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Eric Meyer wrote:

 >control except in the aggregate, and there's very little support for
 >such a study among ad agencies, who seem to really dislike the words 
 >"image ads." 

Last issue of Vanity Fair I picked up was jam-packed with image ads. Same with many other magazines, a lot of TV and an increasing amount of bigger-budget newspaper advertising.

The online industry created that "click-through" yardstick and now uses it to beat itself up. Some of the messages in this thread have linked successful advertising with click-throughs. There isn't even a real good argument to explain why "banner" ads *have* to be linked to anything.

But now we've got this creature through which people are often trying to sell a product but, in effect, are really promoting a Web *site*. What's with that? (Today, I clicked on a banner ad about scanners on some ZDNet HTML mail and got  ZDNet's index of advertisers. What's with that? The banner on *that* page, however, told me that GTE "invented" secure networking.... Didn't have to click anything to get that message.)

If immediate response is the measure of success, then we'd have to consider most print and broadcast advertising worthless, along with almost all outdoor advertising.

Get the click-through monkey off the medium's back and evaluate banner advertising as Mr. Meyer suggests and I wouldn't be surprised to find that this form is at least as good as outdoor and general-interest newspapers at conveying a low-bandwidth concept, with the added bonus of permitting superb targeting justifying higher CPM.

And on the notion that many people browse with graphics turned off:

I'm not seeing that in the logs of any of the sites I monitor. People may occasionally click off to the next link before graphics fully display. They may even hit their browser Stop buttons before all images appear. (Both resulting in slight variations in the counts for images on the same page.) But I see that the number of page requests (from clients that aren't spiders or text-only browsers) matches the number of image requests closely enough to suggest that the number of people browsing with graphics turned off (as Suzanne L. says she does) is insignificant. Like, way down there in the same category as the number of people still using those text-only browsers.

(I'd be interested in hearing what the logs of others on this list say on this issue.)

On the surface, that would support Vin Crosby's suggestion that text links may encourage more click-throughs because many sites find them easier to place in context with content.


Regards,
SRB


 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 Steven Bonisteel                                      P. 613.531.4764
 Kingston, ON                                          F. 613.545.9148 
 steveb@typecast.com




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