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Content Marketing Measurement & Analysis

Attend

Why are so many people down on banner ads? Honestly, this is getting out of hand! I’ve heard people use language like "Banner Ads Suck" to blast into the effectiveness of Internet advertising. Others say it less blatantly, often while promoting their own alternative way to capture customers.

Now I’m not one who really enjoys advertising (web based or not), so let’s make that clear. Many sites feel like a Las Vegas strip with banner ads popping out everywhere. Ads on other sites are plainly tasteless and they annoyingly bounce around with the ever-present call-to-action "Click Me", "CLICK ME!" It seems there are plenty of good reasons why banner ads should be attacked.

But let’s not indict a possibly good advertising strategy because of bad tactics. That’s a classic trap in business.

True, click through rates hover at a pitifully low level (about 0.6%according to 1999 Nielsen/Netratings figures) and they appear to continue to fall. But banner ads are effective in other ways.

The View from Academia

Rather than rely on personal opinion, intuition, or the claims of DoubleClick and other web advertising companies (who have an incentive to say banner ads work), let me report what empirical studies in universities are documenting.

Banner ads can make people aware of a product, associate a brand name with what a product stands for, lead to higher recall, build brand equity, and sometimes create a positive brand attitude. Ads that are highly relevant to someone in a buying mood are the most likely to be clicked.

Many banner ads, however, are not even viewed. Is this a problem?

There is evidence that suggests web surfers who don’t report seeing a banner ad take in ad information anyway. This effect is called "pre-attentive processing." Studies in marketing and psychology have neatly documented this human process and the punch line is this: your ad doesn’t need to be directly viewed to get into a web surfer’s mind.

But you probably already know that banner ads can have these effects. So do we academics.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Allen Weiss

Allen Weiss is MarketingProfs founder and CEO, positioning consultant, and emeritus professor of marketing. Over the years he has worked with companies such as Texas Instruments, Informix, Vanafi, and EMI Music Distribution to help them position their products defensively in a competitive environment. He is also the founder of Insight4Peace and the former director of Mindful USC.