No Boundary

If only we all knew at birth that display advertising in the world of print gets its juice from itself and where it’s displayed.

For example, you’re reading Wired, you’re flipping through a piece about what you could be doing with your workouts in 2013, and you notice an evocative ad from Nokia in those pages about a new smart phone for athletes.

The point here is that you can’t separate the overall pull of the magazine, the interestingness of the article, and the creativity of the ad. There is no clear boundary.

That’s known, that’s accepted . . . in print, but almost completely unrecognized and unrealized online.

Yes, we could use the Web to combine these same three elements - let’s call them context (magazine), content (article), and curiosity (ad) - to engage connected consumers. But, what gives display advertising value in print is still lost in translation on the Web.

Fortunately, despite our best efforts to ignore the obvious value of this approach, display advertising, real display advertising that’s connected to services and ideas and helps connect people to products, is breaking through with a certain unstoppable brilliance.

This post was inspired by ChasNote’s post on display advertising versus graphical ads.