UKNM: Mo' Banner Blues

[Sajid Mohammed]

Ray Taylor was absolutely on the money when he asserted that banners

are a ludicrously expensive way of building traffic. Take this real

world case study:


Mr. X has a client who want to shift 30,000 units of Brand Y online.

Mr X. researches/punts and concludes that only 1% on visitors to a

site will buy online (which is in all fairness realistic). He also

thinks that the banner creative will get 2% clickthrough rate. So...


30,000 buyers means

3,000,000 visitors means

150,000,000 banner deliveries


Assume a CPM of �20 and you're talking a whopping �300,000 if my brain

is working properly. Which is cheap compared to TV, I know...but even

Tom Loosemore can't persuade his clients easily of the virtues of

spending a few grand on banners.


Brand is all well and good - but brand recall is no guarantee that the

advertising is effective. I have strong brand recall for Tampax,

Stannah Stairlifts & Woman magazine - doesn't mean I'm necessarily

going to buy them. Advertising effectiveness is hard to judge

accurately. The old adage about not knowing *which* 10% of advertising

is effective still holds true. Brand advertising IMHO is really a

great way for agencies to get more money from the client ("Your

mindshare amongst CEOs & CTOs is down 17% in Q3...we must place more

brand!")


The future is probably the intertwining of advertising and editorial.

I got a case study from Pat Connolly at AEP which looked at a custom

content section on This Is London that was created for IBM. This

managed to achieve a 7% banner clickthrough and no doubt had

additional knock-on benefits.


Also, better tracking would help i.e. you may see a banner, not

clickthough and then two weeks later decide that you really do need an

ethernet hub for your kitchen and go off to visit Inmac or similar.

But then there are the inevitable issues around privacy and data

protection. But these issues will have to be addressed sooner or

later, especially if the commercial exploitation of the Internet is to

continue apace.


I'm off to buy some Sta-Prest clothes now - dontchajustlove Flat Eric?



Sajid Mohammed

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