Beyond the Banner

Online media offers a nearly infinite number of alternatives to garden-variety website advertising

Several websites and a few enewsletters here at Meister Media Worldwide are running into an enviable position: their inventory of ad positions is running out for the year.

This is not so enviable for some marketers, however. How can we accommodate prized advertisers who want in? In a few markets we’ve “sub-leased” spots to up to three rotations. And as our pageviews grow, we’re moving away from blanket run-of-site buys and toward more contextually pointed “channel” buys – i.e., amidst topical areas of high relevance to individual advertisers’ products or services.

But moving from a time to an impressions model isn’t really a solution for us – way too much seasonality in our agricultural / horticultural markets. When buyers want January-to-March primetime exposure, they want January-to-March primetime exposure, not reaching a faster-than-anticipated impressions threshold that spins their ad off the site two or three weeks earlier than they expected.

Nor is adding ad slots a good solution either. There's too much clutter on the site that puts off the user. Plus, as is amply proven in just-released research into the effect of ad placement on ad effectiveness, “ghettoizing” an ad well below the fold doesn’t do anybody any good.

So what options are left? Plenty. Here’s a quick rundown of a trio of major options we’re setting before our prized advertisers who may have been shut out of the banner spots they wanted.

Emails. These can be in the form of edirects or sponsorships of target enewsletters around specific topics. We suggest this option with a dash of caution, always leery of creating list fatigue, but outbound email is a great way to hook an audience and bring ‘em in.

Custom landing pages and microsites. When email brings ‘em in, it often is to this “third way” of websites: something between content-filled media sites and marketing-oriented product/service sites. These can be as elaborate as a 10-page product site, or as simple as a one-page company introduction. We custom-build them either way. Absolutely essential to the model though: these must have response mechanisms to harvest leads and inquiries.

Video. All kinds of possibilities here, from pre-roll ads on editorially-produced video “channels” to sponsorship slots amid video news reports. We’ve even developed a “video product showcase” platform that gives certain advertisers just what they need: a place to “post and host” their video, along with for-more-information links to ancillaries of their own choosing (technical paper PDFs, other videos, web articles, mail-tos, etc.) and custom video production if they so choose, which many of them do.

In the end the bias of online media is toward access and interactivity. With or without banner ad availability, all of us in media need to be ready to provide advertisers with a host of options.