The Spam Mangled
Banner
By Samuel John
Photo Credit: Provided by author
Samuel John has an impressive pedigree in the
world of digital marketing with companies like JWT
and Google in his career portfolio. He has just
stepped down as Director of Operations (Brand)
for the North American Market at InMobi and
assumed his new role as Head of Operations at
GreedyGame, a new mobile marketing start-up that
focuses on native advertising.
In the beginning there was the banner ad, with
Global Network Navigator selling the very first
clickable web ad in 1993. A year later, on October
27, 1994, hotwired.com launched its iconic banner
ad campaign for AT&T, which many consider the
very first, with its legendary 44% click-throughrate. Such a number in today’s world would elicit
less excitement and more engineers investigating
what is almost certainly fraudulent clicks or broken
tracking or pretty much anything other than the
possibility of 44% of users clicking on the banner
after seeing the ad.
In 2015, the average click-through-rate across
platforms on banner ads sat around 0.1% (source:
Google ‘Display Benchmarks Tool’). The slightly
more enticing ‘Rich media’ banners (standard
banners that lead to engagement focused content)
averaged around 0.2% for the same time period.
So how did this ad format slowly but steadily over
a period of 20 years go from a pioneering format
that engaged nearly half the users that saw it, to a
format that most of us are now familiar with as an
annoyance on the mobile screen?
Banner ad for a sporting news application
(source:http://blog.greedygame.com/2015/08/09/5-reasons-why-nativeads-in-mobile-games-are-important-for-publishers)
“If you look at the heritage of the best advertising you can make
stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don’t think
Don Draper would have loved banner ads.”
- Jonah Peretti
10
AGSM