Banner “Fraud” Doesn’t Matter

A Message from brand marketers to publishers

Here’s a message on behalf of brand marketers everywhere.† We know about banner fraud already. We just don’t care. Seriously. It’s fine. I mean, you got us into this mess years ago, and sure, it was kind of annoying, but you know what? It is what it is. To your immense credit, you have adjusted prices downward as you’ve made banners an ever-increasing s**tshow, so, actually, it’s totally cool. We like them.

That’s right. I said it. Banners are awesome.

So here’s the thing. It’s been over twenty years since you foisted the banner upon us. And it was pretty cool. We liked it right away. But along with this cool little piece of digital real estate, you sold us this dream: that everything was trackable. It sounded awesome. I mean, we like advertising on billboard, they’re cool. They work. But we can’t really track all that much with them. So this seemed, like, even better.

We don’t care about clickthroughs.

Secondly, banners are still little billboards.

We’ve known about banner fraud forever and we’re cool with it.

So, now, here it is in 2015 and you start going on about a multi-billion dollar “fraud” in the industry. Honestly, at first when that article got posted I thought you were going to talk about something else: like maybe how the entire dream of the internet is a bit of a fraud for advertisers in general. But then I read it and, oops, no, it’s just you guys confessing that, hey, you know what? We’ve been showing a lot of banners to people who aren’t people. And not only that, you guys have been “bribing” the media buyers to buy this crap.

An aside on “bribes:”

By the way, if you think you guys are bribing anyone, you might want to consider working in any. other. medium. Because, honestly, you peeps in digital are still rank amateurs when it comes to bribing our colleagues in the media departments. You wanna see real bribing? Buy a broadcast spot from a large local TV station.

Fixing banner fraud isn’t going to do us any favors.

So, now that you guys have “confessed” (and, really, god bless you you’re so cute), what’s going to happen? Nothing. You know why? Because you’re not really confessing. You’re trying to sell us something else.

You know why your display CPMs keep falling? Because we freaking knew about this whole thing, and took our pound of flesh out of your CPMs.

In conclusion.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with the utility of a banner in our ad campaigns. They still have a use. They’re great, for example, in papering over the whole web to launch a movie or a new soft drink. All I have to do is run upstairs to my wife’s office and look at the (really very smart) companies who are using display ads effectively for myriad endeavors. These companies make a lot of money. Really. A lot. They are not dumb. And they love banners.

author, @agencythebook, @mannupbook. writing an ad economics book. reformed angel investor, record label owner, native alaskan. co-founded @barbariangroup.

author, @agencythebook, @mannupbook. writing an ad economics book. reformed angel investor, record label owner, native alaskan. co-founded @barbariangroup.