By Kathryn Koegel -

All of the conflicting reports about display advertising’s future make me think of the Monty Python bit where formidable knight is attacked and loses each limb but continues to fight with blood spurting as each appendage goes. When reduced to a torso stump, he continues his retort: “Come back, I’ll bite your knees off.”

I think of online display as hacked to bits by the proliferation of ad networks, search, inventory glut, format and measurement challenges.  As an industry we’ve lost the spirit of the knight and have heaped what is essentially an economic downturn onto display ads. 

Too many have declared that display just doesn’t work – or they don’t know what works. We’re even back to talking about paying for content online, while only three publications seem to have successfully pulled that off.  The IAB has decided to attack the problem by focusing on digital creative, and the OPA is declaring that new formats exclusive to their members will help improve the situation.

A little historical perspective is in order.  Display advertising has been in a state of dramatic change – just as the Internet has – ever since that first banner was run on Hotwired.  It had high click-through rates because it was novel and then as those rates for standard banners declined, the IAB introduced new standard sizes that have indeed helped the cause.

What was important? They were larger and they were standard – so agencies did not have to spend money and time re-sizing creative. Along with various rich media technologies, we did see an increase in direct response rates and we even took the important step of looking at view through – or a method that accounted for the impact of exposure rather than just direct response.

We have to remember that display was declared dead in 2002 and yet DoubleClick – which at the time was diversifying into a CRM company – sold off all but its ad serving and reporting solutions and subsequently managed to sell itself to Google for $3.1 billion in 2007. Would Google bought them if they had any sense that display would trickle off to nowhere? 

What else happened in 2002? We had a glut of inventory – all those dot-com brands which accounted for huge volumes of ads dropped out – while usage continued to grow.  Publishers were desperate and began to take the dreaded, guaranteed-to-piss-off consumers “pop ups” and “pop-unders.”  It was a world littered with the X-10 spy camera. And yet, despite how sad that period was, we did survive.

By the time I worked on a report with Nielsen and DoubleClick at the beginning of 2004 on response, usage and spending, there was a whole new story: Fortune 500 advertisers had discovered the medium, and began to put significant budget toward online display. One of the surprises of that research was that Estee Lauder was one of the top display spenders of 2003 – we somehow overlooked the fact that the cosmetics behemoth had adopted a direct sales plan through Gloss.com.

What do we need now? More comprehensive, non-partisan reporting and analysis of what is actually going on in the display market.  Marketers want competitive intelligence and simple information about what works – and what doesn’t. There is no need to sell the medium and especially no need to argue about the minutia of panel and server methodology. If we all jump on the display dogpile, we’re giving them another excuse to keep out. (See this panel at the recent AAAAs as an example of how to scare marketers from using the medium).

So who has all the data? The usual suspects and individually they have been doing some great work: Nielsen has shown the impact of clutter on performance – a simple way the industry can improve effectiveness and give the user a better experience as well.  They also have ad spend data both cross media and for online – we need category by category reports of who is spending what where.

Google is sitting on an amazing pile of data – the basis of the reports that I used to produce there throughout the last recession and recovery. We want to know gainers and losers in sizes and formats, what the multiple of click through to view through is, how volume impacts response. Comscore now has the ability to tell us across advertisers action post impression – not click.  Dynamic Logic is doing extensive work into effectiveness of the varying video formats and has normative data for branding impact.  Atlas is working on attribution models for online display. 

They are all participants in a panel at the next DPAC conference called the “State of Digital Display: A Non Partisan Approach to What is Going on in the Market.”  (There will also be a whitepaper that is a compellation and analysis of all data contributed available after the conference).

We need a benchmark at this one of the darkest hours for online advertising (at least in the minds of the trade media) so that we can successfully go forward and find solutions for marketers. There’s a lot at stake here: we must support all that great online content.

I see each of these companies as having the sutures to get those limbs back on the Monty Python knight. We need to staunch the flow of blood. The Holy Grail?: Leadership of an industry rather than hacking it to bits.

Kathryn Koegel is a media and marketing specialist with expertise in Internet, TV and print media and advertising. She has developed marketing strategies for companies like DoubleClick, Gemstar TV Guide (Interactive Program Guides and a cable network), US News & World Report, The Online Publishers Association and one of the first Internet ad networks, Phase2Media. At DoubleClick, she was in charge of research and industry development and conducted numerous studies that showed the impact of online marketing on the purchase process.  Her work also involved effective models for planning display advertising and she initiated the DoubleClick Ad Serving Trend Reports, which have been widely cited as industry benchmarks for online advertising performance. Her research work has been accepted by the ARF and ESOMAR. She currently heads up the marketing strategy practice for Primary Impact, a boutique marketing and technology consultancy.

Links to her industry  research work can be found at:  www.primaryimpact.com/kathrynkoegel