trends

Call it whatever you want, but banner ads are not dead and they won’t go away. Even if we talk about traditional display advertising, video banner ads, animated banner ads, social media ads or or any other kind of visual ad. I’ve seen a large amount of great banner ads in 2016. When you see brands like Netflix, Marketo, Dropbox using display advertising to promote their product, brand and connect with the online user it can only encourage you to adopt this as part of your marketing strategy. But what about 2017? What will be ahead of us in this year? We’ve heard a lot about adblocking and how this can affect display advertising and we see a 20% increase in advertising revenue in Q3 that hits $17.8 Billion. This means that when we talk about banner ads, display advertising and online advertising we talk about a big industry where everybody can take a piece, even if you are a small business, medium company, early startup or even an enterprise. The interesting fact is that they predict that in 2021 the spending on digital advertising will almost double. And mobile will have an important role in this part. But let’s not go so far and stick to our year. What will be the banner advertising trend in 2017? Banner advertising is composed in 2 important parts: design and advertising. I divided this article in these major sections because I want you to understand that you can’t have a good display advertising campaign if you banner ad is poorly designed and lacks creativity neither if you don’t understand the trend in online advertising, nobody will see your beautiful and trendy banner ad. Banner Ad Design Trend The internet is a noisy place and I often hear that banner ads are overcrowded on a web page. Well my friends, it’s not the marketers fault that the publishers let all these spaces to be filled with banner ads. This is why I always recommend people responsible in designing the banner ads, even if it’s the designer or the small business marketer, to keep it as simple as he or she can. Stick to the brand. Keep the message simple. Use only 2 or 3 colors if possible. Use simple and high quality images. If you go and look at our banner ad templates you will see that many of them are well designed with simple elements, such as readable fonts, good choice of colors and remarkable CTA button. The second trend that I see in banner ads is the usage of smart branding. Think about the movie series that use display advertising to promote their newest episodes or just to create brand awareness through the internet. Movies like “Crown” who is using their simple typography and also their main character of the movie, or “Narcos” where Pablo Escobar character is watching you through the banner ad and makes you end a deal with him. These simple elements are all branding elements from the movies. Because today's branding is not only about a logo, a shape or about typography. Smart branding is every element that is used in a space and where the user can easily recognize the brand. So yes, smart branding is another trend that we will see rising in 2017 in the banner ad design field. The last but not least, the one that I can say that truly got my attention is the influencer marketing in banner ads. When was the last time when you saw Beyonce or Adele using display advertising to promote their concert. Yes, they use their most powerful piece of advertising - their identity. Every Beyonce fan will recognize her in a million of banner ads. But think about “Beats” who use the power of influencers to promote their product and make it more present in its customer’s life. Because if I’m a truly big fan of LeBron James, I will definitely want to buy some of these Beats eardrops. We will see a lot of influencer marketing in banner ads too. Banner Advertising Trends If design is about creativity then advertising is about data. So if you want to have a good banner advertising campaign you should combine the two of them to get the amount of results you want. And because audiences are spending more and more time consuming media on their mobile devices, I look at the mobile phone as one of the primary screens through which we can reach people. Let’s face it, why do we use our mobile? It’s more than just about calling somebody or texting. It’s about consuming information about this world, about what our friends are doing and also connecting with the world by showing them what we do/feel. Before I had started writing this article I’ve done my research and read a lot about what others think about banner ad trends in 2017 and many of them point to Banner Ads on mobile. Also, it seems like 59.5 percent of Google’s net global ad revenues will come from mobile Internet ads in 2017 up from about 45.8% that was in 2015. This seems like Google is befriending the mobile devices more and more. Well, we can’t even talk about mobile as the second screen. Every screen we use every day is the first screen. And I’m not talking about those Banner Ads that are big as the entire screen, the “x” button is only 1% of the design and the user must click on the banner to get rid of it. I’m talking about responsive scale html Banner Ads that are personalized for every device and every user's needs. If I accidentally read an article on Renault's blog about how to clean my car and then that banner ad is targeting me everywhere I go, trying to make me buy a car, it doesn’t fit my needs and definitely I will report it. This means that the banner advertising trend in mobile advertising will have a serious personalization track. Marketers must understand their users intents before they throw the cookie and start retargeting them over and over again. Another trend that is scoring big is the Social Media advertising. Oh yeah, it’s that topic that you definitely wanted to read about. “Tell us Robert, about Social Media advertising and what we can do” said the voice inside your head right now. Well my friends, it seems like there are 2 important players in the global digital advertising industry: Facebook and Google, and nobody can’t beat them in 2017-2018-2019 and definitely for much longer than that. The guys from Hootsuite had done a great job by collecting a few interesting statistics about social media advertising. Here are a few of them that I found interesting to look at: Social media spending in the U.S. alone is expected increase to $17.34 billion in 2019 In 2017, analysts predicted a 26.3% global increase on spending for social media ads Social media ad spending is likely to exceed $35 billion in 2017, representing 16% of all digital ad spending globally Should I say more about the rise of Social Media advertising in 2017? I don’t think so. Conclusion As I already said in this article, creativity and data go along together if you want to launch your next banner ad campaign. Don’t rely on these trends and put all your eggs in one basket. I recommend you to test and experiment and see which channels brings you the results you want. Now back to you, let me know in the comments section bellow what other trends do you see appearing in Banner Ads stage of 2017?

trends

Banner Advertising Trends in 2017