Internet display advertising is going the way of the white tennis ball, according to a webinar I kind of heard and sort of watched yesterday. The white tennis ball analogy is mine, of course, since the presenter started off by saying banner ads had been around “forever.”
Yes, those hotel ads that appear on your home page a minute after you close out of Trip Advisor are gonna be old hat by 2019, according to our presenter, who asserted that social media advertising, which now collects just 20% of digital ad dollars, will be taking home 79% of the pie in three more years.
Why?
User ambiguity.
Banner advertising is often targeted inaccurately. First of all—this is kind of creepy—up to 37% of web impressions aren’t even people, which translates to as much as $7.2 billion in wasted ad bucks in 2016.
Marketing Manager Rashida Boyd of Unified Enterprises Corp sourced in 3-point type and marked as confidential each one of these statistics on the provided PDF handout. Proprietary studies must always be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m convinced at least she wasn’t making this stuff up.
So even playing along with that 37% stat, odds are still in ad spenders’ favor that an actual organism will see their pop-ups. But what if it’s served up to the wrong human? People in households share devices. Those strappy sandals you just eyed could get pitched to your husband while you’re in the bathroom and he picks up the tablet to check the sports scores.
Rashida wasn’t so indelicate as to mention the bathroom, I mention it because we took this tack to sell print against broadcast. That soft-drink spot is playing to an empty room, we used to say. Everybody’s in the bathroom during commercial breaks, reading the paper.
So where should digital budgets be heavied up? Isn’t it obvious?
Social-identity based marketing.
Via social, marketers can find out you logged onto Facebook at 7:30A.M, checked LinkedIn at 9, visited a new food truck at 1PM (you Instagrammed a picture of your lunch) and finally kicked your shoes off and Tweeted in front of the TV that night. Unified Enterprises calls this “tracking the customer journey.” George Orwell called it by a different name.
“That’s really creepy,” I typed into the chat feed, but none of my fellow webinees answered. They were probably in the bathroom.
I appreciated getting all that free research from an informed and talented presenter, but I left the session reflecting on my years in print. “Household members sharing devices” sounded fine to me when we called it “pass-along readership.” Ads falling into the wrong hands? Not bloody likely. Have you ever wrestled from your grandchild the latest issue of The Atlantic?
And those with privacy concerns should consider this: that copy of USA Today you just picked up off a chair at gate 12B in Terminal 1 has not the slightest clue you were just reading strain reviews on Leafly, and it’s never gonna tell!