• by Jaffer Ali , April 6, 2004

The hottest space in online advertising is search engine marketing. Google is about to go public and have a market capitalization that will be the envy of just about all online media companies this side of Pluto.

What Google, Industry Brains, Yahoo!'s Overture, and other search engine vehicles have is a combination of two powerful methodologies: text and context. By placing text ads in contextual settings, we may be onto the best "new" thing around. A picture may be "worth" a thousand words, but text is king when it comes to response.

Why?

The eye candy that most advertising agencies like to develop is a great way to develop creative fees, but it generally doesn't perform as well when it comes to click-through rates. And advertisers are beginning to learn the direct marketing creed that "not all clicks are created equally." Test after test from our e-commerce division proves to us that clicks originating from text advertisements convert anywhere between 5 to 10 times better than graphics-heavy advertisements.

Penn Media is agnostic as to the image-text debate. In actuality, we would be much more successful selling advertising inside HTML newsletters with wonderful graphics than simple, low-tech text because advertising agencies would love to create the next great graphical ad to be placed inside millions of double opt-in publications. But we have converted all of our publications exclusively to text-based newsletters.

Once again, why?

We are not masochists, but realists. We believe that the numbers do not lie. Google, Yahoo!'s Overture, and the other successful search engine media outlets have finally discovered what we have been preaching for years--text converts. We use only text ads inside text newsletters (or e-zines) and have developed 44 different context channels. These channels range from humor and entertainment to technology and investment channels.

So what is behind this counter-intuitive text-based revolution? It appears low tech, and looks a lot like emails you get from friends and family. But that is precisely the point. Since their inception, we have practically been trained to ignore banners and graphic images on websites. But we have been trained from youth to read information.

Whether this information is email from a friend, text offering information that you subscribed to, or text on a page where you have searched for information on asteroids or hemorrhoids, ads in this format are more likely to be read and therefore people click with purpose after reading.

Relevance and Context

Simple text, when placed in the right environment will outperform eye-candy. What is the right environment? Advertising that is relevant to the content. For example Penn Media's email network has forty-four "context channels" in which advertising can be placed. These are highly specific categories of text newsletters that advertisers can place their 75-word text advertisements.

We match the context they wish to be in with their message. The more these match, the more effective the advertising. Google, Yahoo!'s Overture, and the rest of the search engines run off "key words" or "key phrases" to match advertising with context. The theory behind text newsletter advertising and search engine advertising is essentially the same.

But the future is clear. The more intelligent search engine algorithms get, the more advertisers will learn that context and relevance trump all other factors in advertising. Text will assume an even higher degree of acceptance in the online advertising industry because it can be changed quickly. Text has come of age.

Jaffer Ali is the founder and chief strategic officer of Penn Media, the largest email newsletter network. Since 1998, Penn has served more than 500 billion text ad impressions.