General Business: Boring Banner Ads build Brand Awareness

Good article.

I think creative banner ads always have been and always will be more effective than text ads.

Text ads eliminate the need to be creative. It's a game of chance. You hope that someone will click on your ad by chance of it appearing on a page they enjoy. It's ridiculous. I've never spent a dollar on Adsense campaigns and never will.

If the networks focused on merging CPM and CPC ads so banner advertisers only pay when their ads are clicked on, just like text ads, then we've got something big on our hands.

The banner ads that rotate in Adbrite on YGG sometimes only pay on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions). They're awful most of the time as well.

I aggregate the BannerBlog on The Ad Feed and it highlights some of the best online ads I've seen. Take a look through their archive. You can't tell me that the ads they feature aren't effective and don't have much higher click through rates than any text ad.

I plan to eventually create an interactive ad agency and hope to one day be on the level of the Barbarian Group and consistently produce creative and effective online advertising.

Travis,

I agree that creative or at least good ad design is always better than bad desing.

However, I was most interested in what was said about conversion and brand awareness.

They said that based on their experience that banner ads have a lower click through rate to the website. However a banner campaign could significantly increase brand recognition.

This brand recognition resulted in a 20% increase in clicks on text ads (most likely sponsored search results) . If anything I think that this is where the value and power of strong advertising is.

Ad design isn't necessarily going to push me to action more than a text ad but it does build my confidence and overall recognition level of that brand. So when I am ready to act it's already in my brain that damn I like those Geico ads with the cavemans I'm going to give them a call.

Their ads have nothing to do with insurance but they definetly get them brand recognition and intrigue. Which will later to translate to conversions.

I think the final analysis is that ad design creates long term results while text ads have a more impulse or call to action.

Like you somewhat mentioned, contextual text ads are really only effective in search results. Google will always be rich because of that. Our growing immunity to the sneaky placement of text ads is only hurting every publisher in the end.

In regards to the VW ad and the rest on the BannerBlog, it's the same as text ads, you have to follow up and deliver once they click on your ads. Creative banners and relevant text ads are both useless without delivering on your promise and offering an extra punch once they click on your ad.

I think a lot of work still needs to be done to have relevant banner ads appear. Matching keywords to content is just not good enough.

Here's why Vioxx sucks, but if you dont believe us...visit our website at vioxx.com to decide if you want a heart attack!

There are a ton of poor placement examples like that on AdRants if you do some digging.