The August
20, 1998 Wall Street Journal included an article with the headline, "Companies push
for much bigger, more complicated online ads."
The article was based on interviews conducted with different advertising agency folks
relative to a study completed by a French research company. That study looked at how
consumers reacted to more than 80 different Internet ads. They looked at thumb-sized boxes
and banners. They looked at ads that winked, ads that blinked, and ads that jumped up in
your face when you came onto a Web site. They looked at interactive ads, and multiple
choice ads, and scroll down ads, and just about every other kind of ad that you might
possible imagine technology could offer up.
The reason the article came to be written in the first place was that the survey found
that larger and more complicated ads are more memorable and communicate more information
than their less complicated friends. According to the study, the average recall of the
complicated ads was between 46-63% higher than the average recall for standard banner ads.
Follow-up interviews with consumers revealed that they got the advertisers main message
33% of the time when it was presented in interstitial format. That's the ad that fills up
the entire screen when you visit a website. That 33% is just a bit more than double the
16% for banner ads.
WALLY'S COMMENT ... There are a couple of things at work here. First, the people who
design really, really, really cool or killer Websites want to design really, really,
really cool killer advertisements as well. It's fun to do that. Besides, if you are good
at the trade you get paid big money.
The other thing that's going on, though, has a more practical purpose. Online
advertisers are trying to figure out how to make this medium work. They're doing that in
the fact of studies that tell us that banner ad click-through rates have dropped
substantially over the last year or so. If you're considering online advertising, should
you pay attention to this?
Let's drive a couple of stakes in the ground here. Things that are bigger and more
intrusive are more likely to be remembered than things that are smaller and not so
intrusive. It doesn't matter if we're talking about ads, or your in-laws.
Here's the problem. Research like this is based on measures carried over from
television and print advertising. Those measures depend on surrogates such as recall and
memorability rather than direct buying behavior as a necessity. You can't measure that
buying behavior for a lot of electronic or print advertising, especially the sort that are
used for branding.
The problem with that design is twofold. First, the Web is a different medium from
either print or electronic media. Trying to make the Web behave like TV or conform to TV
or print standards simply is inappropriate because it's a different breed of cat. In fact,
it's a little bit like getting your dog to act like a cat by buying lots of cat litter and
putting litter boxes around the house. Sometimes it will work, but mostly it's just plain
stupid.
The second problem with this research is that it doesn't take into account how Web ads
really ought to work or measure them in their actual natural state.
Companies advertise on a Website because the Website draws people that the company
wants to reach with its message. This is a far higher and more active level of choice than
people make by picking up a magazine. In fact, on the Web advertising can be keyed to
specific content of specific articles or pages.
If you're going to measure online advertising effectively you have to do it based on
behavior in some form. And that behavior needs to be based on the Web in its natural
state. Here's what I mean.
People visit a Website for its content. They do so to answer a question or solve a
problem for most business Websites. For some business to consumer sites they may be there
for news or entertainment, but those are a minority. Your ad, whatever it is, needs to fit
into that format. It can be a banner, a button, a boxed message, or it can be a part of
the Website content itself.
The active device can be a banner to click on for more information, a link to follow
for more information, a form to fill out for more information, or even one of the banners
recently tested by Eddie Bauer taking you direct to purchase options.
What do you measure? Click through is a possibility. Purchasing is a possibility. File
download requests is a possibility. The fact is, that we don't know yet what some of the
more effective measures are, but those are pretty good candidates.
What about the placement of your advertisement? It seems to me that the best ads are
likely to be those that are embedded in content. Thus, an ad for a Kraft product located
on a food site and embedded in an article on using the product or the type of product in
cooking would be a good candidate. This seems to be born out by some of the recent
findings of Editor and Publisher's look at effective media commercial sites.
What about physical placement. One study last year indicated that banners work better
at the bottom of a page of information than they do at the top. This makes perfect sense
to me.
At the top of the page, a banner ad is an intrusion on the reason for the visit.
Instead of looking at the information on a page that I have chosen to visit, I need to
stop what I'm doing and go visit somewhere else and then find my way back.
However, if the ad appears after I have dealt with the content, I'm ready to move on
and the ad can be a logical next step.
A serious danger here is that there are a lot of folks who have heavily vested
interests in big, fancy advertisements and campaigns. They want to keep doing things the
same way they always have because that way is familiar.
Here are my suggestions for making your Web advertising effective.
Opt for content-based advertising wherever possible.
Don't break up the flow of question answering or solution finding. Whether it's a
banner, a button, or a link, make sure that the flow to it fits the flow of the content,
even if it's not your content ad. That means to put it at appropriate stopping points
within the content on the page that people came to visit.
Use active, behavioral measure rather than surrogates wherever possible. Click
throughs, file requests, and other interactive items are likely to be more helpful to you
than recall statistics.
From Wally Bock's Briefing Memo -- 15 October 1998
