We’ve come a long way since the beginnings of online display advertising 17 years ago.
The came in the form of a clickable online banner ad hosted on Hotwired.com.
The ad was an extension of AT&T’s future predicting ‘You Will’ campaign, whose banner asked, "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?"
The ad was nothing short of prescient and marked the beginning of the evolution of display advertising as we know it.
Advertisers flocked to online advertising. Banner ads were purchased, site by individual site, in places where they believed their customers would visit.
Movie studios would contact numerous newspaper websites to buy homepage ads on the launch day of their latest blockbuster.
Big sport brands would buy space across the biggest portals to push their latest football boot just in time for the new season.
Early advances included updating the simple clickable banner to include forms of interactivity, where users could manipulate aspects of the graphic.
An early example is the in-banner game which allowed users to play Pong within the ad.
Quantity over quality
The ultimate goal was to drive clicks as a measure of performance. At the height of the craze, this sometimes came at the expense of brand experience.
In hopes of increasing their revenue, websites multiplied the number of ads they hosted.
Banners became obnoxious and flashy in an effort to coax a click from the customer.
The sheer number of ads on a page crowded out content and left customers and advertisers struggling to see and be seen - not to mention the now quasi-defunct pop-ups!
Dissatisfaction drove away customers and gave online display advertising a bad name, forcing websites to scale back their advertising.
The proliferation of websites and fragmentation became a problem for advertisers because striking deals with multiple websites became a big headache.
It was also an issue for publishers because the growth in inventory pushed down prices and decreased revenues.
Technological solutions
A host of technological solutions were created to address these problems. In this highly competitive space, networks, ad servers and exchanges grew.
With traditional media, there is a one size-fits-all solution which leads to a lot of wastage. With display, there is a solution for every kind of advertiser and every kind of publisher.
For the advertiser and publisher who wants a managed service which delivers the most appropriate ads in the right space, there is the advertising network.
For the advertisers and publishers who want more control over where their ads are delivered and shown without having to worry about making lots of calls and striking multiple deals, there is the ad exchange.
Technology has enabled advertisers to target their ads to the right audiences at the right time. In turn, this has helped to increase publisher revenues.
And ad exchanges have created online marketplaces for large advertisers, agencies, networks and publishers to buy and sell their display advertising for the optimal returns.
This is done by exposing the publisher’s inventory to a very large number of buyers and, in return, by providing buyers with unheard of scale, all through a real time auction which already manages more transactions than all of the worlds stock exchanges combined.
Creativity and technology are working hand in hand
But, technology is only half the display story. Creativity is the other half and we have seen technology open up many opportunities.
The improvement of digital ad formats continues to inspire creativity and, in turn, creativity is pushing technology to develop in new and exciting ways.
How many punch-the-monkey ads do you see nowadays? Display now conjures up innovative ads such as last year’s Tipp-ex "" on YouTube, or the Ubisoft "experience" masthead which enabled the user to play the Nintendo videogame in-banner or even the expandable ad that combined interactive rich media, a 360 degree view of the new vehicle and a photo gallery.
Display advertising has evolved from the annoying ‘click me’ banner to a world of engaging rich media, video, micro-sites and animations with social aspects such as Twitter and Facebook feeds.
The greatest ads create an emotional experience and engage consumers. For example, the now infamous Old Spice "The man your man could smell like" campaign created individual video responses to most comments left by users on the original video.
The brand forged a bond with the user that no number of clicks could match. Click through rate is increasingly less important than metrics that measure interaction and engagement.
For example, the success of the YouTube masthead is in its ability to provide advertisers with a microsite on the most viewed page daily on the internet from which to reach out and connect with that audience.
Conclusion/Call to arms
Last year, Google launched the ‘Watch this space’ campaign heralding the incredible potential of display advertising.
This week we will be celebrating the IAB’s event. The proximity of these two campaigns is not coincidental.
We are in the midst of the display advertising revolution. There is huge potential in display and some even talk of it eventually becoming a $200bn industry.
To achieve this, many people in our industry still need to be convinced of the technological and creative strengths of display.
This is a seminal moment. History has shown how far we’ve come. When it comes to display, we’re no longer punching the monkey, we’re test-driving the latest car, we’re playing the latest game, we’re shopping for the latest craze and even though we’re not literally shooting wild animals, we’re giving brands the ability to engage with their customers and customers the ability to experience those brands.