*supercollider

I generally like what Giles Rhys Jones has to say over on Interactive Marketing Trends, but unlike Giles I’ve never been a fan of banners. To me they represent the same traditional advertising thinking brought into a new medium.

“Hey, look at this awesome new invention, the interweb!”
“What can you do with it?”
“People use it to have share their life, interact with people and have conversations, voice their opinions, search through amazing volumes of information, play games, enjoy entertainment…pretty much anything you can imagine!”
“Great, so people with eyeballs are there? Let’s take my advertising poster and stick it up there as well!”

And people wonder why there is such a thing as banner blindness? It’s not rocket science.

On TV, you are sitting looking passively at a screen anyway, so maybe you stick around and wait out the commercials for a couple of minutes before your show comes back on.

On the web, you are constantly moving, looking for things of interest to you. And unlike TV, where the options for interesting things are depressingly limited, on the internet you can get whatever you want, immediately. Even if I want to passively consume content, I can create my own channel in a second and watch it all commercial free.

So given the overwhelming abundance of options for entertainment and information available to me on the internet, what is the chance the thing I want to spend my time looking at is a banner that simply advertises your product, and links through to your advertising microsite? It’s like suggesting I would be interested in calling the telemarketers to hear their pitch on BT Home Broadband. Umm, no thanks.

On the internet I’m in control of what I see and experience. And clearly people have discovered that 99.95% of the time banners are not of interest to them, and so they’ve evolved their viewing patterns to simply block them out of their visual focus, as brilliantly illustrated by this graphic from Jakob Nielsen on Alertbox:

Basically what what we’ve learned from graphics like that and recent stats around who actually clicks banners ads is that the vast majority of people do not find advertising worth looking at. I think this is generally true, people would choose not to look at advertising. But on the web it’s just easier to avoid.

Ad and media folks’ natural reaction is to simply try and force the medium to change, developing takeovers, interstitials, and pre-roll ads and missing the point entirely. The problem is not with the medium, but with the message.

Giles suggests that people need to be retrained to look at banners by putting something of value in them like art or weather for a day or a week. I think he’s got it half right.

The solution is not to try and trick people by occasionally providing value in ad space, then swapping it out with the same old banner spam.

The solution is to put something of value and real interest to people in that space, either developed or brought to you by a brand.

Essentially, advertising needs to evolve to match the medium.

As an example of this, Henry Chilcott notes that on RCRD LBL they’ve had “a gig finder from Virgin America which let people know where and when gigs were - and then offered the cheap flights to get them there. At the moment Nikon have a widget that hosts photos of and from artists and fans.”

And even the Summer 2008 Road Trip Mix, a curated set of MP3s on RCRD LBL, brought to you by BMW is a much better option in my books than the traditional banner messaging. This is banner space on RCRDLBL, but used to provide contextual, relevant value to a specific audience, with subtle attribution back to the brand. I actually looked at this banner and considered checking out the tracks, and was impressed that BMW was smart enough to sponsor it so personally my own opinion of them just went up.

I would agree with Giles that the near future of the banner lies with widgets, and have said this myself for some time now. It’s a way of providing more user control over the content they consume, and it’s a way of providing a window into a larger interactive service.

However, this still relies on you actually have developed content or a service that people are interested in consuming in the first place. Because on the web, that’s what you’re competing against.

It’s no longer good enough to simply communicate your product message. Now you have to earn that right. It’s survival of the fittest out there, and you’d think that with our marketing pedigree, copious creative skills, and vast ad budgets behind us, we’d be up to the task. But so far, on average the pros are getting smoked, leaving a trail of abandoned microsites and Second Life ghosttowns in their wake.

It’s well past time to shift away from thinking selfishly about “what do I want to say and how can I force someone to look at that” and to really think about “what are people actually interested in, what can I give them of value?”.