Member Article

Has display advertising finally grown up?

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.

Has display advertising finally grown up? We’re raising our banners high and proclaiming: “there’s probably an app for“ the kitchen sink, but there’ll always be a web for everything.

No doubt display ads were suffering from too long at the top. But a sharp rise in Flash banner sales and impressionslast year, shows that fresh competition from personalised retargeting and dynamically generated ads has given Flash banners the kick they needed. Re-targeting has taught us what Flash banner ads do best: high quality, high impact, brand affinity advertising.

There’s sharing and sharing…

Sharing has always been crucial for those of us who work online. But sharing has come a long way from webmaster forums and the chumminess of “likes”, “reddit”s, “digs” and “pokes”. Now it’s less and less about choice.

From “community“ to “ecology“

Bizarrely, it’s the Facebook effect which has shattered this sense of fraternity. Before Web 2.0 and its boundless social sharing, the internet was described in terms of community. Now, since the explosion in social publishing opened the display advertising floodgates, the language is all about ecology.

The food chain

The change is subtle but critical. Ecologies incorporate communities, of course, but where do they stand in the vast biodiversity within an eco-system? They’re at the top of the food chain: the strategists, rationalisers and planners in a vast system of mutually dependent life forms. They’re the ones with the knowledge and / or technology to manage, subdue and contain the rest. So where in Google’s open ecology do we and
our clients sit?

The virtual zeitgeist

Like most ecologies, Web 2.0 is constantly evolving. A successful suit against Google for “violating users’ privacy rights” by bypassing Safari privacy settings, continues a revisionist trend from last year, when Google settled claims with the Federal Trade commission that it had “used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy policies [with its] Buzz social networking service.” [Source](http://www.businessweek.com/news/ 2012-02-22/google-sued-by-apple-safari-user-over-web-browser-privacy.html).

Facebook has delayed plans to share users’ phone numbers and addresses with web developers, while they work out how best to inform their users of the consequences (yes that’s inform, not ask - it’s an ecology, not a community, remember). At the same time Google is inviting gmail account holders to aggregate their personal data and store their phone numbers in their settings.

Privacy and all that

The privacy rows are only just beginning, and online advertising technologies like personalised retargeting and dynamically generated ads which depend on aggregating internet users’ personal data, are increasingly insecure.

Kino Creative’s key trends

Kino Creative are working on bigger and better Flash banner advertising campaigns. In response to google’s new Search+, they are advocating high quality content in their websites, their clients’ sites and their entire display advertising portfolio. They’ve embedded video in Flash banner wrappers and branded You Tube channels for clients.

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