Apr

14

The Banner Strikes Back

April 14, 2007 |

According to a certain venture capitalist from NYC, thanks to the sale of DoubleClick to Google, banner ads are back and here to stay. The reason is pretty simple, banner ads can carry a branding message that text ads simply can’t deliver.

But, banners carry branding value that text ads don’t. The return on investment measure is not as cold and hard with banners. And the big branded advertisers that are leaving TV and print in search of better performance on the internet want to be able to brand with their ads. And they want to control where those ads are run. They’ll pay more for those two features.

Steve Rubel agrees:

For advertisers, there’s nothing but upside here. Banner ads are great for branding but not for direct response.

That’s somewhat of a scary thought to me. Branding is, of course, the holy grail of marketing and with the pool for Adsense text ads slowly reaching its limits, Google has to start looking for a new source of revenue. However, do I want to see a resurgence of banner ads on the net? Text ads are so simple to ignore, they are great. Banner ads are more intrusive and annoying.

Branding is a difficult art. How do you bombard somebody with your corporate message without annoying the hell out of your potential customers/clients/users?

The good thing though is that it is very easy to turn it all off and just surf the net in peace. Just use Adblock Plus or Admuncher (and yes, I am aware that I use Adsene on this very site here).

I think that is the real problem with banner ads: they are so annoying, they will drive even more people to use technology to ignore them and hence reducing the overall value of any ad online.

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