I remember when I realized I'd become immune to banner ads.<p>I had to sign up for a college related thing on a website once and I just could not see that sign up button. They made it a flashing advertisement sized block right above another article, with big letters "SIGN UP HERE". A friend sent me the link and I literally spent 5 minutes trying to find it in navigation bars and other links in the article. My friend had to send me a screenshot of his screen with a big red arrow pointing to the sign up block before I noticed it. I now use Adblock but for the times that it doesn't work, my mental Adblock seems to always help me out as well ( Especially for those sneaky ads mixed in between real articles ).
I found it amusing that an article on this topic has a newsletter signup dialog appear immediately upon scrolling down. I'm sure the effectiveness of such a technique follows the same kind of curve as the other techniques discussed in the article.
"When HotWired showed banner ads for the first time in history, people clicked just to check out the experience. Same for being the first web product to email people invites to a website – it works for a while, until your customers get used to the effect, and start ignoring it."<p>Well, duh, people tend to avoid unrewarding experiences. And advertisement is basically the pursuit of pushing unrewarding experiences onto people. Of course once they are onto you they won't fall for the tricks again. People have just become much, much better at filtering now (both mentally and digitally).
I doubt we will see the sidebar ads disappear very soon though. Even though our eyes do not focus on the ad we are still aware that the ad is there. There are many studies concerning subliminal media being successful. In fact Derren Brown made a career out of it.
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/6232801/Subliminal-advertising-really-does-work-claim-scientists.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/6232801...</a>
All advertising today is arbitrage by definition -leveraging a discrepancy between the value of those eyeballs and the cost to attract them. All arbitrage will eventually be corrected by the market.<p>This is why there is such a strong push to content marketing, which is essentially the brands becoming media companies.<p>This is also why native ad units (not just advertorials but any ad unit that Is the atomic consumption unit of the site like news feed ads, AdWords ads, etc...) Work much better than display, because they are value add and are essentially the flip side of content marketing.<p>I think the future, sustainable strategies will be user experiences that naturally progress into buying. (I.e. a content site selling premium content or hosting a conference or a Saas product using a freemium model.)<p>Maybe ads are called ads because they should be adding value.
There's a bunch of issues with this post. He points out AT&T's one ad had a 78% CTR, and then labels HotWired's entire site CTR at 78% CTR (he assumes that they didn't have other ads after ATT and that all their ads have a 78% CTR)<p>And then he compares it to the FB CTR of 0.05%<p>0.05% is not accurate. It's likely what you'll hit if you have no idea what you're doing, or just don't care because you're an agency advertising a clueless big brand. But it's not that hard to hit a 1-3% CTR on FB now -- especially with the newsfeed ads. Even using standard IAB display it's not too difficult to hit a 1-2% CTR.<p>Last, the 78% CTR is suspect. I wouldn't just believe it blindly. It does make sense that it would be high (I.e. 20-30%) given that people weren't used to banner ads at the time. Additionally, it's a Trick to Click ad that would never be Approved today. And I've even tried out of curiosity, and it was immediately slapped by reviewers ("I bet you can't click your mouse right here")