What If You Ran an Ad, and Nobody Saw It?

Recent research confirms something that we've suspected for a long time. Banner ads don't work. In an article from the New York Times Jacob Nielsen, the web usability guru, said, “For the longest time, the web has been in collective denial of this phenomenon."

Nielsen points out that, surprisingly, paid search ads are effective. “We thought we’d find [paid search] box blindness the way we did banner blindness, but that’s not the case. Users are interested in search ads and actually look at them.”

Other studies have indicated that ads inserted in video are effective. Possibly because we are accustomed to advertising in video. More likely is the fact that we have to actually select a video and are anticipating the content to follow.

Video ads produced, edited and then posted to the web, huh? Now that's something we're good at!


~George