Display Ads Suck, but Consumers Ignore Them Anyway
Noah Brier recently wrote an article for Ad Age in which he discusses why he feels display advertising sucks, and what he thinks can be done to make them suck less. Take a moment to go read it now (if you haven’t already), as the rest of this blog won’t make sense without it…
Back? Okay, great. So, Noah makes several great points, right? And I love that he’s bringing this conversation to the forefront (Brian Morrissey also blogged about this topic this week so it’s starting to get some “heat) as it’s a conversation that needs to be had. And while I agree with his thesis statement (“Online display advertising sucks”) I think the piece ignored a few realities of the business of creating display ads. In my opinion, what he writes ignores the fact that there’s:
- NOT ENOUGH CONSUMER INTEREST – People ignore ads because they don’t want to be advertised to, not because ads “look like they don’t belong on the page”. There’s a visual pattern to every page, and people are smart enough to know where the content they want exists. They actively ignore ads because they know where the skyscrapers, superbuttons, and leaderboards will show up. And if we weren’t in advertising, we would ignore the ads too. C’mon, when mind-blowing success is a 1.5% click-thru rate, there’s just something fundamentally wrong with the medium. Right? The real question in my mind is not “how do we make display ads suck less?” but rather “how do we create brand engagements that consumers actually want?”
- NOT ENOUGH MONEY – For most clients, the budgets aren’t there. Noah states that it’s affordable, but for most clients it just isn’t. They only have the budget for three concepts/directions in three sizes each. That’s it. Fundamentally, I agree that it would fantastic if we could create ad units specifically for each publisher (and subsequently each section within that publisher’s site). Unfortunately, the realities of our business dictate that that just isn’t possible. Costs would go up exponentially as the number of ad units do too. The costs associated with the necessary research, discovery, concepting, comping, reviews, etc. is just way too great (especially when the benefit of pursuing this line of thinking is currently unproven). For this sort of customization to become a reality, clients will need to change how much they spend online, and how they spend that money online.
- NOT ENOUGH TIME (typically) – This is not the post to discuss proper timelines/planning/process, but the realities are, there usually isn’t enough time to execute the type of campaigns Noah is discussing. Typically, the creative team building the units need to wait on the media plan to be finalized so they know the specs of the units being created (no sense wasting budget concepting take-over units if none are purchased). Now, that documentation is not usually finalized until a few weeks before the units need to be delivered. So that has the creative team scrambling to concept, comp, build, and QA all the necessary units while building in time along the way for necessary client reviews (and keep in mind the total project timeline is typically about two to three weeks).
Now, I think it’s important to note that I’m pretty confident the second and third bullet above can be overcome. There would need to be some fundamental changes to the way things are done, but it’s doable. The real issue for me is the lack of consumer interest in the current model… That’s a tough nut to crack, and a larger conversation to boot. At any rate, I thank Noah and Brian for opening the dialogue. And as always, if you want to discuss, you can find me at @jack2point0
Tags: brian morrissey, noah brier, online display advertising
