• by August 28, 2000

The majority of all online ad banners have short life spans, running on average three weeks or less, according to a new report released today by AdRelevance, a division of Media Metrix. With few advertisers running large online campaigns, an overwhelming majority of advertisers have less than a 0.01% share of all online advertising impressions.

AdRelevance found that although most banner ads run for three or fewer weeks, the average banner runs for five and a half weeks. The automotive industry schedules online ads to run the longest, an average of 7.8 weeks. This is almost twice as long as the average banner duration for a hardware and electronics ad, which typically lasts 4.1 weeks. The consumer goods industry embraces the most targeted ad approaches, with only 40% of online impressions appearing on broad reach sites like portals, search engines and community destinations.

At the other end of the spectrum, Web media, financial services and travel advertisers appear to be targeting the least, running an overwhelming majority of ad impressions on broad reach sites. While the average campaign in the second quarter weighed in at 7,265,000 impressions, more than half of all advertisers ran campaigns with less than 44,000 impressions. A campaign this small would only garner a 0.0003% share of voice on a major portal like Yahoo!.

"Shorter campaigns are not necessarily better campaigns," said Charlie Buchwalter, VP of media research at AdRelevance. "Although shorter campaigns may concentrate banner impressions, thereby increasing the share of voice and share of market for an advertiser, only longer campaigns can bring about a change in consumer attitudes and behavior." The AdRelevance Intelligence Report also analyzes ad impression distribution strategies for campaigns running four, eight and 12 weeks - revealing that banner impressions, on average, are heavier in the beginning of four and 12 week campaigns. On the other hand, campaigns running eight weeks tend to feature higher impression levels in the middle. Impressions for the average banner in an eight week campaign peaked in the fifth week.