent (& expensive) placement, but when I went to check it out on launch day live, the site had sold a peel-down of the right corner of the homepage, which was very distracting and was right on top of my placement. I immediately contacted them and worked out a resolution. However, my point is that the greed for ad revenue is causing some publishers to lose value for each of their ad inventory spaces. The fewer the ads on a page, the higher a premium price could be paid for it, and the cleaner end result would be for user experience.
Standardized buttons mandated through the IAB might actually limit the creative’s more, in a space which you already defined as a very limited canvas anyways with very specific requirements technically. If anything should be standardized, I feel like the developers and 3rd party servers should all agree on ONE standard click tag. Perhaps if implementation were easier or creation of the banners (as many sites have started using third party ad creator software – to allow all advertisers, no matter their size, create standard flash banners ), perhaps we would see an uptick in performance. In this way, the standardization might work because it puts all players within a level playing field.
Most banners do not have a strong enough call to action. Perhaps banners are more like billboards at the end of the day for branding initiatives. Unless your message is more of a direct response focus or has a strong call to action, what do you expect from the average internet user? People are aware of the banner ads, but often rather than simply click thru, they might just finish consuming the content they are in the middle of, then type your brand name into Google to find you. It’s always preached of the lift in search results seen when a banner campaign runs.
Creating full experiences on a brand’s Facebook fan page seems to have killed the landing page. Perhaps, online banners as a means of clicking thru to a landing page/homepage and the metric of CTR is dying, but rich media within banners and more engaging experiences within that space are where this particular element of online advertising is headed. Engagement rates measured through time spent and interaction are the new CTR.
Let advertising on the web die. If it can be reborn, it will be better for it. If it stays dead, we’ll all be better for it.
[...] A Radical Proposal to Save Advertising on the Web [...]
I’m perplexed at the oddly sycophantic response of this audience. What part of this staid and regressive idea is radical? Standardizing display ads is a desperate attempt to control the web’s inherent anarchy. A hopeless effort to temper the restless, wild creativity of digital crowds. This proposal is an abortion – two thumbs down.
It’s not meant to stifle creativity, on the contrary it for freeing it! If the call to action is standardized and easily understood it leaves the creative part much freer to do innovative things.
Calle – in principle, this sounds like a great idea. Placing display within a harmonious, common context will be appreciated by many.
You may be interested in reading Gerry McGovern, a long-time web consultant based in Ireland, whose blog (www.gerrymcgovern.com) often refers to concepts and matters very similar to yours.
Best of luck – I’m very interested in finding out how this develops.
have a look at the new AOL ad unit, which just leaked to the press. If this sort of thing were available widely, we’d be in a better place. It’s a good start, at the very least. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/09/13/a-look-at-aols-new-ads/?KEYWORDS=project+devil
Great idea. Standardization can really help. When we get into a car, we don’t have to re-learn which pedal is the gas and which is the brake, so we can focus on driving the car. If there were standard behavior for ads, it could be the same way. Unfortunately, all too often you get ads competing with each other for obnoxiousness, floating over the page, moving, expanding on rollover, etc.
[...] mindful of the recent upwards blip in discussions about display advertising’s future, not least inCalle’s post here. (As an aside, my favourite title for a post ever is “The Tragic Death of Practically [...]