A new survey delivered some glum news to the online ad industry: more than six in ten respondents say Internet ads (63%) are the ads they are most likely to ignore. Among those who ignore Internet ads, two in five say they ignore banner ads (43%) the most and one in five say they ignore search engine ads (20%) the most. Smaller percentages say they ignore television ads (14%), radio ads (7%) and newspaper ads (6%); just 9% of Americans say they don't ignore any of the listed types of ads.
These are some of the findings of an Adweek Media/Harris Poll, and while their results are not too surprising - especially the data about banner ads - they do give a pause for reflection.
Hindsight with Banner Ads
The worst culprits, without a doubt, were the banner ads of earlier years. Consumers learned to ignore them - a fact that has been proven by several eye track studies that determined a person’s gaze will avoid anything on the page that resembles an advertising, writes Jeremy Rue at the Knight Digital Media Center.
There are several tricks advertisers can use to attract banner-shy eyeballs and can and should also be applied in general to online ads.
Make them useful. Anything that give consumers bargains, more info. As an example, Rue suggests advertisers use the banner ads to offer to send coupons to the consumers' cell phone. For this to work, it must be "really really" easy for the consumer to do, he says. "I envision [simply] dragging ads that are on a website over a special bin placed on the side of the screen, which would collect all of deals I found interesting. Then with one click I could send them to my cell phone. No registration required, because all that would do is hamper the number of people using this service."
Keep the design simple. Thanh Nguyen, senior usability engineer at BusinessOnLine, says that one of the main causes of banner blindness is embedding text within an image. "The background picture causes the text to become difficult to read, and it is often ignored." (via the E-Commerce Times). "The optimal solution is to move text out of the image and insert it on the page as plain HTML text. Another solution is to place the text on a solid background color within the image, if necessary."
Customize whenever you can. Technologies are available that let marketers change - and better yet, customize - display ads on the fly. A display ad start up, Teracent, acquired last year by Google, has developed a platform in which real time algorithms customize and automatically build ads from among thousands of different choices of creative elements. The algorithms can incorporate user information, such as a viewer's geographic location, and customize the images accordingly. Mercedes-Benz recently found that such variations can have a profound impact on performance when it began testing display ads with Teracent using several different variables ranging from general copy testing to varying background and call-to-action button colors. The primary success metric - an action indicating buying intent - saw a significant increase as a result, the company said.
Go for the glitz. Mobile ads have made significant traction in the last year - in large part due to Apple’s iAd and iPad. While text messaging and mobile coupons are still quite prevalent, the ads that grab attention are the sexy new creations by advertisers on these devices.
