The Conception of Banner Ads

Today we have banner ads in our face everywhere on the web. Some of them are so well strategized that the follow us like the dog in the old Indian Hutch Ad. Today I thought of writing about the first ad banner to hit the WWW.

The first ad banner online was for promoting Sears products in the 1980’s, which was pioneered by Prodigy a company owned by IBM and Sears. Prodigy was also the first in online shopping, banking and stock trading as well.

Hotwired was the first to sell banner ads in the online market and they were the ones who coined the name ‘Banner Ad’. They were also the first to provide click through rate (CTR) reports to their clients. Research shows that the first banner ads received a CTR of 78%!

Boyce under the mentoring of Ken McCarthy introduced the concept of a clickable/trackable Ads. His vision of measuring the return on investment of individual ads would be the big push for online advertising led to the coining of this remarkable concept. The 21^st century online advertising model introduced by GoTo.com (later Overture, then Yahoo and mass marketed by Google’s AdWords program), still relies heavily on this tracking response rather than impression.

Who took the Mickey of who - Facebook teases Google

This week saw Mark Zuckerberg announce Facebook’s partnership with Skype and introducing a video calling feature on the Facebook social media platform.  The Announcement was made a week after Google launched its first social media site called Google plus.  

Mark stated with pride that they were using the best technology for video chatting available in the market and blending it with the best social media infrastructure which would result in cool new scenarios.

The platform allows 750 million Facebookers to use video chat functions to speak to their friends within the facebook interface. It also provides group video conferencing for up to ten people using an application called Hangouts.

With recent statistics which showed a loss of 100,000 British Facebookers in May and slump in the US Facebookers from 155.2 million to 149.4 million. This new feature will help facebook bounce back in the game stronger and showing the Google world Facebook’s here to stay.

Colgate uses Facebookers Smiley faces

Our toothpaste brand just got innovative, the recent campaign of Colgate is an interactive digital outdoor campaign which involves pictures of their facebook friends smiling in support of a children’s charity called Barnardos.

Social media and outdoor digital has been a buzz for quite some time but not all brands have tapped on these resourceful media opportunities.

The interactive nature of the campaign which involves Colgates loyal friends on facebook to directly interact with the brand helps build greater brand loyalty and long term relationships. Thus utilizing the social media platform to the till. 

In this crowded market place where we are bombarded with several brand campaigns, digital media tends to stand out because of its very nature of being more attractive than the rest. Hence adopting this technique will gain more customer attention than a print or billboard form of campaign. The only limit brands faces when adopting this option is the price costs.

With the changing advertising environment, it will be interesting to see how innovative brands can get when engaging with social media and digital outdoor.

Tweeting Adverts

Facebook and Twitter are the two social media titans of age. Brands by using these platforms of media can interact with their customers and build relationships on a personal level. We have witnessed brands promoting themselves and their events on Facebook. The breast cancer campaign which involved female facebookers writing the colour of their bra to promote the cause was one of many successful events.

Twitter now declares that they will be enrolling in for promotional ad campaigns on their site. We have witnessed the promoted tweets last year which worked similar to google’s advertising stream. It is now speculated that they are aiming to provide enhanced profile pages to brands and special tools that would allow brands to set pre-timed 140 character adverts. The adverts may appear in the users twitter stream, however the ads will be related to the user’s interests and profile.

The interesting and fascinating bit is to see how creative advertisers could get to promote their brand with just 140 characters. This would be a turning point in the social media industry, and something for all of us to look out for.