OMMA's Smith: Got Plenty Of Science, Need More Creative In Online Display Advertising

In the magazine of Online Media Marketing and Advertising (OMMA), Steve Smith hands in a nifty assessment of the display advertising marketplace.  He reinforces two major themes I agree with.   First, that the problem of creating effective display advertising is not solved by any single element.  Second, new technologies in the space present enormous potential as solutions, but that great creative outstrips any other element in importance.

In spite of its serious workflow efficiency improvement benefit, sometimes I think of AdBean as a creative solution first and foremost.  Especially when I consider the state of the business as calling for great creative more than anything else.  You can quickly make and optimize some great, great ads with top-notch creative using our product.  The industry needs them!

But for all of the technology that companies are throwing at this shift to automated, audience-centric systems, both publishers and agencies resist the idea that display advertising is just another engineering problem for the wizards of Silicon Valley to solve with science. Creative - or the lack thereof - remains this industry's weakest link. "It is all like the complexion of a teenager," says one media buyer. "It needs to come a long way." But the lack of emotionally engaging, even memorable, online display advertising has been a decade-long lament. Everyone in the supply chain agrees that there is now as much interest in premium, contextual branding experiences as there is energy around the massive tech-driven inventories. Agencies contend that most campaigns will still start with the big idea anchored at premium sites.

But there seems to be less agreement here about how to make good on the unmet promise of blending art, science and scale. Zinman and others point to the enhanced takeover and push-down ad units that Yahoo just adopted from the Online Publishers Association. "This is really key," he says. "For the first time we can really push the boundaries around display and finally get them to scale." Others see the Web moving closer to a TV experience, where video embedded in a page replicates tvs tried-and-tested attention-grabbing branding power. And still others say that the answer to invisible banners comes only when the Web itself stops looking like a NASCAR racer. "There are way too many ads per page," says Kathryn Koegel, an analyst and marketing practice lead at Primary Impact. According to her research, most publishers responded to the recession by desperately tossing even more ads on a page, even though most studies show that better integration with content of fewer ads improves performance. With the Web's infinite inventory always threatening price, publishers need to re-create some scarcity, at least on a given page, she argues.

Read the entire article here.