CReATION: Setting the rules for venturing beyond the Internet banner ad

For all those who believe the banner is dead and has the potential to grab user attention for no more than a nano-second, banner evangelism is a wasted task. According to Renren.com VP, marketing and sales, Richard Robinson, however, the banner is here to stay - with a fair dose of reinvention currently keeping it nimble, and banner 'boosters' such as Rich Media, pop-up windows, interstitials and permission marketing livening up the 'Net advertising space. Making the inevitable comparison of Asia's markets to the US was vital, he noted, because Internet adspend figures for Asia and Hong Kong were still thin on the ground. "Back in 1998, banners made up half of US online adspend - this year, it will shrink to a quarter, and it's estimated that US$5 billion was spent in online advertising last year alone." Speaking at MEDIA's recent Technology Marketing Seminar in Hong Kong, Mr Robinson also predicted that over the next year and a half, Asia would catch up with the US Web model. "For all the comments you can make about banners they really are here to stay, they're effective and they're crucial from a branding and direct call-to-action perspective," he said. The beauty of creating a single banner ad and dispersing it across 50 different websites was a key selling point - coupled with a banner campaign's speed to market, hiked-up users reaction times and reduced campaign costs. Citing a rich media banner which Modem Media Poppe Tyson created for Citibank's Stateside network and subsequently rolled out in the UK and Taiwan, Mr Robinson hailed Javascript - enabling users to interact with the banner wihout having to click-out to a separate Citibank site. "Previously, it took about 12 hours to produce a high quality banner - that includes all the strategising, the creative and the back-and-forth with the client," he said, adding, "this was much more time consuming, but then the user is called to action and gets a demo of some of the banking services". Java's saving grace enabled Citibank to identify when there was a mouse cursor hovering over the banner, even though the user hadn't technically engaged in any click-through. "We were able to tell that over a third of people interacted with the banner because their mouse was placed over it," said Mr Robinson. "Twelve per cent of people actually clicked on it - that's pretty good, considering that right now in the US, only 0.6 per cent of people click-through at all." However, with the core expertise and cost commitment involved in such ultra-rich banners, Asia, Mr Robinson noted, would most likely not be seeing similar, complex banners in future. In the realm of online advertising spend, sponsorship was also consuming large chunks of the adspend pie, while Intel's deal with Yahoo Hong Kong recently paved the way for the "under-utilised" delivery of advertisements juxtaposed with editorial. "Editorial adjacency means that click-through counts, because it's relative to editorial - which means people are in a much more receptive mindset when they click-through," Mr Robinson said. Tapping into the power of "word of mouse", enabling users to become marketers by emailing the likes of pop-ups and animation to their friends - this form of engaging, unusual "viral marketing" is fast emerging as the catchy and cost-effective one to watch. Renren.com's own Chinese New Year offering - a "sticky, fun", animated, musical Chinese dragon which popped up on registered user's screens - cost the company the equivalent of buying a million banner impressions. Paying off with worldwide site awareness, branding promotion and calls to action, the gimmick was deemed a marketing success. "If this is sitting on someone's desktop they have to click it to go away, and what pops up after enables you to send it right through to a friend, or you can give it a call to action and click onto our homepage," said Mr Robinson. "Say you buy one million banner impressions - and let's say you have a 10 per cent click-through rate - you're talking about 10,000 people clicking through to your site; while we had 240,000 downloads of this and 25,000 people coming to the site." In the viral league, email marketing was forecast to be next in line for the "explosion", making a credible play for the hearts and pockets of Asia's Web users. "Email is not spam - unsolicited email is spam," Mr Robinson said. "It has to really be used properly and it's about permission marketing - that is, getting someone's permission to market to them." As gaining the trust of users increasingly pays off, the personalised touch of email marketing is becoming a fast track to elusive higher click-through rates. Advocating rules of thumb for email marketing, he championed "teaser emails", affording users targeted clues to sites, as opposed to similar text-heavy offerings.

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