HP And Yahoo: How Display Advertising's Reach Can Beat Search

Effective display advertising has more than a few special characteristics unto itself that other forms of online advertising don't really have.  Display is the right medium for branding, most forms of interactivity and customer engagement.

One of the biggest benefits of display advertising is its
reach - the sheer number of people who see the advertisement. Of course search has its place in the market, but when campaign goals call for high volumes of impressions, display is the way.

A short piece in MediaPost reminds us of this, talking about a recent display campaign Hewlett-Packard ran with Yahoo!:

Relating a recent campaign HP conducted via Yahoo, Zinman said that both the display and search components delivered virtually the same ROI in terms of the absolute cost of reaching their online consumers. The difference, said Zinman, was the absolute reach.

“In display they reached over 100 million people, and you’re never going to get that in search,” he noted.