UKNM: Standard Banner Sizes

[Tom Hukins]

My last post on this topic wandered away from the main point, as James

Tarin and Ben Thompson have pointed out. However, I'm still not convinced

that standard banner sizes are necessary, and I'll try one last time to

explain myself clearly, without wandering away from my main point.


Those who sell advertising space are competing amongst each other for

revenue from those who buy advertising space. Buyers will buy the

advertising space which they expect to fulfil the objective of the campaign

they are buying for at the least cost.


It is highly unlikely that the most effective advertising creative can be

constrained to a small group of standard rectangular sizes. If adverts

could be created in different shapes and sizes, I expect they would perform

better.


Clearly, there are costs associated with creating and customising ad

creative. It would be highly undesirable if we returned to the stage where

different sellers had their own standard sizes which advertisers were

forced to adhere to. This would force advertisers to incur tremendous costs

customising their creative. I am not advocating a return to this situation.


What I am suggesting is that host sites are more flexible with regard to

the advertising they allow. This means that it should be possible for an

advertiser to combine a 40x800 pixel banner running along the side of a

page with a triangular banner at the bottom of the same page.


Technically, it should be possible for host sites to allow such

flexibility. Designers who are treating the Web like yet another graphic

design medium would have problems with this, but good designers would be

able to design pages which allow the incorporation of a wide variety of

advertising.


So, why isn't this happening?


Host sites aren't flexible enough. Consider the example of the 40x800 and

triangle banners I used earlier. I'm fairly sure that if you phoned up a

selection of Web advertising sellers next week asking to run a campaign

like this they'd laugh at you. Part of the reason for this is that nobody

does it, so sellers don't expect it. Ben Thompson summed up what I expect

would be the main objection in his last post:


>Standardisation means cheapness. If I have to redesign a page for

>every advert displayed I would not have time to do any work (in fact I would

>have to create 60,000+ pages a day by hand).


When Web designers create their pages they do not take into consideration

how they can incorporate a wide variety of advertising into that page. This

is trivial to do. Create a template for the page and process that template

according to the advert(s) being displayed every time the page is

requested. Anyone who really understands HTML and has a rough idea of how

to use Perl, Visual Basic, TCL, or any other programming language can do

this easily. As most sites have a house style applied to all pages, such a

template would only need to be created once, after the site owner has

determined how flexible the site's advertising policy should be.


Sure, there will be a cost to host sites of varying their design to suit

different types of advertising, but the extent to which they experiment is

up to them. Successful host sites will increase their revenue by permitting

a greater range of advertising, without destroying the coherence of their

site.


The Web isn't a WYSIWYG medium. Competent designers are aware of this;

their sites already have the flexibility to adapt to a number of display

environments.


Ad designers won't experiment with their creative until they know a

significant number of host sites will accept non-standard ads. Before

de-standardisation can occur, there will have to be a critical mass of host

sites willing to accept non-standard ads. Unless a group of major sites

choose to de-standardise, it is unlikely there will be any move away from

the status quo.


Mat Morrison states:

>Standardisation allows media-owners/audience centres to price and sell 

>comparable media.


This statement assumes that we are dealing with comparable media. It isn't

easy to group impressions into groups of comparable media. The same ad will

have different effects on different pages. The same ad will have different

effects on different people.


There isn't even just one standard ad size. 468x60 is, I suspect, the most

frequently purchased, but there are others. The industry seems to cope well

enough with this.


Furthermore, traditional media have coped with this problem. Flicking

through the main section of Wednesday's "The Times" I counted

advertisements of ten different sizes. Some were in colour: some were in

black and white. Some covered less than one eighth of a page: one covered

two pages. In addition, the Personal Column contained several small ads,

which I didn't count. There were supplements for business and sport,

computing and jobs. These sections also contained different sized adverts

placed in different locations.


It is already difficult enough to estimate the value of different

advertising creative. The introduction of non-standard sized ads won't make

this noticeably more difficult.


Test campaigns are a far better solution to any comparability problem than

standardisation. Test campaigns can be used just as well to estimate value

for banners of any size.


De-standardisation would make Web advertising more effective for all involved.


Anyway, I think I've made my point now, so I won't post on this topic any

more (unless anything especially interesting pops up) and risk tempting the

moderator to reject my posts. :)


Regards,

Tom


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