i·me·michael

Here’s where the thinking goes wrong about advertising on the web. The strategists seem to be looking for it to generate instant revenue, basing its potential on click-thru percentages. Get the prospective consumer to the website and they will buy, buy, buy.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Granted the goal of advertising is to generate sales, and advertising does work in that respect, but it should be obvious by now that the parameters under which advertising can accomplish this don’t change simply because it’s on a medium like the web. There were lofty aspirations for what advertising on the web could accomplish, but they were all based on misconceptions.

At best, good advertising creates a want for a product where one didn’t previously exist. At the very least, it keeps a product in the consumers mind so that when they are ready to buy, they think of that particular product first. Asking advertising to stimulate instant purchasing is more than it can deliver. again, by now it should be obvious that it’s simply something advertising can’t accomplish.

What’s gone wrong is that in trying to make advertising do more, they’ve only succeeded in making it more annoying. Even worse, they are trying to force the consumer’s hand by using increasingly unpopular techniques.

We’ve learned to live with traditional advertising—static ads in print, and commercials on television. We know how to tune them in or out. When it comes to web advertising however, we are not afforded this opportunity. Marketing strategists have done everything possible to keep the ad not the product visible. we no longer think of the product but the ad, and we equate the ad with the technique used to propagate it. Pop-up windows become condemned along with the advertisment and people go out of their way to prevent both. Ultimately all web advertising has suffered because of techniques which have only succeeded in alienating us, the potential consumer.

Advertising on the web needs take a much simpler and more static route. There is absolutely a place for advertising on the web and there should be. The web cannot sustain itself without the influx of money that businesses are willing to pour into it in return for sales revenue. Advertisers however, are placing too much stock in the information gathering opportunities, and feedback potential inherent in the web. Because of the poor figures and diminishing returns, this feedback has caused advertisers to pull their advertisements, and with that, their money. I suggest that if businesses could gather the same feedback from print and television advertising, they would pull the money spent there far faster.

I’d like to propose some suggestions.

1. Use static ads, similar to print; mostly visual. save the interactive stuff for the actual product page. Animated banner ads operate under the false assumption that I am already paying attention to the ad. I assure you, people are not spending their time looking at animated banner ads. The majority of ads on the web appear on pages that are basically online versions of printed material, so I propose treating them that way. More thought needs to go into the design of ads that will appear on web pages.
2. Work the ad space into the layout of the page. Something similar to those used in the articles found on Cnet and ZDNet. While I don’t think that’s perfect, I don’t mind the space that’s being used, just usually what gets put there. This may require a rethink of how pages are laid out.
3. Create collapsible advertising spaces and give the user the opportunity to turn off all advertising on a page. Again Cnet has something like this on their homepage. This could be employed on all pages, with the default being expanded.
4. Create advertising portals on the site that list the advertisers and their websites. Perhaps a seperate page or included on each page. This could create more opportunity, and potentially better usability.
5. Run fewer ads in rotation and lengthen the time that a particular ad is visible. In this vein, perhaps a series of ads could be run with varying degrees of potential viewing. The time someone spends at a given site, the more potential ads he will see. Ads which are run first would be more expensive than ads which run after five minutes. This could also be based on time of day. Offering advertising real estate based on time and potential views similar to television ads or some combination of print and television schemas.

I think text advertising is good in theory, and its appearance is obviously a backlash to the visual and invasive onslaught of current advertising schemes, but ultimately I don’t see it having widespread appeal or potential. Unless of course people are willing to create complete text ad pages, or a sort of ‘classifieds’ section similar to those found in magazines and newspapers. In fact, why doesn’t that exist on the web? There is some potential there. I may mock up a few pages that take all these ideas into consideration just to see what the possibilities are. Stay tuned.