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!

Each of these big players also acquired various Behavioral, Video and Mobile ad networks… Apart form these big players there are other media firms who have been on acquiring spree of various smaller players in the ad networks industry, like Ybrant Digital (acquired Addynamix and Oridian), WPP (acquired 24×7 Real Media) etc… Research on Ad Network model from various sources IAB, Comscore and the like gives us enough data to look into the scope of Ad Network’s reach into the targeted audience and how potential is the business. AOL’s experience – beginning with the acquisition of Advertising.com for $435 million in 2004 – provides a useful point of reference about the recent growth of ad networks. From less than $100 million in revenues in 2002 to approximately $650 million in 2007 (a CAGR of 55%), AOL’s third-party ad networks (primarily Advertising.com) now account for approximately 27% of the unit’s advertising and content revenues. Based upon the value recently placed on Yahoo! by Microsoft, AOL’s advertising and content business could be worth as much as $20 billion, and Advertising.com represents a significant portion of that value.

Though all those acquisitions and the revenue now coming from those units is an exciting story, currently a lot is happening in the Ad Network industry turf. Dynamic nature of our industry makes us face challenges every now and then. Current challenge is that many big media companies like IAC, News Corp, and Time Inc. are in the process of aggregating all of its web properties into an ad network of their own, which means, limited direct access for a general Ad Network to the media available with few of the biggest portals. On the contrary there are enough legitimate arguments that there will be any scarecity of media with the existing Ad Networks like ThePublisherNetwork.com:

1) This transition will take a lot of time and experts doubt that its not worth an effort for the bigger media owners to form there own ad networks. Though they will be more organized in handling the huge audience they have on their properties but Advertisers now-a-days need variety and this need is the result of shift in trend at the macro level. Online marketing is facing unprecedented change, brought on by a volatile economy.

2) There are thousands of 2 – 3 Tier independent publishers who have no choice but to be part of an Ad Network

3) Improved targeting technologies (beyond contextual, demographic, social, behavioral) 4) New methodologies like free content v/s community (user generated content – users share videos, blog posts, and widgets with each other across sites) targeting. We need to be there where users are.

4) New methodologies like free content v/s community (user generated content – users share videos, blog posts, and widgets with each other across sites) targeting. We need to be there where users are.

- Lower Cost – We will have to look at the few reasons of how Ad Networks came into being to understand how its cost effective to work with an ad network. The publishers with the ad space (the audience), always have this inventory in abundance. This doesn’t mean that there is an imbalance in the supply & demand graph. First face of the coin says that the publishers are not able to sell their valuable traffic completely whereas second face of the coin says advertisers are not able to find the right audience to suit their campaign objectives. An Online Ad Network had the answer. It provides both the parties, the Publisher and the Advertiser, a meeting platform:

o Publishers get to sell the traffic, they are not able to sell. In other words, publishers get Advertisers/offers for their traffic which their sales team is not able to sell directly. This saves both time and cost for a publisher and gives leverage in terms of concentrating on their basic business i.e., keeping pace with the constantly changing internet technology and not only work on maintaining the traffic flow but also attract more audiences.

o Advertisers get to find more traffic at a cheaper rate as they find number of publishers with the audience of same demographics which means same audience at a whole sale price i.e., More traffic + Number of Ad-options @ cheaper price which is not-to-be lost deal.

- Better Technology – Improved Targeting: An Ad Network is having a better technology in terms of targeting the audience as that’s the whole essence of any ad-networks’ existence. Going with the fact that and as the name itself says any Online Ad Network is a collection of number of publishers, which makes it quite obvious that they have traffic more than any individual publisher and which also makes it quite obvious that to maintain such huge volumes an Ad network needs superior technical capabilities.

- Increased Reach:

o Publishers get to meet not only local offers but chance of having some international brands coming to them without having a Sales teams with international exposure or offices at various parts of the world to get international offers.

o Advertisers, as discussed above, get leverage out of the superior technology or in other words, targeting competencies of an Ad Network to get the Increased (More Volumes) and Deepest reach among the suitable audience across the globe.

- Flexible Cost Models: There are various cost models and ad-types available to suit the objective of communicating a message or promoting any offer online. The most used ones are CPM (Cost per million/thousand impressions), CPC (Cost per Click), CPV (Cost per View), CPL (Cost per Lead), CPA (Cost per Action/Acquisition)… Every Publisher tries to attract its audience in a unique way and various such publishers make a community competing against each other to get offers, but with a set of unique cost models which suits there technological competencies and which makes more business sense. With various communities of publishers at one place, an Ad Network tender opportunities for advertisers to pick the cost model which backs their ROI goals and for publishers to get advertisers for what they have in offer.

- Various Media Sources at one place – Specifically for Advertisers and Advertising Agencies,

o One of the major advantages of working with an Ad Network is it saves time in media planning as most of the time, experienced media professionals at any Ad network guides them with the selection of traffic or do the media planning on their behalf as they know the origin of the media better.

o Single point of sale – While working with an Ad network it saves a lot of valuable time for advertisers and interactive ad agencies in operations and paper work while not only looking for suitable media sources but also deal with number of media owners separately.

A few concerns while working with an Online Ad Network and the answers:

- Concerns about adverts appearing next to inappropriate content: With traffic abundance, comes the risk of appearing a brand next to the content which talks opposite or some how affects the brand value in the market. This can be avoided by making sincere effort while doing media buying and to work with genuine traffic sources.

- Discrepancies between network data and our data: One major reason and which is unavoidable is many a times there are number of ad-serving systems working at the same time, which are set and operate in different time zones across the globe and hence difference. As per industry standard 10% Discrepancy clause in traffic delivery reports of the two systems in pace is acceptable by the parties involved.

As you see, the concerns are not big enough to stop advertisers working with Ad-Networks and as there are better chances of getting suitable offers for their audience Publishers prefer to get along.

Therefore it makes Online Ad Network, an obvious choice for all!!