Every year around this time I am responsible for developing
the next year’s advertising strategy. This involves decisions on who to
advertise with and how to best deliver our message. Of course there is the
usual suspects – print ads, banner ads, sponsored text ads, etc. Depending on
the publication, we sign up for a variety of these advertising methods. I am
always trying to ensure we use our advertising dollars most effectively and frequently
question which method is the best to portray our message.
I was never a huge fan of spending a great deal of money on
banner ads. Based off personal experience, I rarely spent much time looking at
them myself. When we read the lecture notes for this week, it mentioned banner
blindness, which is exactly the experience I have had. Constantly being
bombarded by banner ads is something I have learned to quickly ignore. I
wondered, now, if my company should not pay for banner space for 2014.
I did a little research, thanks to Google, and found that
there are many resources devoted to the topic of banner blindness. The best I
found, though, was this infographic from bannerblindness.org.
While it gave
some facts that I really wasn’t shocked to see, like low viewing levels and
retention rates of banner ads, one thing that did catch my eye were the suggestions
to avoid these problems: go native; stay relevant; and decrease clutter.
Finally, some insight into how to make our banners more
effective! Let’s place ads in uncommon places and shapes than are normally
seen. Make sure the content is formulated so that it is relevant to the
customer. Last, choose websites that are not already cluttered with other
banner ads. Ours would easily get lost in the shuffle.
Next month we start discussions for 2014, and I can
guarantee you I’m taking this new found information into consideration when
determining whether or not to use banner ads.
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