Leon Marshall

January 23, 2001

Speech: Advertising with Electronic Banners

Advertising has taken on new heights in the electronic marketing trend today. One of the most famous trends are the ad banners that are shown on Web Pages, Email Programs and Free Internet Service Providers.

A banner ad is the graphic image of the client's message that is generated on the screen of the person's computer who is visiting the website page or program that contains the graphic file and related controlling HTML code for that message. The code attached to that banner directs the user to the product’s website where then the user can get more information about the product and buy it. It's called an ad "banner" because the original online advertisements were always in the shape of a banner, usually at the top of a page. Nowadays, there are many sizes of online ad "banners”. The standard size for an ad banner set by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is 6 inches wide by 1 inch high. It’s basically another way to market items just as companies do on TV, Radio, Telephone, etc. Banner advertising is very popular with the increasing use of online shopping / e-commerce, since customers can shop at a click of their mouse, which in turn meets more demand for advertisements to these products offered on the web. Online banner and other advertising spending marked around 6.1 billion at the end of 2000, a significant rise from the 4.6 billion in 1999.

Free Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are Internet providers that give free dialup modem access to browse on the Internet, in exchange for an advertisement banner on your screen. Mainly, they rely on “target marketing” to produce advertisements that attract customers, therefore each click that customer makes on the banner will make money for that ISP. This target marketing is achieved by long term questioning of the customer about his financial status, marital status, likes and/or dislikes, and pretty much anything else that would be any key personal information to the company. They take this information and provide it to marketers so that banners that attract to their personal preferences can be shown on the screen. When a customer or user clicks on that banner in the window, it either marks a “hit” on the server in which hits are counted for how much the company makes off the banner, or advertisers can pay a flat monthly or yearly fee to have their banners placed on the service. Net Zero is probably one of the popular Free Internet service providers.

Email software, such as Juno and Eudora Sponsored Edition are offering email clients but with the exception of advertisement banners. Juno offers a service of free email with dialup access, but also uses target marketing to gain personal information. This information is sent to marketers, which in turn provide only the ad banners that will relate to that person’s interests. Eudora Sponsored Edition is another email client that has no dialup access but offers general and seasonal advertisement instead of targeting to one’s interests.

Web Sites offer similar advertising such as banners on their pages. It is probably the most famous of ad banner advertising, since webmasters and companies want to “sell” their site to the public. By providing advertising for hot products they attract more people to the site as well as make money to support the site’s progress. Also, another technique marketers are using is Pay-Per-Action advertising, where no payment is given to the affiliate site carrying the advertisement until a sale is made on that product. Generally, a percentage out of the sale will go towards paying the website to offer advertisement purposes. This allows the website to make some money from another company, but the company saves money by not paying for the website’s services until a sale is made. Another minor banner advertising service offered by several companies are called Banner Exchanges, in which sites will exchange information about their inventory with other sites with the same goal. This allows sites to gain hits from others and provides a way of advertising that is free of charge.

All in all, no matter where you turn there will always be a web company using banner advertising to gain some profit for their services. Many dot-com companies have tried and failed, but the successful have continued quickly to attract more and more customers by free services and/or popular websites in tune to targeting interests and needs.