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over skyscraper ads
Latest Big Thing but no evidence they work better
By Jeremy Schlosberg
Tall vertical web ads are all the rage these days.
Media buyers say they like them. More and more web sites are offering them. The leading internet advertising trade association, the Internet Advertising Bureau, recently endorsed them.
And there are more and more of these so-called skyscraper ads on view around the web.
During the fourth quarter of 2000, the number of vertical ads online, in a variety of sizes, increased some 70 percent, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
But there's a problem.
No one has any idea whether they’re any more effective than banner ads.
At least one industry analyst is positively flummoxed at how web sites and agencies alike are embracing an ad type that is more expensive than standard banner advertising and yet completely unproven.
"Everyone is working off the assumption that bigger is better," says Christopher Todd, a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst. "But from our perspective the jury is still out."
Todd says proof of the skyscraper's unsupported popularity can be found in a study released this week by the IAB, which recently endorsed skyscrapers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Surveying participants at the AAAA’s trade show earlier this month, the study reported that fully 93 percent of respondents believe the new ads are more effective.
And yet, as Todd points out, the study also reveals that only 26 percent of them had used any of the new, larger ad units yet.
How do these people know that the ads are more effective? Todd asks.
"Nobody has a case study of an advertiser who has used these larger ad sizes successfully," he says.
Additionally, 43 percent of the respondents in the survey said they believe the new ad units warrant higher CPMs.
But Todd argues that this makes little sense, given the industry’s widespread inability to offer any solid metrics for measuring or evaluating anything beyond click-through rates, says Todd.
"The problem is that there is no clear value proposition for what online advertising is supposed to accomplish," he says. "It varies from publisher to publisher and from agency to agency."
Without that, however, online advertising remains, for many advertisers and web sites, a complete shot in the dark compared to advertising on other media.
"If you buy a TV spot it’s going to create brand awareness in front of a mass audience," says Todd. "But with online advertising, there really is no value proposition. Any inherent value that can be attributed to branding is just not being tracked."
What’s worse, says Todd, is that the first case studies that are likely to emerge regarding the larger ad sizes online will probably focus on the higher click-through rates the ads may generate—which Todd feels will be completely beside the point.
"Initially, click rates and response rates are likely to jump. But over the course of time they’ll diminish and we’re back to where we started."
Todd sees the industry as still punch-drunk on clicks, a measure that arose for little reason beyond the fact that clicking was possible.
Certainly clicking on ads does not make design or context sense to users who, for example, are going onto a financial site to track their stocks or a food site to find a recipe or doing some other very focused web task.
Todd believes web advertising will be far better served when few people talk about clicks anymore.
"We’re going to have to unilaterally establish how online advertising is measured and what the value is. And we’re going to have to start focusing on brand impact and how it’s measured."
Because neither skyscraper ads nor any of the other new larger ad sizes on the web have anything going for them yet but a wing and prayer, Todd figures their popularity is based far more on what they aren’t than what they are.
What they aren’t are banner ads.
"The new ads are larger, they’re more obtrusive, and they’re something fresh," he says. "Banner advertising for the most part has become very stale. There’s not a lot of excitement about them anymore. In the current ad market, publishers are struggling to sell any kind of inventory."
-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor of new media
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