Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads

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But the banner—the lowly, punch-the-monkey, lower-my-bills piece of animated junk that delivers abysmal click-through rates—is the modern equivalent of direct mail, where a 1% response is considered a massive success. I've seen stats for a major project (I won't name names) where the agency proudly proclaimed it served 45 million impressions, resulting in 62,000 visits, for the client. That stinks.

"Search Death Spiral,"

Display or banner advertising basically just contributes to clutter and place emphasis on inflated page view numbers that no one believes because no one can agree on how to audit the numbers. That makes no one happy—not the poor junior ad designers who have to shoehorn genius into a slot 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall; not the traffickers who have to pore through Comscore to find the right demographic to serve them to; and not the client who knows return on investment is going to be a joke; and not the site that hosts the suckers and has to watch its gorgeous site design get nuked by the online equivalent of NASCAR after too many beers.

Can you tell I don't like banners?

O.K., but my mind changed last summer when I read an internal company metrics review with the weird correlation that when we ran banner ads our search campaigns performed better and when we didn't run banners our search yields declined. Hmmm. Then our agency told us the same thing: Run banners with search and both get an uplift. O.K. Lesson learned. Reserve some component of every campaign to run in parallel with search. Not exactly rocket science nor cause to proclaim the renaissance of display ads, but enough to get me looking at banner advertising in a new light.

Search is pretty saturated. Get into a bid war over a nonbrand term like "digital camera" and the cost per click gets ugly fast, as every digital camera manufacturer and retails tries to buy camera buyers' searches for "Best" or "Cheap Digital Camera." It's also dangerous to get into a "search death spiral," where you see search outperform other tactics such as e-mail, viral, and banner ads so you starve those other budgets and allocate more to search. Meanwhile, that elusive thing called "awareness" declines and the pipeline of prospective customers dries up.

Don't Count Yahoo Out

What Google just did—in its infinite wisdom and good M&A sense—is ensure a rebirth in banners. The space is distressed. Targeting impressions with behavioral tactics is still in its infancy, but interactive marketers are doing a deep dive of their campaigns and making every dollar they put in market fight for survival. The ad is going to perform if the advertiser's offer is right, the targeting is going to work if the ad server does its job, and the marketer's site metrics are going to show plainly whether the campaign performed. Those that perform get renewed and refreshed. Those that don't move on-fast.

Google obviously is looking at its own analytics and saw potential for a banner revival. By taking the industry standard tool—DoubleClick—they lock the interactive agencies and media buyers deeper into their clutches, and by waving rich media opportunities like video at marketers, they offer an integrated network that is easy to buy, easy to measure, and easy to manage.

Of course, it's too early to count Yahoo out. Disappointing earnings are not a measure of future potential, only past performance, and Yahoo has a compelling consumer brand awareness story to tell marketers. Yahoo is an entirely different animal from Google. It is a true content and service network. Google is search and applications. Yahoo is search and content and applications. Sure, Yahoo media czar Lloyd Braun wasn't able to turn it into an interactive TV network, and lost his job in December, 2006. Still, the notion of a global buy on a network with monster page views and great insights into their audience makes a rich media buy on Yahoo, combined with search and banner, attractive to a marketer.

But Google is virtually everywhere now. And the DoubleClick deal takes it even further.

Churbuck is vice-president of global Web marketing at Lenovo. He is formerly a technology reporter at Forbes and the founding editor of Forbes.com.