• by Michelle , Saar Safra , March 21, 2005

Numerous articles have been written about how the "banner" is still, surprisingly enough, alive (and kicking). However, the fact that so many articles have been written about the good old "banner," demonstrates that there probably is a general consensus about the fact that banners will eventually disappear from our marketing landscape, due to Rich Media (RM), of course.

There are two main reasons why this cannot happen, and even if it does, it won't be anytime soon. The first and foremost reason is that in marketing, the magic words are 'the mix.' It is the secret ingredient and the key to successful marketing campaigns. Just as we have billboards and TV spots, we have banners and RM. The second reason is that RM is still emerging as a marketing vehicle. Eventually, I believe RM will reach today's level of banner usage, both in terms of media and marketing/advertisement percentages. After all, there is an abundance of media (both qualitative and quantitative) that is not used effectively or at all for RM advertisement purposes.

How do we bring RM advertising to the banner level? I am sure anyone who has executed RM campaigns found that it is difficult at best. Many of you may be thinking the solution to the difficulties RM presents is 'standards.' As much as I agree with that assumption, I believe standards are very hard to create, and even harder to promote in our current online market. Standards may be a good long-term solution, however, there are alternate solutions that might expedite the process and transform RM advertising over the Web sooner; I am talking about technology.

Unfortunately, there still is some disconnect between the marketing/advertising world and the Web-technologies world. Marketing is about executing creative ideas to close the gap between the product and the buyer. Technology is all about building the platform and the infrastructure enabling marketers to execute their plans. However, when it comes to RM, there are still too few technologies that adequately enable today's marketers to execute their plans.

Now let's bring this theoretical discussion down to the ground and understand what is wrong and how it can be fixed. When I speak of marketers, I bundle both the advertisers and publishers together. RM advertising service providers, like EyeBlaster, PointRoll, etc., have developed systems that provide scalable ways for marketers to create and launch RM campaigns. There are a lot of things to improve in those processes, but that is a subject for a different article. What is lacking in today's offerings is the ability to assure quality (QA) of RM executions, before they go live, in an automated, scalable, and straightforward manner. I am sure that what the lion's share of marketers want most today, is to take their newly created RM ads and throw them into a magic box where the outcome would be dichotomous -- it works a hundred percent, or not, and if not, what should be fixed?

When we create a banner, it works. When we create a RM ad, it also works, but after a lot of effort, time, expertise, and frustration. That is where technology comes into the picture. Technology should enable creative authors to have the maximum flexibility when creating RM creative materials, without having to consider which RM vendor will eventually serve the ad. Technology should enable an easy creation process of RM campaigns, and an easy process of serving them. Technology should enable a full scope of QA for RM ads, including the destination HTML page, and all automatically without any human intervention. Technology should enable RM ads to adhere to publisher specs and behave accordingly, in an automated manner. As long as the above processes are half-automated, in the best case, or fully manual in the worst case, RM will not deliver on its rich promise and we will continue hearing "long live the banner."