How to Make Display Ads Suck Less
Online display advertising sucks.
There, I said it. It’s like everyone’s been kind of skirting the issue over the last few months so as not to upset anyone. It seems like the conversations around the death (or at least decline) of display has been about everything but the ad itself. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I want to talk about.
I’d lose my director of strategy card (we really have those) if I didn’t first acknowledge that these types of decisions should be led with objectives. Thinking through what you want to accomplish with online display will obviously help sort out what it should say and how it should say it.
OK, with that little disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to the creative. Why does it suck? Well, first off, it’s hardly ever aware of the content it is hanging out with. I’m not talking contextual ads here, just saying that display advertising needs to be aware of where it lives. At least it should know what site it’s on and what people are there for. I mean, we spend a lot of time thinking about our consumer, right? We know what they like and don’t like and roughly where they spend their time on the Web. However, we give little or no thought to what they’re actually doing once they get there. What content are they looking at? What’s the difference between homepage visitors and lower-level visitors?
