Placing Banner, Pop-up and Other Internet Advertisements

The August 20, 1998 Wall Street Journal included an article with the headline, "Companies push for much bigger, more complicated online ads."

The article was based on interviews conducted with different advertising agency folks relative to a study completed by a French research company. That study looked at how consumers reacted to more than 80 different Internet ads. They looked at thumb-sized boxes and banners. They looked at ads that winked, ads that blinked, and ads that jumped up in your face when you came onto a Web site. They looked at interactive ads, and multiple choice ads, and scroll down ads, and just about every other kind of ad that you might possible imagine technology could offer up.

The reason the article came to be written in the first place was that the survey found that larger and more complicated ads are more memorable and communicate more information than their less complicated friends. According to the study, the average recall of the complicated ads was between 46-63% higher than the average recall for standard banner ads.

Follow-up interviews with consumers revealed that they got the advertisers main message 33% of the time when it was presented in interstitial format. That's the ad that fills up the entire screen when you visit a website. That 33% is just a bit more than double the 16% for banner ads.

WALLY'S COMMENT ... There are a couple of things at work here. First, the people who design really, really, really cool or killer Websites want to design really, really, really cool killer advertisements as well. It's fun to do that. Besides, if you are good at the trade you get paid big money.

The other thing that's going on, though, has a more practical purpose. Online advertisers are trying to figure out how to make this medium work. They're doing that in the fact of studies that tell us that banner ad click-through rates have dropped substantially over the last year or so. If you're considering online advertising, should you pay attention to this?