Is Your Marketing Department/Agency Robbing You (Banner) Blind?
Let’s start with the basics.
What is banner blindness?
This term comes from a 1998 study that was called, “Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss Obvious Links,” by Jan Panero Benway and David M. Lane. The gist of the study: People almost never look at anything on the web that looks like an advertisement.
Here are some other factors that make banner ads a tough sell in our offices:
Ad-Blocking Software
There are some really sophisticated ad blocking software out there. These prevent ad delivery, thus preventing your from reaching your target audience.
Graphics-Off Surfers
A lot of browsers actually disable animation, which can be distracting and annoying to users. Reality check: All the money you spent on designing a flashy banner animation is entirely wasted on this segment of your target market.
Failure to Load
Ads often fail to display, even on high-speed internet. This can be blamed on lethargic ad servers that are not always working at peak performance. I personally have experienced this a lot with the Yahoo home page banners. Remember: the more complex you make your ads, the slower they are. A few extra seconds means that I have already moved on to the content I was looking for. Sorry, you lose.
Outdated Flash Players
Not everyone has loaded up the latest flash player version. We all know people that just never get around to updating their computer. Case in point: The population using Internet Explorer 6… when do you think they last updated their computer?
Placement Disasters
This is the scariest and often the most hilarious way a banner campaign can fail. Here are 2 of my favorite examples:
- There was a banner ad running under a German curse word dictionary. It read: “Travel to Friendly Germany This Summer!” Hilarious.
- A banner ad for an ethnic matchmaking website was running right under a news expose on a gruesome “Honor Killing” that took place in the same community. Pretty dark.
Lose Friends and Alienate People
Elaborating on the point above…don’t overdo it. And don’t push your brand in places where your ads will annoy people. Brand exhaustion can set in if your banners are splashed everywhere. Banners can become like those pesky TV commercials you are forced to watch during your favorite TV show live.
Why do marketing agencies push for banner ads?
Answer: Ignorance or unwillingness to embrace the truth. Or a willingness to make money running campaigns that don’t pay off for the client.
Propping up your marketing mountain on banner ad matchsticks is going to have disastrous consequences. Before you start thinking about getting into a banner ad program, you need to be certain that the rest of your marketing program is in ship-shape. If you are in the market to build your brand, make sure that first you have the basics covered:
- Great-looking, intuitive and usable website
- Solid pay per click campaign with contained CPCs and excellent landing pages
- Integrated offline and online messaging
Then you go and water the plants, diet and exercise, do community service….THEN start with banner ads.
Listen to the Godfather of Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen, who says: “…companies continue to be clueless about the Internet and waste their budgets on banner ads that don’t work.” The next time an agency tries to force a banner campaign on you, ask yourself…What would Jakob do?
