The Banner is Dead ... or is it?
Posted On: 2009-03-16
Hey it's 2009 and banner advertising on web sites is dead ... in fact it's been dead for a long time ... years in fact. Nobody looks at them anymore ... people are suffering from banner-blindness ... and you're just wasting your time and bandwidth putting banners up on your site.
Yep that's been our collective thinking for a few years now and it's certainly something that I've written about and agreed with ... but just maybe things are changing. Perhaps banners are starting to make a comeback and instead of being dead they're a whole new way of attracting surfers to whatever it might be that you're marketing.
Now before you rush out and start populating your sites with those old 460x60 banners ... those relics of a bygone era ... or even a few of their odd shaped brethren like the skyscrapers and their shorter cousins I'm not talking about them at all.
What I am talking about are some of the very modern interactive banners that are starting to appear in various places on the mainstream side of the Net. If you haven't seen them yet ... and they're so recent that you may not have seen them ... then imagine a banner add that incorporates a webcam scene that updates in almost real time. Imagine a banner that incorporates a webcam scene that the viewer can change to other places around the world.
Visa launched an online advertising campaign last week that featured a banner ad that included those webcam images. Another ad that's coming soon from Visa identifies where the viewer is located in the world and then shows him a map that's associated with the webcam view.
Apple have been playing with interactive banner ads too and it seems that the only limit to the versatility of these ads is imagination of the people who create the ads.
So perhaps it's time to sit back and imagine what you could do to create an interactive banner ad for the adult products that you sell. What are the limits of your creative ability or your imagination?
Sadly one of the limits is probably going to come, not from your creative ability but from what rules the link lists and TGPs impose on you. If these guys are still locked back in the dark ages of two or three ad units per page then how are they going to handle a large banner that actually interacts with the individuals that they send to your sites or galleries?
Let's hope that in these tough economic times the guys who control the traffic are going to wake up and move with the times because when they limit what site builders can do on their sites they're also limiting themselves too.
In these times we need to take every opportunity that's available to us to engage the surfer and encourage him to buy the products that we're selling and there's no doubt that these new forms of banner ads are very engaging.
Perhaps as mainstream rolls out these new ads it's time for us over here in adult to take a fresh look at some of the 'rules' we've imposed on ourselves when it comes to advertising. For a long time we've had this thing about ads that come with sound and some of us have gone looking for ads with that consume the smallest amount of bandwidth.
Maybe instead of worrying about bandwidth and sound we should be looking at whether or not we'll make more money if we do use ads like that. It may be a bit difficult to engage the surfer with an interactive ad without spending a bit more on bandwidth and without having some sound. And perhaps we've been limiting ourselves with things that don't really matter.
We tell ourselves that surfers don't like sound ... but what do they get when they join an adult site? They get plenty of sound so perhaps it's time we stopped pandering to those who are only after the freebies and used sound as a way of encouraging surfers to sign up for our products.
We also tell ourselves that we have to watch our bandwidth because bandwidth costs us money but what if we could make more money by spending a bit more on bandwidth? Let's face it, we really do have to spend money to make money so if we're too miserly with our bandwidth we could just be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to making sales.
Perhaps it's time to look at all these things and then catch up to mainstream with the way we advertise our products.