Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
The banner ad’s demise has been greatly exaggerated. Even though it’s responsible for a $15 billion industry in U.S. display advertising, the banner sometimes seems universally reviled. Nobody — not publishers, agencies or tech platforms — seems happy with Internet display advertising as it currently stands. Leaving aside the vast targeting industrial complex, there’s the existential question for banners: Would publishers use them now if they were starting from scratch? The answer is probably no, especially when you look at the birth of “native monetization” formats on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and the rest. They’re all turning their backs on “traditional” online display advertising. James Gross, a cofounder of content-curation tool Percolate, sees this as spelling the eventual demise of the display ad — or at very least its radical transformation.
This new world with no special box is a big shift from a brand perspective and these platforms will all force companies to act more human and interesting in nature. Creating, liking, Tumbling, pinning and publishing alongside others in a way similar to how we all use these channels today. Of course, this is not a new thought, but the interesting twist I would put on it is brands, in theory, have the advertising money to buy an audience much bigger than we can afford as people, or even publishers, on these channels.
Read Gross’ full article on AdAge. Follow him on Twitter @james_gross.
More in Media
Daily Mail says Google AI Overviews have killed click-throughs
Daily Mail’s clickthroughs drop 80–90% when Google AI Overviews appear, but traffic impact remains minimal due to strong direct traffic.
AP makes its archive AI-ready to tap the enterprise RAG boom
It’s a strategy that should secure its future as an information data repository for the AI era, and widen its customer base to include more enterprise clients by meeting their AI needs,
Inside Reuters’ agentic AI video experiment
Reuters is experimenting with using an AI agent to speed up its video production process, and hired its first AI TV producer.