According to a new report, “Europe Looks Beyond th Banner Ad”, the Yankee Group predict that online advertising revenue in Western Europe will rise from $1.5 billion in 2001 to $4.2 billion by 2006.
During this time, banner ads are predicted to decline in popularity and the proportion of banner ads to all online advertising will drop from 53% in 2001 to 40% in 2006 with advertisers expected to diversify their adspend amongst alternative forms of marketing such as direct email.
“While direct e-mail marketing seems like a no-brainer for many marketers today, online consumers are likely to find this method of advertising objectionable, as many do now with direct mail – effectively junk advertising online,” said Scott Smith, Director of Internet Strategies Europe. “With banner ad revenue now being concentrated among an increasingly smaller group major portals, and most present interactive ad techniques spotty, uncoordinated, and bandwidth-heavy, a new, comprehensive strategy is necessary to each consumers where they will be in the future. This means tying ITV, mobile, and PC-based Internet together with unified creative techniques.”
Increasingly, says Smith, portals and other leading market movers will offer ‘best fit’ advertising opportunities, “with their great knowledge of the market, portals titans such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL have been successful in guiding advertisers through the minefield of interactive advertising themselves, thus gaining a foothold in non-interactive marketing budgets. This technique of proactively guiding the advertiser will increasingly need to be applied by other aggregators if they hope to grow their ad income.”
