Points Of Engagement: The Point Of Display Advertising

12 Points Of Brand Engagement

The display channel just isn't about impressions any more, because the point of display is brand engagement.

Check out the Ford Taurus ad I spotted on AOL yesterday.  I was struck by a few things about it. First, you couldn't get further away from the static banner ad in this piece.

In the middle is the video production, dragging the visual rules of TV onto the browser screen.

What strikes me as most important is the interactivity.  There are 12 points of engagement this ad delivers to the car shopper (I circled all of them).  Compare the Taurus to other top tier cars, view the 1:26 video, share, embed, see the other Fords.

The power of this ad is in the fact that it offers something for people in all the varying stages of the car buying process. The latent shopper, the active shopper and all their subtle permutations have something to interact with inside this ad.

All that interactivity produces huge brand engagement, which is so much more effective than what an old banner delivers.  Beyond the impression, the static banner delivers one point of interactivity, which does nothing to sell in and of itself.   Compare that to the Ford piece - that much interactivity practically delivers a microsite in an ad.

Naturally, the full design of such an ad and its campaign involves tracking the interactions.  I can guess the ad makers are not throwing that data on the floor. I imagine timers, heat maps, and other interaction tracking all are running, and that data is almost certainly being matched to user cookies / IP addresses.  This tells the story of what kind of interaction I had with the ad.  It tells a little bit about my demographics.   It brings me much closer to the brand in every way.

Make no mistake - this was an expensive ad to produce.  But it leveraged a TV production, which is an efficiency. And the distribution is of course way cheaper than TV.  And (without a focus group) TV never, ever tells you who the viewer is or what the viewer liked in the ad.