Interesting phenomenon: the war in banners. In the NRC of today an interesting page is written about this in the economy part of the paper: there is a war going on in banner world (’De banner zit niet stil in een hoekje’). Banners are less and less clicked upon. Click rates diminished from ‘a few percents’ to ‘ tenth of a percent’. Surfers on the web become blind to the advertising. I see this attention war going on in a lot of environments. Typically the war leads to similar solutions: competitors use the same benefits, even use the same language in advertising. Whereas all marketing laws stress on ‘being unique’ we hardly see that in reality. The uniqueness is almost always found within ‘details being different within the same system of signs’. All of the wariors can be judged on the same benchmarking system. The war tends towards one solution that is to be enlarged and inflated. The online advertisers are fighting back along the same line: with expandable banners (’layered add’) that take over the whole homepage for a while (’homepage takeover’). This is a fight they will lose. The solution is size and attention by screaming out loud as opposed to ‘relevance’. This type of advertising will be succesful in the short term but of course the consumer won’t take it in the long term.
Van Lierop, from www.nu.nl (’now.com’, the Netherlands most popular news site) describes a tension between ‘advertisment’ and ‘news’, both struggling for attention. I guess this quote is quite revealing, if you look at it from the point of the reader, who loves to be tempted by the news but is not seeking the attention of the ads at all.
Funny if you take into consideration that I often hear consumers claiming to like the ads in a magazine. They even like the ‘better’ ads on tv. But no one seems to like banners at all. I moderated a group op youngsters lately that were definintively into online. But they said: if you want my attention, don’t advertise on the web. Use tv.