Invisible Ads
16 Oct
MarketingVox reported on a growing problem facing marketers: Invisible ads. According to the site:
Publishers use so-called invisible ads created by computer codes. To marketers it appears that their ads are running on the actual website – but in fact they are on special sites created with deception in mind.”
I’ve placed 10 invisible ads on this site. Let me know how many of them you find. The person who finds the most wins a copy of the book Trust Agents. To get the book, you have to tell me what the ads are for. Good luck.
Also wanted to let everyone know that I’ve submitted my invisible ads for consideration for a number of ad industry awards. If I win, I might quit my day job and start an ad agency.
is that a viagra ad i see? ron! sinking to new lows. errr, i mean new highs?!
Paul: I’m just trying to raise the bar on blog quality.
When I graduated college, I thought I wanted to work in an ad agency. Not being terribly “creative”, I was destined for “account management”.
So I visit some agencies and find the vast majority of the work entry level people are doing is looking at “tear sheets” – you know, physical proof the advertising ran in this newspaper or that magazine.
Ford Motor was one account I spent time with. Hundreds of people with stacks of physical ads – national, local, co-op, all of it. I said no to the job. But it made sense; I mean, you want to know that the ad you paid for actually ran, right? Accountability to client?
And this is what is wrong with online Display advertising – nobody even knows if their ad ran, where it ran, etc. Partly because it would cost more to admin this stuff than the ads are worth. Cost more, on a relative value basis, than hundreds of people sitting around with physical tear sheets.
Until that changes, online Display will be a rounding error versus all advertising; you just can’t spend more on it than you can afford to intentionally flush down the toilet.