Member Article

Banner 2.0: 30 Years in the Making

Almost 30 years ago, on 27 October 1994, the first banner went live on hotwired.com. For over four months, 44 per cent of those who saw it clicked on it.

What happened to banner CTRs? People often ask how in the intervening 360-ish months the CTR of banners has fallen so dramatically (by approximately -99%). There are a number of reasons. The first being that it had novelty factor. People had never seen a banner before so of course they’d click it. This played a huge part in its success. As did its design. As part of AT&T’s *You Will *campaign, it asked web users if they had ever clicked their mouse right here? And answered, ‘You Will’.

The CTA is so strong that you can’t help but want to click your mouse right there. Psychologically you get FOMO by not clicking. It’s like being asked if you want to see what’s behind door number 1. Before you were asked you didn’t care, but now, yes you absolutely do want to know what is behind door number 1!

Rewind 30 years It was also a very different time. Clinton was President and John Major was PM. Fourteen percent of US households had internet access, less than 9% of people in the UK had the same. In 1994 Google was still but a twinkle in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s eyes, unsurprisingly since there were only 3,000 websites, so finding stuff wasn’t that hard! Coronation Street still pulled in around 20 million viewers (compared to the 2.5 million it attracts today) showing that fragmentation hadn’t yet taken hold, so it was easy to get people’s attention.

Today Today there are 1.13 billion websites and 95 per cent of the population are online. TV advertisers think anything over 500,000 is an alright reach and we haven’t even started on generative AI.

Emergence of Banner 2.0 Clearly times have changed A LOT. So why have banners stayed the same? Now is the time for change; the time for Banner 2.0.

Less reliance on CTR In Banner 2.0 CTR is not the only measure to judge effectiveness. It is not all about clicks, it’s about brand awareness. According to a recent Neilson study brand awareness is the most important factor when it comes to determining the success of any marketing effort. Whilst people might not click, the fact that they’ve seen the brand will certainly register, often subliminally.

Focus on design In Banner 2.0 banner design is critical. Banners must be noticeable. Vanilla banners won’t generate clicks and won’t aid brand recall. Why? Banner blindness. Banner blindness occurs when people consciously or unconsciously filter out banner advertising or banner-like information because they are deemed to be invaluable distractions. Our experiments show that this is particularly true if a banner ad looks formulaic. The user’s brain edits it from its viewing experience. Our experiments show only innovative, non-formulaic banners having the ability to break through. It is possible to override banner blindness by manipulating a banner’s page congruity (the degree to which the banner matches the website) and/or its visual salience (the degree to which the banner stands out and captures the attention of the viewer) . To optimise page congruity and visual salience we’ve found that darker backgrounds with lighter text stand out on most information and news websites, but that light backgrounds and darker text are more effective for gaming and entertainment websites. Vertical and perpendicular lines standout on websites with left to right text, whilst on websites that read horizontally the inverse is true. And animated banners of any kind stand out against mostly static webpages.

Call to arms Banner spend is on track to grow 6% this year to reach $161.8bn globally by December. That’s a lot of money. Make you spend count and join the shift to Banner 2.0!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The Bannermen .