How Much Is That Banner Ad In The Window?
June 16, 2009 – 11:36 pm | by Daryl TayI chanced upon the banner ad rates offered by one Singaporean company awhile back, and saw that a prominently placed banner ad goes for S$4,000 a week, with the promise of “reaching” millions of “eyeballs”.
In Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”, there’s a chapter called “law of large numbers” where he bought 300 million banner ads for US$600. That’s more than one banner impression for one person in the United States. The result? He made a loss. Selling $500 of merchandise in total. He doesn’t specify what merchandise, but does it matter?
To break even on S$4,000 a week, you need to sell:
- 8 16gig iPhone 3Gs (about one a day)
- 10 Amazon Kindles (about 1.5 a day)
- 50 Xbox games (about seven a day)
- 400 movie tickets (just over 50 a day)
and that’s on revenue, not profit.
The flipside of this is of course, there’s no guarantee that some people of the 300 million saw the ad, and bought the merchandise some time later, thus making it untrackable. But isn’t it the same as any TV, radio or print ad you buy anyway?
Do you think you’re going to do better than Seth Godin’s case study? I’m going to leave the parallel of “reach” and “eyeballs” to traditional media to you.
If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard of the old adage “I know half of my marketing doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”. The good news is if you’re employing banner ads in your marketing “arsenal”, they automatically fall into the half that isn’t working.
But that’s just one case study, if you’re buying banner ads, I’d like to ask you: How have they worked for you?
Tags: amazon kindles, banner ad, eyeballs, iphone 3G, law of large numbers, millions, movie tickets, online marketing, print, profit, purple cow, radio, reach, revenue, seth godin, tv, xbox
3 Responses to “How Much Is That Banner Ad In The Window?”
By Razlan on Jun 29, 2009 | Reply
If banner ads are used to generate revenue, it pretty much tank. Like you said, it’s in the other half which is not working. But I do think banners help when you are using it for brand awareness purpose (Mocca? Bad example, I know, but that’s the first thing that crosses my mind) and for acquisition, like membership acquisition.
But… which website is in the right mind to charge that much for a week of eyeball?
By Daryl Tay on Jul 1, 2009 | Reply
@Razlan: Yeah the immediate example that comes to mind is this “Evony” game ad that I am seeing literally everywhere that I just can’t avoid seeing. If that’s the effect the company is going for, then 300million impressions works.
The problem is that sometimes corporations have unrealistic expectations of banner ads. Just because they can track conversion, doesn’t mean they should. I look at banner ads the same way as print or tv ads. You can’t tell who exactly has bought it due to seeing which ad, so they’re either equally effective or equally ineffective.
As for which ad network, it’s the one that runs ads on our main newspaper.