» uk-netmarketing: roundup: 17-11-2000

Banners good? Banners bad?
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - November 17, 2000

It's a bit like Christmas, only it happens several times a year, the debate over whether banner advertising is, or ever has been, an effective form of advertising. The reason this argument reared its head again this time is, I'm afraid to say, my fault. After an article in renowned marketing newsletter Iconocast that banners are effective for branding although it pointed out their response rate was plummeting.

Paul Carr replied first, "Imagine you were running an ad in a cinema. Would you consider it a failure if no one got up from their seat and immediately went to buy your product? No you wouldn't. People who visit a site probably have a pretty good reason for being there. Unless they've finished doing what they are doing they are not going to leave no matter how good the banner is. Banner ads can have great results in terms of raising brand awareness if they're done right. I bought a Mach III razor the other month as a direct result of seeing a Gillette banner but I didn't click on the banner because I was busy doing something else at the time."

Ray Taylor added, "They can be very effective for brand building if designed that way. And even if not, there is always some level of branding effect. Although banners provide a very effective direct response mechanism (if handled by professionals, rather than the hoards of amateurs currently involved) they are equally useful for branding. However, if the main aim is to build brand, creativity is even more important than direct response campaigns. And in many cases this may mean abandoning banners and/or making better use of other formats in combination. Equally, integration with offline media is fundamentally important."

But with the web around for over 10 years now, are users just screening out banner ads as they become more savvy with the medium? Ashley Pomeroy raised this spectre from his own experiences writing, "In the case of banner ads, as an avid internet user I blank them completely, to the extent that any buttons or navigation tools on a site which look a bit like banners also fail to register. For example, the popular Internet Movie Database, in UK form at http://uk.imdb.com/ if I were to draw this from memory, my drawing would start with the navigation bar. It doesn't matter what product or service the advert is for, I just don't see it. Unless it has a semi-naked woman, in which case biology kicks in.

They will not go away, however - a small, well-designed animated gif does no great harm, they are remarkably cheap, and enough neophytes will accidentally click on the banner to justify its continuation. The future is like a cake - you don't know what it's like until you taste it, and by the time you have done so it is too late."

Felix Verlade added, "...one of the big problems with banners is that indeed, they would have to be exceptional to work; but clients do not want to pay for the amount of creativity that such a standard necessitates. Which means that as a rule of thumb banners seem to be crap. I cannot imagine a circumstance where i would not recommend using (forgive the plug) underwired.com to generate a viral campaign or an on-line pr campaign with the entirety of the budget, so in that respect i (duck) agree with one of Ray's points. Although it does have to be said that i thoroughly enjoyed the Hewlett-Packard 'pong' banner of 1996, even though I've never bought an hp product myself, nor varied my (high) opinion of the brand.

The reason i hate banners so much is that they delay me getting the information i went to the web page to see, and therefore represent an invariably negative brand experience. It's as simple as that for me"

Marcus Exall countered, "This only the case with some of the old ad-serving solutions that use JavaScript. Most ad solutions nowadays do not delay the loading of a page at all - the loading of the ad and page are totally independent."

To which, Felix replied, "That's the point. ... That should be the primary concern of those who might wish to foist such inconsiderate solutions on us. The 'it works on my machine so you're inadequate' argument holds no water, and frankly makes me want to write publicly about how crass banners are. Oh, silly me, i already do."

Are banner intrusive when compared with other media, Paul Carr pointed out, "Yes banners are a pain in the arse and, yes, they do take up bandwidth but, then again, TV ads have been interrupting programmes for years. People would prefer a world without ads but, IMHO, have learnt to accept them in exchange for decent quality programming. Likewise, people will accept banners if they are getting decent content. What most people will not do, however, is click on banners, any more than they would run straight to the shops on seeing a decent ad on the TV ... which brings me back to my earlier point about branding."

Using email as a direct marketing technique is still somewhat controversial but companies complying with the Data Protection Act are making it possible for marketers to use lists to email offers to users who have given permission, but how does one get the best response rate? And how do you know if it's a high quality list?

Lisa Wood asked, "... has anyone ever had any success buying into mailing lists? I did one with dotmusic in which i used a response URL unique to that mailing and out of the 31,000 names I was told they had on their mailing list I had a response of 27, two of which were me! Has anyone used a mailing list that actually delivers results? I know it has a lot to do with the message, but you'd have thought more people would want to win a £400 MP3 phone."

Andrew Petherick replied, "It sounds like the list you bought into was an opt-out list, where people forgot to tick a box. To many of those recipients, you were spamming them. Mailtrack forms opt in lists, where people have actually asked to receive information on certain topics of interest to them (like DIY, business information, rock music, modern art etc). Typically the responses are between 5-15% for permission based email campaigns. List sizes at the moment are small because it takes time to build up consumers permission."

Jonathan Peterson added, "I've never felt that those competitions are worth much. A 1-in-(unknown large number) chance of winning something worth 400 quid, but much less useful than 40 tenners, doesn't strike me as much of an incentive to give my details to a web site (assuming that's what people were ultimately doing as a result of this exercise)."

The use of email as a direct marketing tool is clearly powerful with the ability to monitor responses and potentially give a great return on investment, but the possibility of damaging a brand with a promotion perceived as spam, is still a big danger.

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