Member Article

Banner advertising: where other ads can’t go?

As a successful online banner advertising producer, Kino Creative have commissioned a series of articles on the future of display advertising, summarised here for Bdaily by Ann Winter.

Can banner advertising touch markets that dynamically generated ads can’t reach?

Social media’s investment in personalised retargeting has made alternative advertising an everyday reality. But the debate on dynamically generated ads and personalised retargeting is digging up some of marketing’s least cuddly toys, like subliminal messaging, embedded marketing, and product placement.

March 2011 saw a new UK law allowing product placement in most TV programmes. But apart from the fear-factor media value of subliminal marketing, how effective is it compared with Flash banner ads?

Where it works:

Impact has been shown to increase when embedded marketing is “goal relevant”. If you are thirsty and see an Evian bottle you might want either water or Evian, but if you aren’t thirsty the impact is zero. The success of the dynamically generated ad depends on your individual arbitrary state of mind. See our upcoming post on why relevance is personal.

Personalised retargeting increases “goal relevance”, but face-plants before unprimed eyeballs. It can’t persuade, inform, or seduce a market; it can’t imbue your brand with energy and personality or grow customer loyalty.

Flash banner ads have endlessly adaptable creative

The web has evolved since 2010 - now it’s mobile and it never stops sharing. US advertising spend on mobile and social media grew 30% to $45bn in 2011, according to market analyst PQ [media](http://www.pqmedia.com/about-press- 20120130-usmsf2012.html). Yet incredibly, this only accounted for 4.1% of the overall US communications industry revenue.

The web is no longer a platform…

The web is a facility with clients on many platforms. Unlike dynamically generated advertising, Flash banners have the flexibility to reach all user devices and software platforms, online or offline, even if the technology to carry it is not yet widespread (see our last post on Fortress Apple and the mobile markets). Kino Creative’s advertisingcampaigns for [Forward2Me](http://www.kinocreative.co.uk/ examples/forward2me-advert-2/) are great example of a brand enhancing advertising campaign, which was then transferred in Flash, static and video to websites, html newsletters, and physical formats on their packaging and premises.

What next?

Read our next post on how APIs (that’s application programming interface, or the code that runs the internet) have revolutionised display advertising online.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ann Winter .