How about putting it this way – instead of talking about whether Banner advertising is dead or not, we should be talking about what is it that advertiser community is losing if they think Banner advertising is dead and are keeping it out of their advertising budget. Let us start with what we at ThePublisherNetwork.com start our conversation with any new client: Whats your campaign objective?

Branding?
According to a research study done by Journal of Consumer Research, repeated exposure of your brands or products can generate a positive feeling among the consumers. Banner ads job is precisely the same. Familiarize consumers with your products similar to TV ads! The advantage with Online Banner Ads is that it does deliver measurable results and unlike TV ads don’t interrupt the user, right when they are completely into the content and that too with no option left to close the ad.

Performance?
Untill recently, “Banner Advertising” in the Internet Marketing world was compared with “Branding” of Traditional (offline) Advertising. This isn’t the case anymore! Rise of user generated content on internet, Blogs and social media, and how Banner ads are used on Blogs or Social Channels is quite a proof. Targeting options available with Banner advertising campaigns is something that is second to none among the other advertising options on Internet.

Targeting Options

• Contextual: A contextual advertising system scans the text of a publisher website for keywords and display advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. What else an advertiser can ask for, an interactive banner ad right where the user has got the relevant content.
• Behavioral: Users’ browsing behavior is captured and analysed by variuos tools used by publishers and advertisers. The idea is to make sure the user gets the most relevant advertising experience.

Other Targeting Options:
• Banner ad-sizes: Most of the internet users across globe are learnt to read from left to right, top to bottom. Clickable rectangular banner ads are placed across a web-page in various sizes for grabbing attention. Most popular Banner Ad Sizes are: 728×90 (the huge, top of page banners), 300×250 (the large square box banners), 120×600 (the tall skyscraper banners) and 468×60 (traditional banner)




• Banner Ad Formats: The next phase in traditional static banner advertising that mapped the success of Banner advertising. Popular in this phase of web advertising are the ones that you see on just about every web page now – Tower ads, inline ads, sliding ads and video based ads. The sliding ad and pop-up ads are more aggressive in this new cult of Banner advertising that are used to grab users’ attention.
• Choose banner placement on web pages – top, middle, or bottom
• Target by industry/topic | Target by Country/Geography
• Target by Demographics (gender/age)
• Set Frequency Cap: Specify time of day or day of the week / month for the ads to appear
• Set Daily Budget Cap: Specify how much you want to spend per day
• More about Targeting

In the Paid advertising part of the Internet Marketing world, it is estimated that 70%-85% of traffic comes from banner ads and not search engines (organic + inorganic) or anything else. Did you ever ponder on it, that if your focus has been shifting lately from Banner ads to PPC (Search Engine Marketing) / SMM (Social Media Marketing), you are actually losing out to 95% of the money making opportunity.

Dual benefit of the Banner ads –

• Banner ads get you some of the most targeted, interested users you can possibly get from any other medium. As Internet marketer, you do realize that by advertising on sites that are relelevant to whatever you’re promoting, you’re already narrowing down the market to those that may actually buy and further when your banner creative is at work, those people click, you are narrowing it even more to get the best ROI of your marketing dollars.
• No other advertising medium but a well designed and promoted banner ad can leave an impression of your brand in a user’s mind. Not every time one is on net to buy something. But when they are looking to buy a product or service in your segment, s/he will directly look for your brand if at all you have been displaying your ads and have left your brand’s image/message in a users head/heart (emotional buying v/s logical buying behavior).

Let’s consider the most ideal campaign objective for a marketer: Advertising Goals are to drive demand for the product/service, improve brand awareness and gain maximum exposure during the course of the campaign. Online Banner Advertising does all of it and more.

Marketers (and the Interactive Marketing Agencies) have been trying and testing all the options available and have learnt a lot in last few years. Among the various types available today, Online Ad Network industry can be broadly divided into three types:

Right Ad Network

Vertical Ad Networks: As Advertiser/Marketer you get to target audience matching your product/service by selecting vertical specific publishers/websites e.g., Sports / Technology / Lifestyle / Education / Music / News / …

Regional Ad Network: Geo specific Ad Networks tend to have better knowledge and network of websites for targeting mass audience in that location e.g., Hispanic (Hispanoclick) / India (Komli, Pubmatic) / China (Allyes)/ …

Global Ad Network: These have been in the online advertising space from quite sometime. The obvious logic is that the technology with Global Ad networks is better. They get down to manage huge inventory and deliver campaign on publishers/websites from various time zones and handle the discrepancy issue within the best and set industry standards. These bigger Networks give more options in terms of volume and no less in providing extensive targeting options. Some Networks ValueClick / Tribal Fusion / ThePublisherNetwork / …

There is no one good choice though! It all depends on the campaign’s objective and media plan. There are products/service of a local business which obviously chose to go with the local ad network for the fact that local ad network provides better insights and connect better with the local audience. Today’s Global eBusiness on the other hand would need exposure from various geographies and hence would look for traffic from across the globe. In that case the best choice for media planners would be to go with a Global Ad Networks. Similarly the choice of Vertical Ad Networks – provide all the volume (geo-specific/global) from a specific industry websites.

Do Let us know your experiences and what has worked for you!

• New Delhi: February 22-24, 2012
• Sydney: March 14-15, 2012
• San Francisco: April 3-4, 2012
• Singapore: June 13-14, 2012
• London: September 19-20, 2012
• New York: November 7-8, 2012
• Shanghai: Shanghai International Convention Exhibition Center

CEO’s, CMO’s, Marketing Execs, Brand Managers, Creatives, Media Buyers and Planners, Product Managers, Solution Providers and what & who of media and technology industry flock together.

Video – ad:tech Events Channel – Youtube

Nearly 65% of users are using social media as component of their regular work routine, including reading blogs, visiting business profiles on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or using Twitter to hit upon information and/or exchange a few words in relation to  business-related matters. Its interesting to know who uses social media as a resource for bring about their dayto-day everyday jobs at work, how much  experience they have using social media for business in this way, the resources they bring into play largely frequently and how constructive they find these  resources. To get a logic of business social media use by people in different profession levels, roles, industries and company sizes, according to a analysis  every Manager could have indicated that they use social media as a business information resource but not all of them did – a few only worked for companies concerned in social media projects. The Managers were less likely to exploit social media as a business resource than regular,  while middle managers such as Directors and Section Heads were more likely to exercise social media in this way. For job roles using social media to  find business-relevant information is visibly not limited to high-tech facet of the business – in fact, people working in the IT section  were significantly less probable than those from other departments to make use of social media in this manner.

Among those used as any kind of social media to hit upon trade-related information, here is what are most popular ones:

- Attending webinars or listening to podcasts

- Reading ratings/reviews for business products or services

- Saving business-related links on social bookmarking sites

- Participate in discussions on 3rd party web sites.

The fast development in the number of general and niche online business communities over the past 10 or more years and more absolute indexing of online community content by general search engines may combine to give rise to a state where business community visit a large number of business-related online communities or forums in a given month but actually participate in very few. This is an attractive area for potential research. The typical user uses nearly six different social media resources or sites for business information.

Basic logic behind how Google’s AdSense works — automatically analyze the content of web pages to dynamically determine which ads are the most relevant ones to be served there. If you are on a site gathering information about Next generation Notebooks, they show you ads for retailers who sell them — without the publisher or the advertiser (or even the Online Ad Network) having to explicitly specify anything. This is simply contextual advertising, and if this is done using Semantic Technology, its nothing but Semantic Advertising.

Semantic Technology: encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code. Semantic technologies are “meaning-centered.” They include tools for: auto-recognition of topics and concepts, information and meaning extraction, and Categorization.

Given a question, semantic technologies can directly search topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources. From the portal perspective, semantic technologies can be thought of as a new level of depth that provides far more intelligent, capable, relevant, and responsive interaction than with information technologies alone.

With HTML and a tool to render it, one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’. But there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number XYZ is an Electronic Gadget with a retail price of $199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “XYZ” is something that should be positioned near “Electronic Gadget” and “$199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Electronic Gadget” is a kind of title or that “$199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them where as RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies (RDF, OWL, and XML)_are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within documents. The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e. to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and facilitating automated information gathering and research by computers.

Semantic targeting makes a step ahead of Contextual Marketing by going deeper than keywords and understanding the page’s actual content, which results in intelligently placed ads and higher conversion rates and revenue. Various Publisher Ad Networks have integrated Semantic technology in their system which discovers, classifies and interprets text information automatically, builds detailed taxonomies in any language, and classifies content on publisher web pages into these taxonomies, a method of organizing content on a website.

**The content in above article is information gathered for you from differnt sources available on Internet**