Surfers Aren't Seeing the Ads
Posted On: 2008-04-24
Over in mainstream Marketing Sherpa has just released its first Online Advertising Handbook with 2008 Benchmarks and guess what? They've discovered that surfers just aren't seeing the advertising that's appearing on websites.
While that may come as some surprise to mainstream advertising over here in adult we've known for some years that surfers aren't seeing the ads. We might call it fancy names like ‘banner blindness' but the bottom line is that people don't notice the ads no matter what we do to make them more visible.
We could make banners blink, expand, contract, pop up in your face and even linger long after a surfer has moved on ... or even closed the browser ... but it's made no difference. Surfers just aren't paying any attention to the advertising that we've been showing them.
Now we're seeing mainstream following in our footsteps and popping ads, expanding them to fill a page or just plain annoying the crap out of surfers with big bright ads that flash at such a rate they could induce epilepsy and no matter what they do, just like us ... they can't get the surfers to see the ads.
I guess that must be rather frustrating to advertising gurus who have made plenty of money in the past by shoving advertising down the throats of people who watch TV, read magazines and newspapers or listen to the radio. Back then it really was all about pushing the advertising at the people but now it's a little different. Now people have so many options on the Net they don't have to stick around and see what marketers want to force on them.
But here in adult we shouldn't feel too smug because even though we knew that people weren't really looking at online advertising well before mainstream began to wake up to the problem we've not really found the answer to the problem. We still rely on banners and half page ads to get the message across.
We still use text that's designed to push the product down the surfer's throat rather than to coax and persuade him to sign up with our sponsors and we still have about as much success at getting people to respond to our ads as mainstream advertisers do. So what's the answer?
Maybe it's there in that last paragraph. Maybe we need to be trying to persuade the surfer to sign up with our sponsor by stressing the benefits he'll get from signing up rather than by deluging him with banners and other forms of advertising that are right there in his face overwhelming him with features that sound way too good to be true.
Perhaps we need to be thinking about blending our advertising into the galleries or free sites that we're building so that the whole page really does become one huge ad. That may even mean that we need to change the way we think about the sites we build. Most of us think of a site as consisting of two separate parts ... content and advertising and in our minds there's a clear distinction between the two.
We don't blend the advertising in with the content, we just throw up a bunch of images or movies and then fit the text and advertising around it. But what if we were to blend the advertising and content? What if our advertising talked about the content and the content pointed back to the advertising? What if the content and the advertising were one and the same thing and together they drew the surfer into a fantasy that had it's culmination inside your sponsor's site?
Now if you could achieve something like that I wonder how the TGPs and link lists would cope with your sites or galleries. When the whole gallery or free site is one huge blended ad how would that fit with the rules that limit the amount of advertising they will allow you to have on a page?
Changing the way we present our advertising really is something that we need to be thinking about. We need to be looking at ways of engaging surfers with our advertising instead of giving them something that they can so easily ignore as they rush through our sites looking for the porn they want to see. And until we do find a way of engaging them our sales are going to continue to be less than what we had hoped for.
At the same time we need to find a way to show those who control the traffic that any new marketing techniques we may want to try won't be lessening the experience they want their surfers to have.
Neither problem is insurmountable ... all we need is the will and courage to try something different.