Marketing.
A part of my role as the head of the digital design department is to manage the online advertising that goes into our sites, specifically the quality of said advertising. When it comes to outside advertisers and advertising companies wanting to push their ads onto our site, each and every banner crosses my desk for approval.
I am no Ad Man. I don't know about the stats, the money side other than it's not a small industry. The Open X community stats on my dashboard show a peak impressions topping the 3 billion mark and a click through topping as much as 5 million. To be fair, Open X is not the be all and end all of the online advertising industry, and I am damn sure that those figures represent only a tiny fraction of the whole. Now guys, that's a lot of eyeballs on ads. Our own platform tops at 2.25 million impressions and a 1k click through on those impressions. Oh and this is all on a single day. Obviously there are better performing days than others, but that's still not a bad figure, right?
What's the point man?
The point I am trying to make here is that if you consider that figure, you would expect the industry to take their creative work a lot more seriously. And they do, of course. I have seen some marvelous creative work in online ads, even locally.
When I took up the task of managing the quality of the ads that we run, I had big dreams of uber creative artwork, flashy agencies and sipping champagne while marvelling at works like these:
What I ended up in reality is fighting with people about running ads that look like these:
It just seems that with all the creative possibilities we as creative people have when designing an online banner and campaign, all we can think of is the above. The fact that get's me down the most is that these examples are not the minority ads that sometime crop into the inventory. It's a constant stream of bad, every day. One of the companies publishing their ads on our site seems to ONLY have these kind of ads, and it saddens me, that this what our online advertising industry is actually looking like.
I say that because these ads are EVERYWHERE. Reputable sites like news24.com run these kinds of ads (although as of writing I notice they are not currently). You would expect to see these ads on the lower than low, dodgy sites, sure, fine whatever.
Okay, but why are they so bad?
These ads are using dodgy techniques (at best) to fool the user into clicking the ad. This range from giving him something that looks like his actual computer telling him to do something urgently, or through the blatantly false advertising of "Congratulations, you are the 100th visitor to this site and you just won an island"
It's like these advertisers, from company owner to the designer at the agency making this shit just doesn't believe in their products at all. It's like they believe the only way they will ever get people to sign up for their services is to fool them into doing so. It's criminal in my mind. It's absolutely disgusting.
The sad thing is, I have looked at some of these advertisers and their services they eventually offer, and yeah, they are right to have no trust in it because it's weak at the best of times. This culture of preying on the less intelligent and informed (and usually less well off) has permeated the online advertising industry like it's nobody's business.
Where the blame lay
Firstly the finger of blame points directly to money. Sales teams, online marketing and managers are driven by their deadlines, budgets and targets. It's as if the eye goes blind to obviously bad advertising the moment the coin is made clear, and let's be clear, we are talking about big ad spend here. Bad ads don't come cheap.
It's all good and well to say that Our sites will be good sites, we will only advertise good ads and we won't be evil and we will be awesome, when money is not on the table. The moment money get's added to the equation we enter a whole new world of debate. Because now we are no longer just talking about ethics and being good people, we are now also talking about company profit, income and eventually our salaries.
How can we fix this?
The base of the matter in my opinion comes down to simple ethics. Where do we draw the line? Where do we say no more, go away please, we care more about the quality of our site than we do your money at this time? Because face it, you as the ad publisher absolutely HAVE to care about the quality of your site. Every small thing you do affect the quality of the site, content and public face that you present to your (hopefully) valued visitor.
Just merely saying that we need the money, and we need to make our targets, and this is your salary you want to deny just isn't good enough. We HAVE to be better than that. Advertising online is already a maze of decisions and weighing in between user experience and profit, let alone the ethics of what it is you advertise. And it's made more frustrating with the lack of concrete info and guidelines out there, at least publicly. It seems to be the one aspect of the web world that is untouched, perhaps it isn't fancy and glamorous enough for the rockstars out there?
Education is going to be a key factor out there. We need to start educating people, and getting them to take their online assets so seriously. It's not just the big guys that have to have quality stuff, it's the small guy too. Presentation is key guys!
Finally
Basically guys, stop, PLEASE STOP making these ads. They are horrible, do you no service at all, and they are nothing to be proud of. Start being proud of what you put out there. Conversely for publishers, stop publishing these ads. Just because the big sites, and google adsense does it is no reason for you to do it too. Are we that susceptible to peer pressure, even in the web world? Come on guys.
In another post I will talk more about how I am solving the crisis through Advertising Manuals, controls and rules (which don't always work). I would like to start filling my role by helping put information out there. Perhaps we should get a conversation going at some point, involving the big agencies and big ad spenders. It would be great if they start pumping info into the community some more.
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