The Good and the Bad of Online Advertising

Advantages of Online Advertising

Banner ads and their similarity with traditional media

Digital Marketers regularly bemoan the fact that it’s often difficult to educate the market about the value of Internet marketing techniques. Traditional buyers of advertising have been conditioned in a certain fashion and have come to understand advertising in a certain way.

Banner advertising goes a long way towards bridging the advertising divide. Online ads have a set size, they can look very similar to print ads and they occupy a particular bit of real estate in a publication with a particular number of eyeballs looking at it. It’s easy to understand and it does the things buyers expect advertising to do.

Bottom line  - if done correctly, online advertising builds brand awareness and increases sales!

Images - display can offer a rich brand building experience

Some campaigns are better suited to having images rather than the plain text of a PPC campaign (although recently PPC image and video ads have been introduced in the USA).
Consider the following types of campaigns:

• Promoting travel packages: What stirs more emotion - an image of a tropical paradise or the words “tropical paradise”?
• Building a brand within a specific sphere: Use banner advertising to brand the web sites of every major player in that niche.
• Running a competition: Keep the target market’s eye on the prize.
• Launching an exciting new sports car with a call to action: “Test drive it now” - or interactive rich media that highlight all the exciting new features as you mouse-over that part of the car on the image.
• Digital shadow: Using banner adverts that shadow the above-the-line activity to drive the message both on and offline.

Interactivity

Since banners can contain rich media, they offer levels of interaction that other forms of advertising cannot achieve. It allows your target market to not only see your banner, but to play with it too. Interaction builds a bond and improves the chances of the consumer remembering your brand tomorrow. Cognitive learning is a powerful outcome of interactive display advertising.
Animations, games, video, Flash – modern online advertising is able to bring together a number of other online marketing tactics:

• A few years ago, Flash micro-sites were all the rage , now the same functionality can exist right within the ad. This includes filling in a form or playing a game within the ad – no need to be taken to a separate page.
• Viral marketing - clever viral marketing games or “send to a friend” functionality
  from within the ad.
• Video - viewers can check out video previews or trailers from within the ad.

1. Technical obstacles: The nature of a lot of display advertising is intrusive, so pop-up blockers can often prevent ads from being served as they were intended by the advertisers.
2. Connection speed: Bandwidth can also be an issue, although this is a shrinking problem. However, campaigns should be planned around demographics in determining the richness (andinvestment) of interaction. For example heart disease medication is likely to appeal to an older community, with less money and slower connection speeds.
3. Advertising fatigue: Consumers are suffering from advertising fatigue, so while new technologies can provide great results, as soon as the market moves mainstream, it can get saturated. Consumers are increasingly ignoring adverts.
4. Ad blockers : As well as most browsers now blocking pop-ups, there are also extensions available for the Firefox browser, such as AdBlock plus, that will block advertising on web pages. Technologically savvy consumers are increasingly using these methods to limit the advertising that they see.