Display advertising

Display advertising is advertising on web sites. It includes many different formats and contains items such as text, images, flash, video, and audio. The main purpose of display advertising is to deliver general advertisements and brand messages to site visitors.

According to eMarketer, Facebook and Twitter will take 33% of display ad spending marketshare by 2017. Also, desktop display advertising has eclipsed search ad buying in 2014, with mobile ad spending to overtake display in 2015.

History

Since the early '90s the advent of the Internet has completely changed the way people relate to advertisements. As computers prices decreased, online content became accessible to a large portion of the world's population. This change has modified the way people are exposed to media and advertising and has led to the creation of online channels through which advertisements can reach users.

The first type of relationship between a website and an advertiser was a straightforward, direct partnership. This partnership model implies that the advertiser promoting a product or service pays the website (also known as a publisher) directly for a certain amount of ad impressions. As time went on, publishers began creating thousands of websites, leading to millions of pages with unsold ad space. This gave rise to a new set of companies called Ad Networks. The ad network acted as a broker, buying unsold ad space from multiple publishers and packaged them into audiences to be sold to advertisers. This second wave of advertiser-publisher relationships rapidly gained popularity as it was convenient and useful for buyers who often found themselves paying a lower price yet receiving enhanced targeting capabilities through ad networks.

The third and most recent major development that shaped the advertiser-publisher ecosystem started occurring in the late 2000s when widespread adoption of RTB (real time bidding) technology took place. Also referred to as programmatic bidding, RTB allowed companies representing buyers and sellers to bid on the price to show an ad to a user every time a banner ad is loading. When a page loads during a user visit, there are thousands of bids occurring from advertisers to serve an ad to that user, based on each company's individual algorithms. With this most recent change in the industry, more and more ads are being sold on a single-impression basis, as opposed to in-bulk purchases.

First online advertisement

The birthday of the first banner display is on the 27th October 1994. It appeared on HotWired, the first commercial web magazine.

Importance of formats of display ads

Two students of the "Amsterdam school of Communication Research ASCor" have run studies about the audience reactions to different display advertising formats. In particular, they took into consideration two different types of format (sponsored content and banner advertising) to demonstrate that people react and perceive formats in different ways, positive and negative. For this reason it is important to choose the right format because it will help to make the most of the medium. It is also possible to add:

• Video;
• Rich Media Ads (Expandables): flash files that may expand when the user interacts on mouseover (polite), or auto- initiated (non-polite);
• Overlays: ads that appear above content and that are possible to remove by clicking on a close button;
• Interstitials: Ads that are displayed on webpages before expected content (before the target page is displayed on the user’s screen);
• Sponsorship: including a logo or adding a brand to the design of a web site. This can also can fall under Native advertising, which is an ad that can seem like Editorial, or "In-Feed", but has really been paid for by the advertiser

To help to better selecting the right format for type of ad, Interactive Advertising Bureau has realized a Display Standard Ad Unit Portfolio that works as guideline that can be followed by the creatives.

Standard size

IAB has also created a universal standard for display ad sizes Page text. There are four dimensions that have been decided as universal and are respectively:

• Banner 728 x 90
• Big box 300 x 250
• Skyscraper 160 x 600
• Square 250 x 250

Typical web banner, sized 468×60 pixels.

File:Formatfordisplayadvertising.jpg

Who works behind display ads

Creative

The role of the creatives is to give a shape to an ad. They have to find the idea and the most efficient way to push the customer to buy a product or a service. Imagination and innovation are required to develop and to present an advertisement.

Media planner

People have to test in which way the user experiences all the information of a data visualisation. For this reason they have to study the users' response to sounds, image and motion. They have to be aware about everything that is digitally consumed, to know all the newest technologies and media solutions, and to help all the other departments to find the best way to reach the object's campaign.

Tools that a media planner uses buy display advertising include the Google Adwords Display Planner, Quantcast, ComScore, SimilarWeb, Thalamus, Compete, MOAT, and competitive intelligence tools like Adbeat and WhatRunsWhere.

Ad server

The ad server helps manage display advertisements. It is an advertising technology (adtech) tool that, throughout a platform, administrates the ads and their distribution. It is basically a service or technology for a company that takes care of all the ad campaign programs and by receiving the ad files it is able to allocate them in different websites. The ad server is responsible of things as: the dates by which the campaign has to run on a website; the rapidity in which an ad as to be spread and where (geographic location targeting, language targeting.. ); controlling that an ad is not overseen by a user by limiting the number of visualisations; proposing an ad on past behaviour targeting.

There are different types of ad servers. There is an ad server for publishers that helps them to launch a new ad on a website by listing the highest ads' price on its and to follow the ad's growth by registering how many users it has reached. There is an ad server for advertisers that helps them by sending the ads in form of html codes to each publishers. In this way it is possible to open the ad in every moment and make changes of frequency for example, at all times. Lastly, there is an ad server for ad networks that provides informations as in which network the publisher is registering an income and which is the daily revenue.