Display Advertising is the perfect channel for branding campaigns. A targetted media plan focused on impactant placements, combined with interactive rich media ads and creative scenario will really have an impact on your brand, very likely way cheaper than a traditionnal offline advertising channels. I would love to manage some of these branding campaigns some days, in this advertising world were each click cost a conversion and where the goal is to maximize the unique users within the target audience. Get back to real world though!

Indeed, for those like us who need to get immediate Money Back from their Media Investment, it is another story and Display Advertising becomes one of the most difficult channel to break even. Display is different to Search Marketing in at least three key points which make difficult beeing profitable :

1. you have to Push your Ads to the Users, whom doesn’t expect it right now
2. you are competing with Advertisers from Different Industries with different goals, strategy, budget and seasonality
3. Display Advertising is a Negotiation Channel, which means you pay a different price than other advertisers. Being big is a clearly an asset to enter the channel.

Display is a also a very specific and complex channel, with specific tools and technologies, lots of different sites, placements, audience, networks, performance shifts depending on publisher inventory, high creative fatigue and not always a good visibility. This means the performance delta between a good and bad campaign could have a factor of x100 while it is maybe x10 in email and x5 in search. In other words a Display Campaign could really bomb !

As a result, it becomes a very difficult channel for low to mid-size advertisers for profitable direct marketing campaigns because of high entry media price and little experience on optimizing campaigns.

So why should I try it, I am happy doing only Adwords ?

Why ? because Display – like Emailing – is scalable and will create and boost the demand for your product and brand while search only “answers”. In addition, impulsive buy products often have very little search terms and query volume. Display will also drive indirect revenue into other channels, especially brand channels (DirectTyping, Organic and Paid Serach brand keywords) that you will maybe not take into account in your cost calculation as tracking is not that easy and differs from one tool to another.

Fortunatelly, there are plenty of advertisers making immediate money through this channel ! But this depends on the industry and product. Here are some industries which may perform well on this channel from a Direct Marketing standpoint : Magazines, Betting, Dating, DVD rental, Free products and Samples, Sweepstakes… On the other hand, high-tech e-commerce websites (and generally speaking low gross margin products) would never be able to do Display Advertising with immediate profitability, although on a P&L point of view it’ll work as the Branding they’ve done through these campaigns helped them getting free qualified direct traffic.

When I was working for Cdiscount.com, a french e-commerce leader with 5M clients, we started investing massivelly in Display while keeping tough ROI goals. Although we’ve been having some extremelly good post-click performances and cost per session, we would never make immediate profit (gross margin – advertising cost) as it could be the case in search, but the overall P&L was still good and the awarness ad-hoc indicators were up, ending up with brand traffic regular growth.

At Powerspace, we believe we can do great on Display Advertising for our Direct Marketing clients, providing them at fix cost new customers coming from fresh advertising placements on qualitative sites, which is very unusual on a performance based environment. Here are our assets to succeed as an agency where Advertisers may not :

** We have great experience of what works and what doesn’t

** We buy a lot of volume, at good price, from Run Of Network inventory to targeted placements

** We use the right tools to serve, optimize, and test ads

** We optimize creatives based on our Best Practices and test results

** We advice our clients on the offer and landing pages

So if you think you have the right offer and you want to do big volume in the French market, feel free to contact us : http://powerspace.com