By MarcThere are fireworks surrounding native custom sponsorships; with their integrated appearance, high CPM’s, and even higher ROI, it seems like advertisers and publishers have wised up to banners. That old and rusty IAB standard, blearily trumpeting an ad message from the top of your site? It’s dead.
Except… it’s not. Custom sponsorships take too much time and get a site cut from major buys. For the hundreds of thousands of sites smaller than Twitter and Facebook, big advertisers already don’t have the time or energy to go back and forth with you… and that’s with fully functioning IAB standards already in existence. Throw in even more in-depth customization and you’re definitely not worth their time.
Some sites do OK without the major companies advertising on them, and for them, native will be HUGE, because it will allow them to almost exclusively sell space to folks who are focused on performance, and who are willing to dig in and go the extra mile to build specific creatives.
But why these extremes? Can’t native sponsorships and banners live in harmony? One of them does not have to supplant the other. The trick is for companies like BSA to continue creating ads that can be custom integrated, but into common site elements, so they can still be universal. Like our newsletter options. Or sponsored tweets that can be plug and play. Or even allowing publishers to choose ad types that complement the native site environment, while still allowing the big boys to sweep gigantic budgets across standard sizes.
One of our goals at BuySellAds is to provide that fantastic middle ground. We strive to give the human element of choosing ad placements (custom or not) some sort of efficiency, while making it easy for attention-strapped corporations to hop in and join the fun.
Stop ragging on the banner and start getting creative, because at least the “punch the monkey” ad IS dead.
Hat tip to @toddo for his contribution, and to @bmorrissey at Digiday for inspiring this rant. Please chime in below!
