How to Make Display Ads Suck Less

"Online display advertising sucks," says Ad Age contributor Noah Brier. He argues that all the attention on display advertising not working has been focused on "everything but the ad itself" -- that is, the creative, which he thinks has been generally poor. "First off," he says, the creative is "hardly ever aware of the content it is hanging out with. I'm not talking contextual ads here, just saying that display advertising needs to be aware of where it lives. At least it should know what site it's on and what people are there for."

Brier laments that the planning process is so heavily math-oriented that it doesn't matter whether an ad runs across a gossip, sports or gadget site, as long as it fits the IAB guidelines. "Without thinking about where the display is sitting, the creative is left focusing on a totally-out-of-context consumer." This, he says, "pretty much gives up the biggest advantage the web has over other media: the ability to target smaller groups affordably with discrete messages. As soon as we go with a single message across all these sites we're left with a glorified TV ad."

Brier argues that specfic ads should be created for big publishers. "If you know you're designing something for ESPN.com, for instance, you would create a very different thing than if it were for Newsweek." Then, by knowing what site your creative is running on, "we can start to design things that look like they belong a little more."  more