We are pleased to bring you a post by Guest Contributor Martin Meyer-Gossner from The Strategy Web.


Display advertising is the oldest form of online advertising. For years, creative intelligence used big ad space and numerous formats to deliver best possible brand awareness. Display advertising was the no. 1 in online marketing, and seen as THE key in the generation of customer engagement in the Web 1.0 era. Having banner blindness and bad conversion in the back of their heads, all marketers ask, how to create effective online ads to promote company promotions. And ideally these banners should find the engagement economy and generate leads for the businesses.

In today’s social web world, display advertising should have two faces (not only because Facebook won’t sell traditional banners any longer): one for awareness and one for engagement generation campaigns. And for the latter, display advertising faces a tough competitor these days: ads in social networks.

Does this mean social networks have invented a new form of engagement advertising? No – but the philosophy around engagement bannering is changing with their appearance. A question of our clients is: Is the simple creation of a banner with user-centric usability responsible for the road to successful banner campaigns?

In 2000, the silicon business model launched with a product called the “Response Banner” (see reproduced version, left) which carried nearly all call-to-action elements of the Facebook Engagement Ads (right): small picture, offer, call-to-action sentence, a button – click! Knowing how successful these ads performed, I can estimate the success of Facebook engagement ads filling the sales funnel of advertisers with “fans” (not to mention potential customers!).

The Facebook banner intelligence follows our old response banner approach. From a user perspective, the barrier for a user to get engaged with the advertising company is the landing page, obviously the data registration process. This philosophy can be backed by a study showing that in-banner ads generate better lead results than on-site campaigns. Less steps for the user create more conversion.
Community banner ads can be far more intelligent than traditional ones. The creative is connected with the community- database. Thus, it is easy to understand and to use for the community members. Plus, it delivers great community service. And the banners have great brand recognition value – they all look alike and just the text varies.

If the registration process is pre-organized, the user accepts the data registration much quicker, more often and again and again. It is just one click! Facebook offers this “one-click-makes-customers-happy-service”. And I am sure we will see other social networks learning from this case.

Knowing that recommendation marketing through peers is essential for business success in the future, Facebook ads are even cleverer. They carry a recommendation element which lets us know who of our peers has already interacted with the banner. For months, I have been asking myself why we don’t see companies and their agencies placing traditional banners with recommendation elements…

Spot On!

Many posts or books have been written about the essential creative elements of banners. We will still need traditional colorful and flashy banners that cause emotions – but for awareness campaigns! Engagement bannering is different, and it can be quite simple as we have seen, right?

Now, just imagine every person had one easy manageable individual landing page which they can personalize from campaign to campaign, from network to network, from community to community – just by using Facebook-, Google- or Twitter Connect?

Welcome, new engagement advertising philosophy…

Martin Meyer-Gossner is sales and marketing expert and co-founder of the IT B2B platform silicon.de. With his social business brand The Strategy Web Martin helps business decision makers to understand what a modern (web) business strategy needs and how to provide top customer service in the future.