Programmatic ads are booming for good reason. The automated digital brand staging steadily grows in importance in the marketing mix. The average consumer is exposed to 7,000 different marketing messages a day and, unlike a few years ago, the attention span is by now down to an average of eight seconds.

Hans J. Even, Managing Director of TWT Interactive, shows how companies retain the attention of their customers even in times of smartphone and information overload with the help of good design.

In 1994, the world’s first online banner ads ran on the screen under the URL hotwired.com, which was a landing page of the American company AT&T. The "You Will" campaign hardly worked with creation, but with text and technology eventually. The banners had a CTR of over 70%, which is a value marketers can nowadays only dream off.

20 years after the pioneering online advertising campaign, the information and advertising flood a user is exposed to has scaled up multiple times. More and more banners in various sizes and styles change the user behavior.

Programmatic marketing is here a kind of good solution, as only those who positively stand out from the crowd may lead the user to the desired click or conversion.

Small space, big idea

Actually, programmatic advertising is a must-have this year, but it has to reach the right user, at the right time, on the right device. In the US, around 80% of market participants already make use of programmatic marketing, whereby the creativity is rather secondary - compared to large out-of-home campaigns – as the small-area formats are quite limited. Programmatic per se merely refers to the nature of the delivery of a message, but not the style.

Good creation and automation do not have to be mutually exclusive

Studies show that so-called ‘Ad Bundle’ bookings perform better than the booking of individual banners, as they provide the opportunity to be more creative in reaching the users.

But what exactly means "creation" when only the size of a matchbox or palm is available? Creativity in banner form can be supported by GIFs, videos or HTML5. Technologically, this can be especially supported by tandem ads, which is the combination of two forms of advertising such as super banner and skyscrapers or layer ad and skyscraper. Both advertising media are combined graphically and textual. Thus, the tandem ad receives diverse design possibilities and a good story can be told in a small space, besides click-through rates that even increase. Different banner sizes can be linked so that an exciting storytelling is achieved even in the smallest space.

Creation is one of the key factors determining the success of advertising and is like technology subject to a kind of evolution: It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract attention, hence, the more creative the ad, the higher the chances to get attention. Rest assured that through creative banner advertising in times of programmatic advertising, it is possible to increase your KPIs significantly, attract new customers and increase sales.

By Daniela La Marca