Hello everyone….
I recently visited ClickZ and found an article that interested me entitled “Advertiser Directories: The Key to Successful Online Ads”
Now let me start off by being completely honest here… Online Advertising is an area that I am just getting my feet wet in and as such some of the concepts and terminology are a bit alien to me.
Having said that, somewhere around paragraph 10 the “light went on” and I went back and re-read the whole article. The basic idea was to take the concept of Advertiser Directories which are typically found in magazines, usually in the latter portion of the magazine there is an area which list advertisers and which keeps the advertising in the “main” portion of the mag to a minimum thereby allowing the reader to enjoy the content much more, and apply the idea to online advertising.
One of the ideas that was provided was the Marketing Web Site set up by Architectural Digest, which features not only straight forward online advertising, by mini articles which link to advertisers sites as well as contest and sweepstakes.
At first blush I think that this is a tremendous idea. Personally I am not a big fan of the current “crop” of online advertising offerings which seem, at least to these eyes, to be focused more on “glitz, animation and annoyance” then anything truly informative. Also, I had to chuckle when I read the article authors comment:
“If only I had a dollar for every time I caught a glimpse of an interesting banner just as I was clicking off a page, to search for it in vain (curse tight frequency caps). I can only imagine consumers are doing the same.”
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a banner ad that I was actually INTERESTED in, just as I was clicking off the page only to sigh and resign myself to the knowledge that it would take an eternity to go back and rapid click in the hopes of finding that same ad again.
While I haven’t sat down and thought through all of the ramifications of online advertiser directories, it just seems to me setting up a directory system where you have access to all of the advertisers that a particular site or company wants to promote and that would be topical to the site would be incredibly well received.
I can imagine a situation where you would have a site that is lighter in advertising content and heavier on topical content but included links (via the banners etc) to the Advertisers Directory portion of the site (or a separate site in the case of the AD example) where visitors could view all of the adverts together. Not only would that be more convenient for the visitor, but advertisers would know that, when a visitor clicks on the directory link, they are in the mindset of wanting information on a product, in other words…. they are there to buy a product or service rather than trying to find the clickable area on the latest popup banner that will CLOSE the window!
Take care everyone,
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