I have come to realize that advertising on the web is a genetic dead end. Before you start raising your hands, this is not going to be a rant against online advertising or even an analysis as to why online ads are on the outs. Web advertising is as vibrant and growing as anything online, but I am sure that for a time, so was the Saber-Toothed Tiger.

The real problem with advertising is that we have all grown immune to it. Despite what the recent upsurge in Facebook application ads might tell you. Even as a publisher, I am always amazed that anyone clicks on ads at all. It seems more an oddity of statistics than real human beings actually caring about the products being sold in our collective sidebars.

Why don’t we click on ads, well, the issue might not be as complex as some would make it out to be.

Our Aversion To Advertising

It’s Stale. The biggest reason that people don’t click on banner ads is that they all look the same. Every advertiser known to man seems to believe that the best way to design a banner is to make it as obnoxious as humanly possible. This usually involves some kind of blinking text, flash embed or auto-playing sound. While likely to draw attention to the ad unit, I would venture to guess that this sort of shilling only serves to detract people from clicking through.

A big reason is that if I see a terrifying ad, I general assume that site attached to it will be equally terrifying.

Trickery. More endemic than the lack of design in online advertising is the tendency for advertisers to try to trick users into clicking. I would like to see some conversion statistics on users who were fooled into clicking on an ad. My theory is that they are obscenely low. More problematic than the fact that most users are smart enough not to be tricked is the fact that unscrupulous advertisers have driven users to install software to block out advertising all together.

Why worry about sinking into some Adsense minefield when you can rest easy by blocking the entire thing. Publishers rant and rave about users “eating their bandwidth” by not clicking on ads. Maybe they should consider that the reason these scripts are installed at all is because users want to retain control over what they view, something that some advertisers would love to take care of them.

Click-Thru As A Proxy For Engagement. It astounds me that click-thru is still seen as the be all and end all of user engagement. People click on links out of curiosity, not brand loyalty. All that click-thru implies is that you have managed to expose a user to a concept. What the user does after that exposure is the real value of the ad. If I click on an ad, hate it and then immediately leave. Where was the value in the advertisement?

The Solution

The solution to this issue, I feel, is to look at advertisement as another form of content. You want to get users to engage with your advertisement the same way they do with their favorite YouTube video. Instead of tricking them to click on some silly banner, why not set up a marketplace where publishers can syndicate your “advertainment” for their sites?

I think the best example of this type of thinking are the movie trailers that Google occasionally pushes. These ads are extremely high quality and they provide content that a user might look for on their own (i.e. trailers). The result is a highly engaging ad that attracts instead of repulsing users. Not only that but the trailer makes its point without forcing the click thru. You are delivering your information without annoying your audience.

The point is that advertising must become more interesting if it will ever regain the place it has lost in the hearts of consumers. Focusing only on driving clicks is making advertisers lose sight of what they should be focusing on, converting those clicks into customers. Instead of strictly playing the numbers game, it might be time for big brands to realize that they have the power to regain a foothold in the market by designing online ads that give users a reason to lift their ad blinders.

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