ABOUT ONLINE ADVERTISING

AD Posting, Banner. Skyscraper. Pop-up. Pop-under. These are some of the advertising formats found on the Internet. Over the last few years, as advertising agencies have experimented with the format and placement of online ads, users have seen advertising messages grow in size, shape and download time. Despite slow growth over the last few years, Jupiter Media Metrix says the online ad market will grow from $5.7 billion in 2001 to $15.4 billion in 2006. Darwinmag speaks with Robin Webster, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, to learn why online advertising is still not dead.

Following are few thoughts about Online Advertising which was discussed with Robin Webster president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau:

Q. What advantages does online advertising have over broadcast or print advertising?

>>Webster: It has the interactive nature of the medium itself: That actually provides the advertiser with a host of tools. The two-way communication gives them an opportunity to get in-depth information. This is an active medium, not a passive medium. It also allows for online sales. I don’t know if you can say that it shortens the sales process, but there is an opportunity for immediacy there. And, frankly, it’s much more than a medium. If you look at an advertiser’s budget, they’ve got something for media spending or advertising, something for consumer promotion or trade promotion, or direct marketing or public relations, and the Web can do all of those things. That’s why we’ve had a hard time trying to talk about it because it does so many different things. Finally, I think it’s a very good targeting vehicle. We know a lot about the audience and their viewer ship. An advertiser can target their audience better on a website than they can on television.

Q. What are the drawbacks?

>> I don’t think the best creative talent from the agencies are working on these online ads. I think we’ve addressed some of those situations at the IAB in terms of providing a larger palette in the new Interactive Marketing Units (IMUs), the larger ads. But that’s sort of a cultural thing, so I don’t know how you correct that. Also, we’ve made it very, very hard to incorporate interactive advertising into the media planning and buying and selling and post-buying process. We are working on that one. We’ve got a number of task forces going on together with publishers and agencies just picking apart every step of the process and looking at how it’s done in other media. And if the tools aren’t there, we’ll encourage them to build them. So those are the two biggest drawbacks -- it’s hard, and we haven’t got the best creative talent designing the ads.

Q. How do you measure the value or effectiveness of an online ad?

>> If you don’t know what you want out of a medium, you don’t design the right ads. And then if you don’t use the right metrics to see if you got what you wanted, you could be pretty disappointed. If you have a new product and you’re trying to increase brand awareness, for example, there are very standard ways to test that and measure awareness before and after marketing it online. We just did a huge branding study and have overwhelmingly proved that online advertising works for branding. I think a lot of people were thinking that it’s just a direct marketing medium. That’s not so.

Q. Are there any golden rules of online advertising?

>> We learned that size matters—lager-size ads work better. We learned that interactivity matters—specifically that Flash and DHTML work better than streaming audio and video. And everything works better than GIF animation. Ads placed between pages, interstitials, work better than ads on the page or above the page. A good ad shows the logo or brand name up front. One message per screen is a good idea. Fewer ads on a page tend to work better. I guess the most important rule of all is make sure you understand what your objective is in the first place. That sounds almost insulting, but I can’t tell you how that simple lesson has been forgotten as people have been wowed by the technology or have tried to test their way into understanding the medium.

Q. The ad industry is soft across all media right now and the online market seems to have the most vocal critics. How do you respond?

>> The entire media industry numbers are down. Clearly we had a very large percentage in 2000-01 year of dotcom advertisers that are no longer around, necessarily. So did radio, television, print. But the Internet has the audience. I’d rather be in this industry right now, with as many people that are complaining, than in some other industry that is losing its audience to online. I know, as an ex-advertiser, that I must reach my audience. And if they’re moving online I’m going to figure out how to use this medium and follow them online because I need to communicate with them. Right now the space that we’re in is almost a re-launch of this industry. We’re just getting the basics right.