Banish the Banners - Margaret Manning on Online Advertising
Margaret Manning of Reading Room believes the days of taking offline campaigns and shoe-horning them into the online medium are well and truly over. So stop wasting your money and start using it more wisely, she advises.
I don’t want to be distracted by sales pitches when I’m getting what I set out to get. In my hunter frame of mind, online advertising is like being surrounded by a swarm of flies – all I’m going to do is to try and bat them out of the way.
We’re starting to lose the meekness of the old broadcast days, when we passively lounged on our sofas being fed sales pitches on TV.
The internet is a medium for individuals. It’s allowed people to go out and get what they want from it. And that’s very empowering.
This change in our behaviour has a significant impact on how advertising works – or doesn’t work – online.
Web guru Jakob Nielson agrees that we’ve turned into hard-nosed hunters rather than captive softies.
According to him when people go online they know what they want and how to do it.
“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Nielsen. “People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience.”
It was different when we were captive audiences. The only real alternative then to watching adverts was to turn the sound down or switch channels. But the sheer size of the internet and our active participation with it means that we have far more control over the content we view. This means that it’s very easy to simply ignore the content that we don’t want to see.
Advertising has not yet adapted to the specific nature of the internet. Instead, the old offline models remain deeply ingrained in the way that the advertising works.
Media planners and buyers who used to buy space in publications or broadcast time for advertising agencies have translated this tradition to the online world.
But the fundamental problem is that it hasn’t worked – the translation of offline advertising techniques online has failed to engage users. I predicted the death of online advertising six years ago when the best click-through rates were at 0.26 per cent. They have continued to decline year on year since then and some studies even suggest that figures are distorted by a small minority of ‘serial clickers’. And, based on these dismal levels of success, my prediction remains the same.
Hopeless
It’s been so hopeless because it has failed to deliver value for individual users. Scott Karp, writing for Publishing 2.0, said that: “Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers.”
The only online advertising model that has been phenomenally successful has been Google, which offers arguably the most transparently valuable user experience there is online.
So, the challenge for brands in general is to evolve ways of advertising that offer value to their online users. Banner ads in themselves are clearly not the way to do it.
Reading Room have always focused on the user. That was what inspired us to start the company in 1996 after we’d seen websites that were completely unfriendly to users.
In the past 12 years we have become famous in the digital communications world for offering the best user experiences there are. We’re now helping all kinds of brands to market themselves with online experiences that offer value for users.
We have learnt to present advertising to people in a way that isn’t disruptive to their online experience. In fact, it augments it. And actually advertising isn’t really what it should be called because it’s far more sophisticated than that. Our approach is very specifically targeted to particular audience groups with high-value content. It’s about creating rewarding interactivity and conversations with users – allowing people to learn and actively helping them to get what they want.
Hunters
If we think of users as hunters then instead of trying to distract them from their hunt, we’re showing them where the animals are, and sharpening their spear for them. That’s why Google has been so effective.
This all sounds very good for individuals and rather difficult for brands. And in a way that’s true – brands now have to be far more creative about how they reach out to their audiences and more pro-active about starting conversations. But brands that are willing to fundamentally change their mindset away from the offline world’s obsession with bought space and time, will be rewarded with success.
Understand how the internet is different. Understand your audience. Start a conversation. Let’s not call it advertising because advertising belongs in the past. The future is based around strong individuals, making their own choices online. And that’s a great and powerful thing for all of us that is fundamentally changing our lives.