Hiding in Plain Sight

Before I begin this week's blog post, I want you to take a few minutes to watch the following video.  The goal is to count the number of times that the player's in white pass the basketball.

Did you see the gorilla?  Approximately 50% of the people are so focused on the task at hand that they completely miss the gorilla.  Is your advertising on webpages falling victim to the same fate.  Chances are, Yes!!!

One of the topics for this week's Marketing 595 class was this idea of 'Banner Blindness'.  People have a tendency to be so focused on the story that they are reading that they do not even see your ads.  The 'heat maps' of eye movement from many experiments show that people will not even look at anything that looks like an ad

 So how do advertisers get around this?  After all, advertising dollars is what makes a lot of the great content on the internet to be free for users.  Some websites have advertisements that popup and typically annoy the customers that you want to attract.  Other websites try to trick users into clicking on their advertisements.  Again, this can be seen as unethical.

What is the answer?  Unfortunately, the answer means more work up front and may even mean considering the advertisement during the design of the webpage.  That's right, make the advertisement content-rich and unique as Jonathan Gardner points out.  In his blog post, Mr. Gardner leads us to an example from Ikea where they put all of their products on one web banner ad.  Another example is from Jeep where they put the local weather forecast as part of the ad.  These types of advertisements provide a sales pitch along with delivering information to the users.  In a sense, being different is what will attract the most attention.  Although it is much more difficult to create these unique advertisements, the effort will be worth it in higher click through rates.