Even though mobile advertising campaigns are becoming more intricate and elaborate with the help of constant progress in mobile technology, banners are still the unit of measure in internet and mobile advertising.
Mobile banners and banners in general as we know them today haven’t changed much in their shape or size. It is the content of the banner that has evolved the most. Since this year marks the 20th anniversary of the first banner ever, here is the short overview of the evolution of banners.
How it all began
The first “clickable web ad”, how they called banners back then, before they coined the term which will become the most used word in internet and mobile advertising, was created and sold by Global Network Navigator (a website which no longer exists) in 1993. However, it took another year to really tap into the commercial potential of banners. The birth of online advertising came on October 25th 1994, when the web site HotWired sold large quantities of banners to corporate advertisers and provided click through rate reports. And that was it. Online advertising had begun.
Source: thefirstbannerad.com
Banner types
The first banners were placed on the top of web pages, simple and straightforward. Then webmasters started to create place for banners on other parts of the web page, thus creating various banner sizes and positions: rectangle, leaderboard, full banner, half banner, vertical, pop under, button, skyscraper… the variations seem endless.
And as the banners grew in size and position, so did internet users’ ability to ignore them. Then we came up with the pop up banner. One simply could not ignore a pop up banner. Until end users “taught” their browsers to do that for them. Instead of ignoring, our web browsers started to block them.
Constant struggle
The evolution of banners was defined by the constant battle between advertisers and end users. The former wanted the latter to see their banners and click on them, while the latter kept finding ways to ignore them.
Then a leap in the evolution occurred, as it well should have. Advertisers and webmasters found a way synergise banners with web content. So now we have the likes of AdSense for web pages and AdWords for search engines. Then came flash banners… And if you thought that’s where it ends… you’re in for a treat! Because then came mobile!
Mobile banners with endless potential
While mobile banners adopted the logic of internet banners, possibilities mobile technology brings to mobile advertising are endless. The best example is the HTML5 banner. This is interactivity at its best! You can put everything into a single banner using HTML5. That means you can put a game, video, image gallery or any other interactive element into the banner, add a contact form or any other Call to Action without the need to redirect end users to a mobile web page.
Mobile is superior to landline internet in many other ways. One of the most important is targeting. Advertisers can nowadays create mobile campaigns with precise targeting: location, device type, OS type, time, user preferences… There are so many other possibilities mobile advertising offers, but we’ll leave that for another day, another blog.
There are other types and sizes of mobile banners, and you can see yourself what each of them looks like by simply clicking on this image.
You can always get more information about mobile campaigns by contacting us 🙂