Follow up to Noah’s display ad column on Ad Age
Just finished my friend Noah Brier’s article about display ads at Advertising Age.
I couldn’t agree more with his hypothesis that blanket buys across many sites “gives up the biggest advantage the web has over other media: the ability to target smaller groups affordably with discrete messages. As soon as we go with a single message across all these sites we’re left with a glorified TV ad”
At thehappycorp, we have recently had extremely successful online campaigns for VH1 and Brooklyn Brewery. Both of these campaigns considered the sites they were going to run on, and the audience they would speak to on those sites. Both campaigns employed rich media in a way that made it work with the layout of the page in an intelligent fashion. In the case of the Brooklyn Brewery campaign, the banner was built specically to run on ONLY 1 SITE(!)…The New York Times Dining & Wine section.
The end result of both of these were extremly high responses for these campaigns including the highest performing campaign that VH1 had ever seen and great response compared to the majority of NYT Dining section campaigns.
That being said, as Noah indicated, there are boat load more issues related to the success of display ads, (including for starters a critical need for education and creative experience in the media buying community) but these points are a good start.
