If your company is still advertising on major display advertising networks such as Specific Media, 24/7 Real Media, CPX Interactive, Double Click, adGardner, etc….? STOP and re-negotiate your rates or STOP advertising on these networks all together. It is costing you an arm and a leg for shitty results. Yes, that’s right, shitty results. You may be featured on some of the most prominent websites, but you are also paying an arm and a leg and your banners are “blind” to the audience you are trying to reach. Only two out of ten impressions actually “see” your banner and out of that 20% only 1/10 will click on your ad, resulting in a CTR of around .02%. That’s pathetic, we regularly get 1%+ CTR with the banners and placement we create. But wait, there is a better way: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Adsonar (AOL). Dump your CPM buys and buy CPC - you will actually get traffic.

BannerBlindness.com regularly delivers hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to major portals looking to grow their subscriber base. Why would you want to pay for an impression when you can actually pay for a visitor. We can help - yes this is a shameless plug post promoting our services. We recently helped BuddyTV.com generate tens of thousands of new users. They are in a battle with TV.com for online market share of “online television social-networking”. This is the bread and butter way for major television networks to attract viewers for prime time television shows.

CPC advertising on a display network is cheaper and far more effective than purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars of CPM buys throughout the year. Again: why would you pay for an impression when you can pay for an actual visitor. So you might be saying, and this is a common statement; “Well it’s worth it to pay for CPM advertising when your banners are very targeted” or “We have such a large marketing budget that we can’t achieve our goals through a cpc buy”. WRONG. I don’t have the time to conduct an actual statistical investigation into how much more effective cpc advertising is vs. cpm advertising - but I can assure you, that the observations and actual experience that my 10 years of online advertising experience disprove any notion that CPM advertising is EVER more effective then cpc advertising. Companies like Blue Lithium, Right Media, Advertising.com, etc… were founded on a performance based model; but quickly warped into CPM advertising as they saw an incredible opportunity to rip off major corporations through HUGE CPM buys. What the hell does a 60 year old marketing manager know about CPM buys? NOTHING.

The major online display advertising networks have been milking major corporations with major advertising budgets for years. I was discussing with an associate of mine recently, that even though major corporations like Budweiser, Ford, GM, Toyota, etc… may be losing out big on CPM advertising; it’s still probably yielding better results then traditional media buys (magazines, television, radio). So they may be getting ripped off, but at least it’s not as bad as it could be. But it’s time to get smart, and it’s time to get lean — corporations! Stop throwing your share holder money down the CPM toilet, and start paying for actual visitors not just impressions!

Contact Banner Blindness if you are interested in making a major dent in your daily and monthly uniques. We have helped clients double their daily traffic numbers, and achieve metrics such as: registrations, newsletter sign-ups, purchases, recurring visitors, landing page optimization, etc… We can very affordably and quickly send you hundreds of thousands of unique visitors through large CPC buys using all the major advertising networks. Additionally, if you are a publisher (as many of our clients are) you will be arbitraging your purchase with us, as you will make it up on the number of impressions you can serve based on the number of unique visitors we deliver. Remeber, only pay for for unique visitors - NEVER just impressions.

The following blog Cinematical had a top 50 list of what was hot in the movies. I read one of the comments on the first page and the writer said, “This was a great post - but why 50 pages? You guys suck at the internet.” I was impressed with this site visitors understanding of online marketing; he hated the fact that they put 1 page of content on 50 pages - the publisher wanted to get 50x as many banner impressions. From a website owner perspective pretty damn smart, but from an advertisers perspective it sucks. It sucks for advertisers because users are experiencing 100% banner blindness in conditions like this. The advertisements being displayed most regularly were:

Cloverfield (a sci-fi shoot’em up) and Tom Cat’s crappy movie about Mad Money - shouldn’t Kramer Sue?  If I have to see another preview with Katie Holmes bouncing to hip-hop in overalls my head may shatter into small Tom Cruise aliens. Could this girl have screwed her career up any worse? Marrying Tom Cruise has gotten her into one of the worst looking movies I have ever seen. Shouldn’t he have been able to hook her up? Especially since he is the number two alien progenerate on the planet known as Earth.  I digress into Hollywood, I’m sorry.  Lets talk about making money through crap like this - because consumers love crap, thats what they are literally full of.

I’m sure movie studios are finding the internet to be the most effective place to do mass marketing in 2008 - as well as ALL businesses both traditional and non-traditional. However, it is a limited audience and television/previews are still the number one advertising methodology.  Movie previews are actually a good example or pre-cursor to re-targeting through display advertising. Let’s take a deeper look at advertising movies across display advertising networks like Specific Media, 24/7 Real Media, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc…

• A movie has a cost per action of an average dollar amount near $14 (that includes movie and food/beverage)
• An average movie has a budget of around 20 million dollars
• Online advertising costs a movie studio $250K on average to run a successful online display advertising campaign. Even more depending on the budget of the film, and how well the production studio believes it will do. Bigger the star, the better the brand, the bigger the budget.
• The ROI for a $250K display advertising purchase is probably around 4x or $1 million dollars. I would have figured it to be much more, but why throw money down the drain if you cant measure it?

Don’t ask me how I came up with these numbers - because they aren’t meant to be accurate, rather; insightful into how major movie studios determine how much to spend in display advertising. However, how the hell can a movie studio determine whether or not a display ad resulted in a movie-goer? Well there are a few different ways:

• Sell tickets online through the ads themselves. However, I get the feeling that only a few hundred tickets a movie are sold this way and have very little overall impact on sales. So this isn’t much help.
• 
• Have customers fill out a short survey when entering or leaving the movie theatre. This can be either digital (which it should be) or tallied from survey cards and manually entered. This could be a great reporting business for a Nielsen type company to develop. But, this doesn’t exist either.
• Have customers play with a little computer on their armrests and give up customer information (email, address, movie interests, favorite actors/actresses, etc…) Then use this data to do targeted marketing - for example, if someone likes Westerns and a majority of male actors: Then they should have received an email to go to “There Will Be Blood.” Aghhh!  This doesn’t exist either. So how the hell does a movie studio know how much to spend on online display advertising?

They don’t.

I’m sure there are other ways that movie studios and movie theatres could work together to increase visitors and thus sales. The purpose of this post is to inform movie studios of online marketing methods that can result in more visitors to movie theatres, and less in display advertising costs:

Movie Studious: stop paying for display advertising. Run online marketing campaigns that are performance based. Let Tacoda, Blue Lithium, Specific Media, etc… take your business but only on a performance basis. So this might mean the number of tickets sold, number of leads generated (contact information, demographics, and user preference data), click throughs, number of times a preview is watched, etc…. If you continue to run on expensive CPM pricing, you will continue to lose money and be featured on sites that effectively make your ads “Blind” to users because they want to rape you for as much as possible - if you don’t believe me, just look at the site above.

BannerBlindness.com marketing professionals can help your movie studio craft an online marketing campaign that is cost effective, measurable, and profitable! Contact an online marketing professional at Banner Blindness today!