It should come as no surprise that brand marketers want to target attentive, receptive consumers who are capable of recalling specific brand messages at the purchase decision point. Unfortunately, this goal remains mostly a fantasy.

Television ads are memorable and people are eager to discuss them in great detail—they are often a natural, expected break in the action. People don’t go online seeking ads, they go for specific content and rich experiences that are often so engaging in and of themselves that advertisers don’t stand a chance!

Sadly, the online ad community has translated this loud rejection as an opportunity to perpetuate the insanity by improving banner ads, which has proven as effective as banning social media across the Middle East.

People don’t wake up in the morning with a yearning to “engage,” or “click” the way we’d like them to.  They want to be entertained and informed in an environment where an errant mouseover doesn’t ruin their experience.  So why do we, as an industry, bet so much time and money on new, complex-sounding data and reporting schemes that only really serve to highlight the futility of click-through rates that round to zero percent?

It’s a noble effort but the facts haven’t changed. One click out of one thousand impressions is terminal.  Consumers simply don’t remember banner ads or their messages. All the algorithms in the world haven’t changed that – our best and brightest scientists and mathematicians are still largely incapable of delivering on the promise of brand memory creation at scale.

If we’re going to gamble on the future of display advertising, shouldn’t we at least try to stack the deck with meaningful research and value-added solutions?

New research published in the International Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications (IJIMC) found that type-in ads substantially boost brand and message recall among study participants. In the study, type-ins replaced captchas (the user verification boxes with the squiggly text people fill out to leave comments or change passwords on website) with brand messages in quotes and an input box and researchers found study participants’ direct interaction with the type-in ad dramatically improved brand recall (see more information here).

This good news for Solve Media is clearly self-serving, but it should be valuable for the entire industry. Online brand advertising can be simplified: if you don’t impart a message and that message isn’t remembered, your campaign has failed. Type-ins get the user to interact with the ad and remember the brand message. Banners don’t. Easy.

If there was another way to deliver consumer engagement at scale, we’d shout about it in the streets, and encourage the industry to do the same. We recognize we didn’t invent type-in advertising and we are quite certain that we don’t have a monopoly on good ideas to engage consumers online.

It’s well worth it for everyone who depends on the stability of the online advertising ecosystem to continue to identify ways to improve its health. Only a fraction of the $91 billion spent annually on brand advertising is spent online. If the industry could convince advertisers to invest more in brand advertising online (even just an additional 10%) it would be a windfall.

Fortunately, the IJIMC report says there is an impactful, simple way to advertise to consumers online–get them to directly interact with an ad to be certain they comprehend the message in that ad. It’s proof there is a viable option beyond the tired banner ad. Our hope is that this innovation opens the door for other useful brand advertising technologies, and encourages the industry to seek new ways to measure engagement and brand campaign effectiveness.

One study doesn’t end the discussion, but it should at least spark one. The current “all-in” click-through rate based methodologies don’t work for brand advertising. The industry needs to re-think how we apply math, science and psychology to the problem since the current offerings are failing us.

Brands don’t want a few crummy clicks—they want market share—and consumers can’t buy products and services they can’t remember!   Why should we gamble on whether or not a brand message can be recalled, if we can be sure of it?

Created by French firm Alenty, WWN’s Brand Exposure Duration (BED) allows companies to gauge online ad effectiveness through visibility duration. This tool monitors the length of visibility of a banner, as well as the percentage on a page when a user is active. When the script detects mouse or keyboard activity, the stopwatch turns on; however, if a user is idle for 10 seconds or clicks over to another window or tab, BED hits the pause button.

WWN believes the technology should help publishers as well, giving them statistics to back up pricing on ad spaces. Check out the demo.

Integrated into the BannerLink offering, customers can create a “brand-focused” sticker-esque ad on top of the
searchable product inventory or an animation that shares space. When a user rolls over the ad, the branded message disappears and the banner expands to display the listed inventory in a video slideshow. Clicking on pieces of inventory gives more details and images within the banner, which also offers sorting controls.

Along with this enhancement, Liquidus has introduced more BannerLink features such as interactive Google mapping technology, multi-seller BannerLinks, advanced product sort options and new ad template styles.

“In order to meet the demand of our advertiser clients, we needed to provide them means to deliver their brand message as well the breadth of their product offering,” said Chris Carlton, executive creative director and co-founder of Liquidus.

Liquidus reports that BannerLink interaction rates have averaged close to 20% since the product’s launch, significantly higher than the average interaction rate of 2.11% for other rich media ads.

The ads operate differently for each type of unit. The standard IAB display ad plays the video in the banner, but increases to the browser size when rolled over. When a user clicks on the interstitial format, the video plays before navigating to the new page. And for mobile, the videos load after a user clicks on an app or a game.

These cost-per-play ad types are also available on a run-of-network basis. Tribal Fusion claims Full Engagement is an accurate descriptor because the ads get 100% user engagement…. The user can’t see nothing else!

– The plague of click fraud seems to be rescinding according to Anchor Intelligence’s “Traffic Quality Report” for third-quarter 2009. The rate of fraud among its customers fell to 18.6% from 22.9% during the previous quarter. Anchor Intelligence cited increased vigilance and enforcement of traffic quality standards as well as decreased fraud attempts in general.

– Let’s all jump into a chorus of the birthday song — back in 1994, HotWired.com gave birth to the banner ad. The newborn came in at 468 by 60 pixels and was picked up by Volvo, AT&T and… Zima. Wow, a lot has changed in 15 years — does the banner have 15 more in it?

Whilst online advertising in the US grew by 10 per cent overall last year, fourth quarter trading suffered a dramatic slowdown which leads Screen Digest to anticipate a five per cent fall in 2009.

The firm’s media industry analysts predict that all categories and sub-categories except video will decline in 2009. Banner advertising, -8.8 per cent, will not be fully compensated by the double digit growth of online video, so that the Display category will be down 3.6 per cent. Search will shrink by two per cent and non-Display categories such as Classifieds will experience double digit falls. Overall, the total internet advertising market will shrink by five per cent, -4.8, in 2009 and only stabilize, +0.4 per cent, in 2010.

Vincent Letang, Senior Analyst at Screen Digest, said that looking at the US results from the fourth quarter last year, it’s very clear that online Display will fall this year despite the growth of video. Search was still growing in Q4 but the growth rate has slowed down so much that the firm now believe the next quarter will be in the red too – and online Classifieds will continue to fall. Our full year forecast for total internet advertising is thus down around five per cent.

Display and Search, being huge and mature media, cannot be immune from the ongoing ad slump even though they will continue to outperform most other media during the period. Screen digest anticipates the total US ad market to go down two digits in 2009, while some media, press, local TV, could be down by up to 20 per cent.

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ActiveAds allows marketers to display customized messages in ad creative without the need to develop and manage multiple creative units. Banner ads are dynamically assembled to present a more relevant version of the ad’s text or images based on anonymous information available from the client or ValueClick Media.

“ActiveAds is extremely well suited for our clients who believe one ad does not fit all,” said Bill Todd, general manager of ValueClick Media, in a statement. “Too long have clients with a wide variety of products been forced to show the same content to all prospects, despite the wealth of data which can be used to improve performance by tailoring ad creative to each individual
consumer.”

ActiveAds provides an efficient way to micro-target the most desirable audience segments while providing consumers with more engaging ads, ultimately resulting in better campaign performance. Unlike some other solutions, all ActiveAds targeting is done anonymously and without any use of personally identifiable information. It can also tailor an ad based on technical data such as a consumer`s geographic location, or contextually based on the category of the site they are currently visiting.

Moreover, clients can tailor creative based on an infinite number of products or anonymous customer attributes the advertiser supplies to ValueClick Media via XML.

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The Online Publishers A ssociation  have partnered with some publishers to try out new ad units. The standard:

The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

Here is a screenshot of what looks like a new version at the New York Times.

In addition, while the smaller merchants spent less than $300 each on Web site support last year, Borrell Associates in its “Main Street Goes Interactive” report is forecasting that SMBs will triple this “non-advertising” marketing expenditure over the next few years.

There are more than 14.6 million SMBs, and they tend to overspend on advertising relative to their size, Borrell says.  The smallest U.S. businesses have average annual sales of $212,000 and spend just $5,671 per year on advertising – typically in the yellow pages or on direct mail ads or on coupons. But they are now investing 11 percent of their advertising, up from less than 4 percent three years ago. SMBs aare less receptive to buying banner ads, which accounts for 54 percent of their online spending, but declining, in favor of search-engine advertising, online directory listings, and streaming video.

According to Borrell, small businesses owners need to understand Internet ad trends as they look for help to stimulate sales from both inside and outside their market. Many Internet marketing products are oversold and under perform. Understanding the nuances of online marketing is even more important for local media companies trying to serve this smaller, lower-ticket advertising segment, states Borrell.

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Just as traditional ad buys began to erode in the early part of last year, interactive advertising has been hit particularly hard in the last quarter of 2008. It’s no longer enough to offer traditional banner ads on your website news pages. To survive in today’s turbulent waters it’s important to build out additional advertising opportunities. How do you do this? By creating channels specifically targeted to consumer interests.

Currently, the big three verticals are: automotive, travel, and real estate. By building out these main hubs and creating channels that highlight content specific to the big three, savvy media companies are finding additional pockets of advertising dollars. A channel can be anything from an area where consumers can build out their dream car and find a local dealer online to an RMLS listing search area that shows the homes for sale in your geographic region. Companies currently creating customized channels for the big three verticals above are finding they can package these with traditional advertising packages and sell them as “targeted buys” to advertisers. It makes sense that a real estate company would be more likely to buy ad space on a designated homebuyer page than a “run of site” contract.

To explain how this works, let’s take a closer look at the automotive vertical. Automotive dealers have traditionally spent the bulk of their advertising budgets on local TV commercials, newspaper classified ads and radio spots. With the majority of consumers now heading online to research and shop for vehicles first, many dealers have shifted some of their spending to national online vehicle search portals.

Now imagine taking the same concept as a national online vehicle search portal and creating a section on your media site, but tailoring it to your local dealerships and their customers. It’s a win-win. The dealership gets a less expensive and more targeted way to access local customers, while you create an additional advertising stream.

The caveat is that in order to entice advertisers to try your new channel, you need to offer consumers and advertisers the big-time tools found on national sites. Many local media sites are now investing in robust vehicle shopping and researching tools that facilitate the car buying process for consumers, and then push them to a local dealer for purchase.

These tools may include fun surveys to help buyers find exactly the car for them, informative articles decoding automotive jargon like MSRP, and even tools that mimic social networking sites so potential buyers can create shopping pages, upload the vehicles they are considering, and invite friends and family to chime in with their opinions. Media sites have a trusted voice in the community and built-in local readers, so by investing in new tools and features you can offer increased services to your readers, boost online traffic, and become more attractive to local dealer advertisers.

One exciting outcome is once you’ve created a new channel, advertising dollars often flow in from outside the primary industry. For example, local credit unions and insurance agencies would love to have exposure to local auto consumers, but how? When an auto consumer clicks ‘Financing’ on your site, you have the power to put the credit union down the street, or the small one-man insurance agency, in the face of a local consumer. This is ‘path inclusion,’ putting complimentary industries in the buying path of the consumer, and it can pay off big in terms of advertising dollars.

Most local media sites are right on the cusp of bigger profits. By building out new online verticals like automotive, real estate, and travel, you can realize a bevy of benefits: more traffic from already loyal viewers, the retention and growth of current advertisers, and new interactive advertising dollars from currently untapped markets.

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