The author of the Digiday article titled Don’t Fall For The ‘Invisible Ads’ Charade concedes that digital ads are sometimes invisible.
Despite that, he urges marketers to spend more money on digital ads on the ground that they’re no more invisible than print or TV ads.
Nice try.
I’m in general wary of double-negatives but the excuse “no more invisible” troubles me for many more reasons.
When brands buy digital media, they’re agreeing to pay a certain amount of $$$$$ for a certain number of impressions of their ads (under the popular CPM model). Invisible ads, where the publisher does not serve the ad at all, constitute zero impressions. Accordingly, they breach the contract between advertisers and publishers (or adtech middlemen). Advertisers can’t condone them. That they happen even in offline media is no excuse.
And, the thing is, advertisers don’t need to condone them since, as long as they’re served, digital ads are undoubtedly more “visible” than offline ads.
Let’s compare them with print ads for example.
A Bangalore-based fellow marketer had recently taken out a print ad in a newspaper in Chennai. For the uninitiated, Bangalore and Chennai are two metros located in South India. On the day the ad was scheduled to run, she sent out a tweet to her Chennai-based followers asking them to scan the ad and email it to her.
Even in this day and age of rising competition from digital ads, newspapers rarely bother to send a complimentary issue of the issue in which they’ve carried your ad.
As this anecdote shows, it’s not easy to verify whether your print ad has been published. In other words, their visibility is open to question.
Compared to that, digital ads are definitely more visible.
Now, let’s assume the author really meant “unseen” ads rather than “invisible” ads.
Unseen ads are ads that are served but not noticed by readers or viewers.
Fact is, digital ads do have an “unseen” problem. The aforementioned marketer averred that their print ads have always gotten them more response than their digital ones.
All along, digital marketers have claimed – rightly – that digital delivers more measurable results than traditional media. Now, when it gets a bit hot behind the ears, they can’t slink away behind weaknesses of traditional media.
Digital marketers pushing brands to increase the share of online advertising should find ways to solve the “unseen ads” problem. Traffic Channels and Ad Propensity are two key elements of the solution. More on this in a follow-on blog post. Watch this space!