The Return Of The (Banner Ad) King?
I get the feeling that I’m going to become a “go-to guy for graphic advertising” again, within a couple of years, much like I was around the turn of the millennium.
Back then, it was all about “banner ads”, and it was simple enough to adapt my strategies to skyscrapers, leaderboards, rectangle ads etc.
Right now, everyone gushes over the pure-text adwords system. It’s always the first thing I try for any business. It works on a relentless and monstrous scale for tens of thousands of advertisers.
The world is still full of useless and unproductive graphic ads of every size. Some of them you see thousands of times (eg., broker ads if you visit stock trading sites regularly).
In the past I discovered profitable and cheap banner advertising at quality sites. I still maintain most of those relationships.
BUT, most of the Big Media graphic advertising buys have to be done personally, through an Agent, for example with a newspaper or magazine’s web site. Not only is this AN IMMENSE PAIN IN THE ASS, but they also usually want you to spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS before anything even happens.
Meanwhile they’re ignoring the fact that Google is a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that has made most of its money by giving their clients FULL CONTROL over the pricing and placement of their own ads. You don’t have to wire somebody $5000 every time you have a new ad campaign to try. You can spend $5 a day if you want.
Sooner or later there has to be a waking-up from today’s sorry state of graphic advertising. Big Media tells you that you have to pay $20,000 – $50,000 for your banner ad to show up 1,000,000 times. Meanwhile, there’s NO WAY they’re selling out their inventory at that rate. They are dumping it, almost free, onto conglomerates who will fill that space with dancing monkey banners, and the like. They are dumped into the inventory of media companies that form out of nothingness and then buy each other out, in a never-ending cycle that’s been going on for 15 years.
Especially garbage-y is advertising for sale on teenage-targetted video game and ringtone and song lyrics sites. Don’t buy advertising there! “But it’s only .001 cents per impression” is NOT a valid reason.
Even on Google, via Adwords (but only on the content network, mind you), you can make graphic ads … BUT … they will be shown little, and probably get crappy results – because most AdSense vampires only have the text ad codes on their sites.
But I feel the day is coming when all this delicious, quality ad inventory that you and I are currently shut out of, will join the party, becoming rational and accessible.
When that DOES happen, you’ll pay reasonable ad rates, with no minimums, and there might even be a grace period where you are not hammered by Google-like campaign quality scores, landing page quality scores, keyword quality scores etc. You’ll pay per impression, or by click, and be done with it. Unless, of course, the upcoming revolution in graphic advertising is controlled by Google.
When that happens, I will experiment far beyond my years-old strategies, study the results, and make myself available once more as “The Banner Ad Guy”.
Everybody wins!
