Discusses t he brief history of online advertising through specificad strageis and discusses where online advertising is headed.
Isthere such a thing as “traditional” online advertising? If there is, itstarted with banners, moved to FFAs, took a step backwards with SPAM, ahard right with classified advertising and then shot forward with payper click search engine. So how do you know where to spend youradvertising budget in the current market? If you’ve been responsiblefor your company’s web advertising efforts over the years you mightagree that the traditional means of advertising worked; as least for alittle while. So as new types of advertising penetrate the market withincreasing frequency, what do you do with those proven stand-by methodsof generating links and traffic? Throw them out? Keep them around forposterity? Maybe give them a facelift? Let’s review those traditionalad models then look at some experimental models. TRADITIONAL ONLINEADVERTISING MODELS

Banners
Banner ads in the form of animated gifs are themost common and widely used form of online advertising today. Bannerads reach the widest possible audience because practically 100% ofInternet users can view them without any special plugins. Webmarketers, advertisers and promoters have quickly realized that bannersunder 12k in file size puts the ad in front of the visitor as quicklyas possible, increasing the chance of click-through even though surfersare growing increasingly immune. New styles and shapes of banners (suchas skyscraper ads) have grown in popularity recently, which isaddressed in the “Experimental Advertising” section below. SPAM
What does SPAM stand for? It’s not “Stupid Pointless Annoying Message”(which in some cases it could be) but rather “Sending and PostingAdvertising Messages.” It’s hard to believe SPAM is effective, butunarguably, it is. While click-through rates continue to fall andlegislation begins to rise, it is a savvy advertiser’s best bet to stayaway from it, unless of course you’re selling Pasta Pots or Viagra.Rich mail – “Fancy SPAM”
Most likely, the e-mail messages you receive on a daily basis are textonly. Rich mail, on the other hand, allows graphics, video and audio tobe included in the e-mail message. When you open up a rich e-mail youre-mail client automatically calls up your Internet connection andlaunches an html page in your browser. E-mail clients that are offlinewill invite you to click on the link when you have your Internetconnection open again. If your e-mail client does not support graphicsyou will receive the e-mail in text only. While SPAM is still SPAM,rich mail has proven to be much more effective than standard textmessages. Pop-Ups/Pop-Unders:
This creative, yet completely obtrusive and annoying means ofadvertising was once celebrated in some circles as the most innovativead concept since banners. It only took a short time before many users,sick of being trapped in a never-ending onslaught of such ads, voicedtheir rejection. One can only wonder when advertisers will recognizethe public dissatisfaction and move on to another more effective meansto promote their companies. Institutional Advertising:
While institutional or “in-house” advertising has been available sincethe inception of the Internet, few companies have made an effort toutilize the many different aspects of online advertising in one formatas has 7Search.com with its Direct Pay-Per-Text advertising. 7Search, aleader in the pay per click search engine arena, has recentlyintroduced this program which enables its advertisers to advertiseoutside of its search return lists using the same titles anddescriptions seen on its search engine. The pay-per-click model enablesinterested advertisers to leave behind the CPM impression model andfocus on the click conversions. Direct Pay-Per-Text is a patent-pendingconcept from 7Search which will be released to the general public inthe coming months. Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
It’s hard to think of PPC search engines as a “traditional” means toadvertise online, but the ratio of those advertisers who do versusthose who don’t is staggering; in fact the majority have at least triedtheir hand at leasing traffic. In a PPC agreement, the advertiser onlypays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on aprearranged per-click rate. The response on ads with well-writtentitles and descriptions targeted to the users query pull response ratesunseen in the ad industry previously. The greatest advantage arguablyis the ability to measure precisely the rate of return versus yourinvestment. Some of the most popular PPC search engines areFindWhat.com, 7Search.com, Ah-ha.com and the industry leader Overture.EXPERIMENTAL ONLINE ADVERTISING MODELS Traffic Exchange Advertising:
Hit exchanges, actually a form of banner exchange, are a recentphenomenon on the Internet. You will visit the site of a member of anexchange, and in exchange, another member of the exchange will visityour site. The recent explosion of hit exchanges on the web has dilutedthe effectiveness of such a method of advertising. There have also beenmany instances of cheating, in which a script is used to generatevisits to a site. However, if you have a product that is of interest towebmasters, and is low cost or has a free version, there is no harm ingiving hit exchanges a try. Shockwave ads
Shockwave is best suited for campaigns that want to utilizeout-of-banner real estate, such as applets, trading cards, and games.Director and Flash provide the ability to embed interaction, video, andaudio within the file, making Shockwave files some of the richest adunits on the Web. Viral marketing and strong brand interaction are twoof the key strengths of Shockwave ads. As these ads are typically“bandwidth monsters” the adoption has been slow and will most likelyremain that way. Other downsides include development costs and the factthat it just won’t work without the Shockwave plug-in, which (thoughdownloaded by millions of users) is far from being a mainstay.Interstitial ads
Interstitials are ads that play between pages on a website, much liketelevision ads play between sections of a program. There are severalvariations on the interstitial model: some play in the main browserwindow, while some play in new, smaller windows; some are pre-cached,while some stream ad content as it plays; some provide the ability tocreate very rich ads, while some focus on smaller, faster-loading ads.Whatever the format, nearly all interstitial ads perform very well ifmeasured by both click-through rates and brand recall. Floating ads andDHTML
Types of floating ads include DHTML sponsorships, in which advertisingobjects "fly" across the page on a preset course; cursor sponsorships,in which the cursor turns into an advertising image; and scrolling ads,in which an advertisement moves up and down the edge of a page as theuser scrolls up and down. Floating ads give the advertiser andpublisher the flexibility to achieve nearly any effect. However, asthis is one of the more daring types of online advertising, advertisingand content must be balanced on any given page. Floating ads(especially DHTML and cursors) are best run for short periods to createbrand awareness—running them for longer periods can bring negative userfeedback. It is important to understand that online advertising is onlyeffective if it generates significant response and this applies to bothtraditional and experimental ads. Unfortunately, the only way todiscover the efficiency of your campaign is to test in every format atleast once with as many ads as you are able.

About the Author

Pete Prestipino is the founder and CEO of SCG - Swirling CircleGroup, a consortium of online marketers, promoters, SEO's, webdesigners, and Internet consultants. For more information visit: www.SwirlingCircle.com