It's odd that with over 10 years of facts piled up against 'click' based banners, marketers still employ them.

Well, here's another bit of research proving you'd have to be a pretzel to logically keep buying them.

99% of cookies examined never click.

More than expected, a tiny fraction of people ever click on an ad. In fact, 99% of stable cookies examined never click on an ad. This is a more pronounced disparity than was reported in comScore’s study. Further, users who have clicked in the past are twice as likely to click again in the future.

Many clicks are accidental.

Nearly 20% of ads that received any click activity received multiple clicks within the same impression, suggesting that these clicks were unintentional. This effect is especially seen among online gamers, who clicked 43% more often than non-gamers, and on mobile devices where users clicked 123% more often.

Intentional clickers are lower income.

An examination of who tended to click paints a picture of an audience that may not be attractive to most advertisers. Clickers tend to be lower income, older and late technical neophytes.

More here.

Here's some research that every CMO should be aware of. An analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards shows a substantial return on marketing investment is based on creativity. The study shows that the most creatively-awarded advertising campaigns are 11 times more efficient at delivering business success.

The study - which builds on findings from an earlier study by the IPA, Marketing in the Era of Accountability (2007) - involved analysis of a wide range of award-winning and non-winning campaigns,

The Thinkbox/IPA analysis examined both the effectiveness (in terms of a campaign’s ability to drive business effects such as share, sales, profit and loyalty) and the efficiency (in terms of share growth per point of Excess Share of Voice) of creatively-awarded and non-awarded campaigns.

Key findings include:

• Pound for pound, creativity makes ad campaigns more efficient; on average, creatively-awarded campaigns (i.e. in major awards competitions recognised by The Gunn Report) are at least 11 times more efficient.
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The vast majority of Gunn Report creative award scores (74%) are for TV commercials, showing that TV creativity is at the heart of the success of these campaigns. The remaining scores cover press and online.


• The more creatively-awarded a campaign, the more effective it becomes.
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Creatively awarded campaigns are much more likely to be ‘emotional’ than ‘rational’ (44% vs. 19%). This partly explains the prevalence of TV in creatively-awarded campaigns as TV creates emotion better than other media (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, IPA).
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Investing in creativity is a powerful way to achieve fame (i.e. buzz). The study shows that brands can buy awareness but not fame; fame is proven to be at the heart of the most effective advertising (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability, IPA).


• Creatively-awarded campaigns that invest strongly in Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) perform particularly well, suggesting that many creative campaigns could further improve ROMI by investing more in Share of Voice (SOV).


• Despite generally being disadvantaged by lower levels of ESOV, creatively-awarded campaigns still generate more and greater business effects than non-awarded ones.
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With the same level of ESOV, creatively-awarded campaigns would have driven twice as much market share growth as non-awarded ones.


• Creative awards strongly reflect consumer liking of ad campaigns. On average, 35% of consumers ranked Gunn awarded campaigns as ‘highly liked’ versus just 20% for non-Gunn awarded campaigns. Liking an ad is the best predictor of business success (source: Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ IPA).

The often overlooked, hidden value of creativity is that it can also drive down the cost of production execution. People want to attach themselves to better ideas and will cut prices and over deliver just for the opportunity. "A great idea has many fathers. A bad idea is an orphan" is as true today as ever.

The problem that remains, though, is the fact that not every agency, or everybody can come up with truly great ideas. Fallacies like, "A great idea can come from anyone" are just that, fallacies, typically spoken by those who don't have a clue. To make matters worse, given an ever increasing aversion to risk, not every CMO will approve great creative over the mediocre. Or, as often as the case may be, even recognize it in the first place.

And what should be understood is great creative is only half the effort. Great creative ideas that actually see the light of marketing dollars will always require great salesmen to sell through and around, shepherding the fragile thoughts past the various kill zones, such as focus groups, politics, committees. And yes, the bosses wife.

Based on free user created content, selling user profile information and some weird notion that it's going to be an advertising midas, Facebook is valued at $50 to $75b. Following the lemming run, there's now a horde of internet start ups solely being valued on their potential to generate advertising revenue. Yet, the internet continues to suck as an advertising medium. Banner ads average one click in a thousand. Facebook's click through is an anemic .05% and possibly less. And what do internet start ups do in order to build brand and create awareness? They don't advertise on the web, they advertise on the Super Bowl. Talk about faith in the industry.

Hate to burst the bubble, but:

If there is a bubble, then advertising is fueling it, but not as it did 11 years ago. Rather than glitzy ad campaigns pumping stock prices, it's the hope of advertising as a source of revenue that is swelling companies' paper worth. Beneath that hope is the perhaps unconscious belief that the largesse of marketers is infinite, an all-too-convenient forgetting that big advertisers are bureaucratic and increasingly austere when it comes to how they spend. They, and their agencies, are not Medicis for the digital era who want to spend their days funding sociology experiments.

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