Banner Ads: Style and Placement

It seems like advertisers have gotten it all wrong when it comes to designing banner ads. The fact that banner ads animate and flash bright colors and try and call attention to themselves is what allows people to differentiate a banner ad from content and therefore ignore it. Rather, a banner ad should match the style of the page. If a page is simple and mostly text, then the ad should be simple and mostly text. This makes the ad look like any other content. The trick is making it look like intriguing content (it should stand out a little) so that you look it over. Placement could also be improved. While traditional banner ads lie above the fold, at the top of a web page (easily ignored), maybe they should run alongside the content, much like sidebar magazine ads, which your eyes inevitably fall on when reading or scanning a magazine article.

But, that's not how it works in other media

In other media the ads are different from the content. Okay, sometimes some company buys a "special advertising section" and tries to make it look like articles from the mag but at the bottom of each page it says "special advertising section" but otherwise it seems like they are always trying to make the ads stick out.

As for banner ads well, a few sites (msnbc.com) for one have side ads AND mid article ads. There's the headline for the article, the first paragraph, then an ad, then the body of the article. And, they've set it up so the body doesn't appear until 5 seconds or more so that you are almost forced to look at the ad before you can scroll past it to see the article.

They also do the commercial thing sometimes. You click a link to see a new article and you are taken to a page with an add with a 5 second redirect to the page you actually wanted. I hate that one.

Also, a couple of sites have started running 1/4 page adds. Yahoo for one. When I log into yahoo mail I often get a 256x256 on the right side of my display.

My point is that ads stand out too much

They're animating when the rest of the page is not. It's easy for users to ignore the one animating element when the rest of the page looks simple.

There's also this whole new media thing: is it like print or like TV? Should we treat it completely different? I don't think we need to be too cutting edge in this respect. For websites that are structured with pages (Salon, NYTimes, etc) just follow a print advertising model. Since my pages are not animating, I'd put ads that were flat graphics in the sidebars.

I'd go one step further, since I believe people have learned to ignore ads on the web. I'd simplify the ads down. I guess kind of like we::blog and blinkover in the danchan sidebar. Although I never really thought of those as ads, I guess they are. I also like what Google is doing, but that may not be a good solution (all text) for companies that want to get their logos and trademarks known.

Now, when everyone has broadband and webpages start moving, that's when I think you should start using animating ads. At that point, it's more like TV. The problem is trying to mix the TV ads with the print pages.

This doesn't take into account the interactive link nature of the web. It is a different medium, but I think it's a good first step.

Marketing, Medium, and the Message

Proper marketing leads to proper advertising. Marketing should know the culture of those interested in their products, and determine what sites those people go to and what kind of advertising they appreciate.

Then marketing tells advertisers what consumers they are targeting and what message they want to pass on the consumers, and advertisers figure out how to implement that message.

So my answer is that you will see internet advertising that mimics print ads (minimal gif animation) on sites like nytimes or economist because those are some seriously conservative viewers. You will see experimental ads (b3d and more obnoxious gif animations) on sites like gamasutra or gamespot.

And what is the effect of new forms of media? Well, Marshall McLuhan says:

"Today when we want to get our bearings in our own culture, and have need to stand aside from the bias and pressure exerted by any technical form of human expression, we have only to visit a society where that particular form has not been felt, or a historical period in which it was unknown. Professor Wilbur Schramm made such a tactical move in studying Television in the Lives of Our Children. He found areas where TV had not penetrated at all and ran some tests. Since he had made no study of the peculiar nature of the TV image, his tests were of content preferences, viewing time, and vocabulary counts. In a word, his approach to the problem was a literary one, albeit, unconsciously so. Consequently, he had nothing to report. Had his methods been employed in 1500 A.D. to discover the effects of the printed book in the lives of children or adults, he could have found out nothing of the changes in human and social psychology resulting from typography. Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and content analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge."

So if "human and social psychology" will change as a result of the internet, then advertising will have to track those changes. The formula for what is effective in the future will be different from what works today.