Keeping It Clean Online

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Is cleaning up ugly online display ads worth the premium?

Spatial organization and the reduction of clutter are all the rage these days, as any number of HGTV reality shows will attest.

The current fashion is clean, clear and open, with minimal distractions from the primary focal points in a field of view. The trend isn’t just limited to living rooms and other physical spaces, either. In the past couple of years, online publishers and advertisers have undertaken a mission to de-clutter the internet in an effort to make the web a more pleasant place for users and a more effective conduit for marketing messages.

Take AOL, for example. Two years ago, as the company was evolving from internet service provider to pure content player, AOL made the decision to cut its ad load by 30%. “We took a massive hit to the bottom line, purposely,” says Dana Toering, director of sales and business development at AOL Canada. “That was the first step, to get rid of below-the-fold, excessive advertising that cluttered the page.

“The second thing we did was redesign our pages to be more appealing. More white space and larger images to reflect a sort of magazine look and feel.”
AOL, and the digital advertising industry generally, has been working on the third step ever since, designing more large-format, rich-media ad models meant to dominate a web page. The idea is to reduce the headache-inducing sensation, prevalent in the early days of online marketing, produced by websites that were like slot machines, overstuffed with competing blinks and flashes of messaging. The idea is also to give users a clearer path to those messages and make it more rewarding to engage with them.

The desire to de-clutter the web has even united competitors in the online publishing world. The New York-based Interactive Advertising Bureau brought together major publishers from around the world and invited them to submit their best ideas, resulting in the selection of six new ad units dubbed the IAB Rising Stars last year. The units—Portrait, Filmstrip, Slider, Billboard, Pushdown and Sidekick (see sidebar, left)—take up a significant chunk of the page and offer advertisers the ability to embed video and other rich-media experiences. That each of them were included in the new ad standards and creative guidelines released by IAB Canada last month is a signal
that the era dominated by the blinking banner is coming to an end.

It’s not only the major players like Microsoft, Google and AOL that are offering these richer ad units. Though each of the Rising Stars was originally the property of their creators, the IAB’s standardizing of the formats includes the release of creative specs that allow any publisher to develop them. In a bid to help advertisers sort out their options, the IAB will soon issue a list of which publishers accept which ad formats.

Ads that are larger and richer are naturally more expensive, though—sometimes six times the price of a traditional banner ad, according to Katie Atkinson, director of digital strategy for Aegis Media—and whether the premium cost is worth it depends on the marketer’s objectives. Digital advertising has historically been measured on click-throughs and conversions, and on these direct response metrics, old-school online ad formats are more than competitive.

Caroline Moul, digital group director for PHD Canada, says traditional standing ad formats are more efficient in terms of metrics like cost-per-acquisition. “My assumption is that the people who are spotting those ads amongst all the clutter are in the funnel for that product or service, and that’s why you have the more engaged user,” she says.

However, while the internet is becoming less cluttered, it is also becoming more of a forum for brand advertising. And media experts like Moul and Atkinson acknowledge that larger, richer formats like the
Rising Stars models perform better on “soft” metrics like
brand awareness and recognition.

“In those instances, the larger, more rich formats always win, and quite significantly—anywhere from 20% to 50% higher performance in terms of brand lift metrics in comparison to your standard ad formats or smaller formats,” says Moul.

Publishers, media companies and the IAB have, individually and in partnerships with each other, conducted a great deal of research that backs up these assertions. Paula Gignac, president of IAB Canada, points to a Chevy Malibu campaign conducted in 2010 that included a page takeover advertisement on the Yahoo e-mail login page. The introduction of the ad coincided with the highest number of user searches for the term “Chevy Malibu” tracked in the previous 550 days of the campaign, which included executions in other media.

Gignac also references an Old Spice campaign that test-drove the IAB Rising Stars Billboard unit on the YouTube homepage in 2010. The video embedded in the ad, which featured the now-iconic (and shirtless) Isaiah Mustafa riding a white horse, generated 35 million views, 28 million channel views, 234 million upload views, 282,000 channel subscribers, a 2,700% increase in the brand’s Twitter followers and a 300% increase in traffic to OldSpice.com. All of this translated to the bottom line in the form of a 107% sales increase (over
the previous year) in the month the ad ran.

The IAB’s research exemplifies the sea- change that’s taking place not only in terms of ad formats, but the way they’re measured. Clicks are becoming passé, with terms like “engagement,” “interaction” and “dwell time” filtering into the digital marketing lexicon. Media companies and marketers are also taking a close look at what type of activity the advertisements inspire, such as search queries and social media sharing.

“There’s definitely a movement within the industry where people are talking about new forms of measurement,” says Jacqueline O’Sullivan, marketing director for Microsoft Advertising, which recently ran a business-to-business campaign for its own brand using the Filmstrip ad unit. That initiative generated a 69% interaction rate, up from the usual 7%, and a “dwell score”—the amount of time spent with an ad multiplied by the rate at which it is actively engaged with—of 39.
In addition to offering greater versatility and creative options, larger formats are effective because, well, they’re large. Troy Young, the Canadian-born president of California-based online publisher Say Media, says the key selling point of his company’s AdFrames units—300×600 and 300×900 interactive formats—is that they give marketers 100% share of voice on a given web page. That dominance, he said, is worth the extra expenditure.

“On one hand you have an ad that, in many cases, is making no impact, and it’s sharing space with a lot of other competing, flashing elements on a page,” he says. “And in the other case you have a large ad that is highly functional, with lots of content in it.

“Once you’re essentially owning the right-hand column of a page, as an advertiser you can start to syndicate out white papers and run video and do things that are generally useful to the consumer.”

Gignac, in explaining the value proposition of newer, bigger and richer formats—which, she acknowledges, require greater production resources and longer lead times in addition to premium placement fees—also claims that advertising agencies embrace units such as those in the Rising Stars series because they provide a more robust creative canvas. In other words, marketers might get more bang for the
bucks they shell out to their agencies.

Shawn King, chief creative officer at Extreme Group, isn’t so sure about this, arguing that creatives often enjoy the challenge of working within the tight restrictions of formats like the standard banner. He also notes that, from the marketer’s perspective, “Spending less and being unsure of the return is a little more comfortable than spending more and being unsure of the return.”

Ultimately, says King, clients must determine what they want that money to do. For those still focused on clicks and conversions, the relatively low-cost approach of the traditional banner ad, even when shoveled onto a busy page, is still effective. For those looking to focus on branding, however, there is an emerging class of advertising units through which to tell stories, and a less cluttered digital world in which to tell them.

Are projects like these effective in cleaning up the internet? Love/hate any of these formats in particular? Post your thoughts in our comment section.

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