4 ways to improve your web advertising Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 18:31, in Labels: web advertising, web marketing

One of the big issues, forgive the latent pun, of current web marketing/advertising are physically large web adverts that crowd popular web pages. By large we mean either the pop-upish ads that fill the entire web browser when you enter, say the front page of your favourite financial news website, or the pop-under that enlargens to fill half your web browser when you happen to bring your mouse pointer over it (especially annoying while it happens to cover an interesting article you were trying to read). Big ads like these are supposed to be flashy, interesting and attention-stealing but often wound up being just obtrusive like traditional pop-ups back in the day. OPA, or Online Publishers Association (a prestigious not-for-profit trade organization for online content providers), released an announcement conserning a new set of principles for web advertising, especially in regard to physical ad sizes. While setting up the foundation for web advertising of good taste is generally a good idea, here are some quick ideas on how to improve your web advertising.

1) You have a second to make me interested. That's about the time I need to realize you've bombarded me with a big, browser-filling message and to move my mouse cursor over the big X on the top-right corner. Many ads, especially those that resemble TV commercials, are little stories that require five to fifteen seconds of viewing to be appreciated. But guess what? I've been educated by the marketing forces that big ads, like pop-ups, are distractive, a no-no. You need to change my mind, every time, in a second or so. Make me interested in your message during the first frames.

2) Make it work without sound. Often your flashy, expensive website commercial includes a well-produced live film with sound. How many times your prospective customer is going to stumble on your commercial during his working hours, on his/her office computer, and end up informing the boss and the rest of the office that he/she isn't working by the sound of your commercial booming through his/her audio speakers? If you had thought you had a second to grab your customer's attention, it'll now take him only half a second to dismiss your message while he frantically kills the audio and closes the ad simultaneously. The advise is thus obvious: either make it so that your commercial is shown online on non-working hours or design your message to function without audio.

3) Continuity: a lost jewel of print media. Remember the day when you still read newspapers ;)? Often they had series of ads, distributed evenly across the pages, so that when you first noticed the first ad on the front page, a supporting ad, or two or three, followed in the later pages. These together created a commercial "story" or just communicated a certain message effectively by means of nifty, alternating albeit repetitive ads. How come I haven't seen one single attempt to bring this popular mechanism to the world of web advertising? Consider a situation. You load the front page of your favorite news website. On the front page you notice a very interesting, perhaps funny, but not yet convincing ad from BMW. You continue by clicking on a link of an interesting article and proceed to the article page. The website registers what you saw on the first page, and presents you with an again-interesting follow-up ad for the original BMW ad, next to the full article you proceeded to read. BMW grabs your attention again, and makes you laugh/smile again. Interested this time?

4) Educate the customers how big ads really work. Rather than bringing my mouse cursor over the pop-under and consequently messing up my browser I'd love to know that every time I decide to click on that same ad, it'd just enlargen rather than forwarding me to another web page. Educate net users that its "safe" to interact with commercial messages. Get them to know that showing an iota of interest on your message won't end up disrupting their browsing, or clicking on an ad merely brings up more info, i.e. enlargens the ad. This naturally isn't the task of a single advertiser or content provider, but the work of the entire community.

Next up: thoughts on how internet memes can enhance your marketing.

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A summer update to this March post (3rd Aug):

Reactive Marketing coined by Gustav Martner and Gustav von Sydow pretty much sums up my thoughts on point #3