• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 28, 2010

Consumers say they ignore static banner ads, and don't click on them, but eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman cites stats from a Microsoft Atlas study that suggest the static strips running across the tops of Web pages still influence purchase decisions.

Successful campaigns require a variety of tools and it appears that banner ads have begun to take on the dubious title of "staple." Hallerman, who has been researching a report about online brand marketing, calls banner ads "somewhat subliminal" because banner ads appear to affect consumers whether they realize it or not.

"The positive, yet not always easy-to-measure effects and the increasingly lower cost and availability of banners give campaigns a steady foundation," says Hallerman. "Banners help to fill in the campaign."

Expect the report to look at spending trends because where companies actually allocate budgets means more than any talk their executives say in front of conference podiums and public events. Hallerman also plans to analyze consumer reactions to banner ads and alternative ways of finding conversions, as well as measurement strategies, and some of the miss-measurement methods.

Banner ads complement search advertising, too. In 2010, the nearly $12.4 billion that companies will spend on search advertising accounts for about 45% more than what they will spend on all three display ad formats -- banners, video and rich media -- combined.

Citing research from an unnamed source, Hallerman says about 18% of consumers searched for the brand's products or services after being exposed to a banner ad. Success from banner ads, however, depends on the company, the industry, the product and the stage in which the brand tries to hit the consumer. How brands rely on targeting also plays a role.

As marketers look to engage consumers -- and to gain better measurement and targeting tactics than what's available with most other media -- they will continue to increase budgets for Internet ads of all kinds, cannibalizing newspapers, magazines and other traditional media spend. The Internet's share of total media ad spending will rise from about 15% in 2010 to more than 20% in 2014.

A large part of the growth will come from video, even in banner ads. Spending for online video advertising will make the format the second-biggest recipient of new ad dollars from 2010 to 2014, according to the eMarketer report "U.S. Ad Spending: How Big Is the Bounceback?" Of the more than $13.6 billion incremental dollars that will flow into online advertising during the next five years, 33% will come from video ads, compared with 44.5% from search.

However, don't expect the online video boom to become as hot as some hype would suggest, according to the report. Annual spending growth rates should hit between 30% and 40%, as brand marketers looking for greater targeting shift a portion of their TV budgets onto the Web.

As search attracts more dollars and video gets more growth, banner ads will increasingly become filler for those two ad formats, as well as for other elements of advertising campaigns. And as the market share for banner ads continues to decline -- even in 2014, when spending on banners will make up 20.3% of all the ads on the Internet -- the format will remain second to search.

Despite the ongoing commoditization of banner advertising, a result of the plethora of ad networks and the growth in the number of Web sites and pages with ad inventory, the total share of online ad spend for banners will stand at more than 20% from 2009 through 2014, according to Hallerman. It could turn the medium into a low-cost staple for online ad campaigns.