Display advertising in digital marketing

Display advertising (often known as banner advertising), which has a rich and interesting history and future. Display was one of the first forms of online marketing and has changed significantly over time. We look at those changes, at programmatic technology, types of display advertising and how to run the channel as part of your strategy.

you should understand the some of the risks and opportunities within the channel. You should understand the technology and how this relates to planning, targeting and managing a campaign. You should also understand measurement and the key terms used in the channel. This will help you to understand whether the channel is appropriate for you and, if so, how to fit it into your strategy.

Key terms

 Some of the key terms used in this chapter are:

 Pop-up: a display advert that pops up in front of what you are viewing.

 CPM: a cost-per-thousand price (CPM = ‘cost per mille’).

 Impression: when an advert is shown.

 Assets: the creative files used for the advert.

 Ad server: databases that help to co-ordinate and manage campaigns.

 Programmatic: a method of automated bidding.

 Retargeting: targeting a user again based on previous behaviours.

• Note: there are many more terms used in display advertising and I have tried to define these throughout the chapter.

There have, however, been three distinct stages to date that typify how display was planned and delivered:

1. Direct to site

Planning and buying used to be a painless and very straightforward affair. In the early commercial days of the internet, circa 1995, there were tens to hundreds of websites that made commercial sense for most blue-chip and large companies with strong advertising budgets to place adverts on. This made planning and execution relatively straightforward and a manageable task. Adverts were commonly coded straight into the website page or the creative assets sent directly to the publisher to deal with after a negotiation on price and duration. Frequently internet advertising space was given away gratis with print media bookings in the leading news and magazine titles.

2. Technology to streamline processes

The significant growth in online spend and traffic in the early 21st century was coupled with an explosion of websites fueled further by effectiveness of search engines. This presented the display industry with several issues to overcome. First was the planning issue of having a greater, more fragmented selection of sites to run campaigns across. Established bodies such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation helped to quantify traffic volumes to sites and new measurement companies such as Hit wise, now owned by Experian, addressed the lack of independent measurement and quantification of audience that website had.

In the earlier years media planners and buyers had an idea of where to place adverts and how many impressions were potentially available, but the next immediate problem was being certain they were actually receiving what they had bought, as no first-hand visibility of measurement was in place. This, coupled with the increased amount of work involved in booking media with each additional website, required a solution.

These two issues were resolved by one of the single most important components of display advertising – the ad server. The ad server is detailed in the following section but essentially it provided a solution to these two problems:

● Simplifying the workflow. Getting creative to publishers’ sites by holding a library of the different sizes and/or versions of the creative and delivering them to a publisher’s website when needed. This allows advertisers to more easily work with multiple publishers and vice versa.

● Providing an independent count of how many ad impressions had been delivered by publishers for auditing and dispute reconciliation.

This set the scene for modern display advertising.

3.  The rise of the ad network and the pitfalls of bad planning and bad quality

Now that there is sufficient technology in place to measure and track spend across multiple publishers, a new breed of advertising company has emerged to address the problem of the amount of work involved in making bookings. These newer and sometimes niche sites often have much lower traffic, but as they are often more specialized in their content they are as valuable as sites with much more traffic. If we picture all of the websites on the internet as being on a scale, we would find a few large websites with billions of available ad impressions per year at one end of the scale and millions of websites with only thousands of available impressions at the other end. Ad networks solved this problem for media buyers. They made the large volume of smaller sites accessible by grouping these sites into categories and delivering their clients’ adverts accordingly in order to get the best results. Early on they started to employ technology to match available impressions to adverts that were contextually relevant. The pioneer was Advertising.com, still going and owned by internet giant AOL.

Programmatic advertising

Programmatic media buying and its subset real-time bidding (RTB) has gone a long way to solving the problems that display has faced. Programmatic allows buyers to assess every single ad impression as it becomes available (as a user’s device is loading a web page or app) and make a decision as to whether this particular ad impression will make a positive contribution to the campaign as a whole. This can be decided based on factors that pertain to the environment that the ad is in. The advertiser can therefore assess the following factors to determine whether the opportunity is relevant:

● the website;

● the specific web page;

● the context of the article or video it surrounds;

● the location of the person looking at it;

● the time of the day, or day of the week;

● the computer operating system, mobile operating or type of device it is being viewed on;

● the propensity for that advert to be classed as ‘in view’ based on previous viewability rate of that ad’s placement;

● the type of content the ad is next to (is it dangerous, defamatory or potentially scandalous for the advertiser to place an ad here?).

Or the known attributes of the user who is behind the screen:

● Are they known to the advertiser?

● If CRM information has been synchronized with the buying platform (known as a demand-side platform, or DSP) whether they are a frequent customer, a high-value customer, a low-value customer or someone to whom it is not worth showing adverts.

● Whether they have started to make a purchase on the advertiser’s site and qualify to be shown a retargeting message.

● Their demographic, psychographic and behavioural qualities (see the section below on targeting display with data).

For example, if you are advertising televisions then the following scenarios could occur:

● Scenario A: your ad would appear on an iPhone but your website is not responsive.

Decision: the experience would be so poor that you may harm your image –do not show the ad.

● Scenario B: your ad would be viewed by a user who regularly visits your site but never buys.

Decision: he or she is not a serious customer, just a browser – do not show the ad.

● Scenario C: the user started to buy a TV last week but dropped out of the funnel.

Decision: a hot prospect – show a retargeting message to try to convert them on their attempted purchase.

All of these options are available to buyers across the whole of the campaign.

More importantly, the revelation for advertisers is that they now only have to buy the ad impressions they actually want. Buying targeted inventory has always enabled this to an extent but within that targeted inventory there may be people in the wrong age range, income range or gender for the advertiser’s product. In the case of RTB impressions there is also the option for the advertiser to submit a bid for that single impression so it can be bought at a price point that is beneficial to the campaign goals as well.

The difference between programmatic and RTB is that programmatic provides the ability to assess impressions on an individual basis and RTB adds an auction element to some of those impressions. Programmatic impressions that are not bought by RTB are often agreed media buys with publishers to access certain targeting options or preferential rates that are unique to that publisher. These arrangements are called private marketplaces (PMPs); however, the advertiser still has the right not to buy an impression if it does not fit the immediate requirements of the campaign. The RTB element, often referred to as open exchange buying, has little restriction to entry and the targeting listed above can be applied to both. Fundamentally it is programmatic that provides this addressability that is seen in display today, by combining multiple data and decision-making options across the whole of the media campaign. The result is extremely effective campaigns.

Key lessons

Viewability is a measure that is more detailed than an impression in that it covers not just that an add is shown but that the ad is shown in the viewable screen.