People Respond

I wrote this bit for a potential client last week to help explain the value of (real) display advertising. I had Federated Media firmly in mind when writing it and will certainly use them if the client wants to use display ads:

Search is one primary way people find your website, display advertising is another.

A display ad is any Web ad - i.e., a banner, rich media, or text - that isn’t presented based on a search query. That is, display ads aren’t paid listings you see on Google or any other search engine.

Display ads, instead, are the ads that you see on websites and blogs based on a guess about who you are from the content you’re looking at, or where you came from, or what you’ve bought, and so on.

Clearly, display ads, mostly in the form of banners, have been the pariahs of Web advertising because of their irrelevance to people like you and me whose attention they’re supposed to be attracting but often repel.

But, fortunately, it isn’t always this way. There’s an approach to display advertising that is actually quite effective. And that is when the websites and blogs that show these ads are handpicked for their relevance to the advertiser.

For example, six or seven websites with recognizable brands and a known demographic profile can be grouped together to give an advertiser the best chance of reaching and influencing the right people.

In this type of ad network, which supports what is known as conversational marketing, the advertiser is also required to be relevant to the audience it wants to speak to.

Because of this relationship, advertisers are confident they’ll be heard, and so they make an extra effort to communicate something meaningful through their display ads.

Not surprisingly, people respond. And it’s easy to understand why: The ad becomes an extension of the company’s brand rather than an interruption. It adds value, and, in the best scenario, becomes part of the conversation.