From Australia, a new study by iFocus, web users are ignoring online ads because they are annoying and bear little relationship to the content they are reading. An article on Bandt (reg. req.) points out very often online ads aren't creative enough to grab people's attention, also most of them are totally out of context and therefore unable to generate any interest in the reader.

Quite strong points against online ads. In my opinions, the critics actually don't affect only creative production but also media planning. Of course in order to serve content specific ads you need a proper infrastructure behind, but still we cannot only blame technology if ads don't deliver results. Once again it's about thinking of online advertising from a 360 perspective: creativity, technology, planning and last, but not least, it's about asking ourselves the fundamental question "what's the value for the final consumer"?

As far as Im concerned online banners serve little purpose other than for non qualitative mass market products, where sales are always measured against investment - figures. They take they soul away from marketing and communication. Leave advertising where it belongs, up in the billboards. Web is the world's only mass media one-on-one channel that enables you to forget ads and concentrate on true dialogue! on a global scale!

Posted by: migster at July 12, 2006 08:21 PM

This is exactly why advertiasing on myspace, right now, is a no go. It just won't wor, it's not context sensitive enough. Google can get context from scraping pages for meta data etc. MySpace 'space' are not built in a way that can be analysed for either 'meaning' or 'context'. It's the downside to having such a 'flexible' layout platform for people to publish on.

Posted by: Andrew Knott at July 17, 2006 05:50 PM