Banners Up, Criminals Down

Not So Fast, Grabby

Two notes from the social feed this week that made me wonder if we've got a trend. And if we've got this one, it's a pretty big one.

First, news out of Paris that Criteo, the market leader in B2C retargeting for years, passed $1B in sales. That's a whole lot of ads, and the remarkable thing about that amount is just how deep and sustainable it is. Criteo is a worldwide operation, with banner ads working on a CPC basis, and placements in any number of languages and consumer categories. They also were leaders in monetizing mobile, and making the utterly correct move of having their own publisher relation and media buying team, rather than relying on the same old automated indexes that everyone else used. When ad fraud and viewability went from niche to world-changing problem in 2014 and 2015, Criteo didn't just have better and more exclusive ad inventory. They had the only placements that anyone felt good about having. The doom and gloom probably helped their sales, not hurt.

Next, the report from Integral Ad Sciences, the ad monitoring business that's been reflecting the doom and gloom in the sector for years now. Funny thing: they think this world has turned the corner as well, with a sharp rise in media quality in Q4 of last year, and fraud dropping by as much as a third in programmatic display. Viewability also kicked up for programmatic, and even did so on the dirty old exchanges, and while the numbers are still not where they should be -- honestly, when you know there's fraud and non-viewable ads in your campaign, the idea that there is less of it is not a great feeling -- it's still on the right side of the trends.

Why? Well, because Web advertising is best understood as a Google / Alphabet product, and that company isn't going to let a revenue stream go to ground, just because a bunch of criminals want to make it so. Pretty smart people there, and reasonably well-capitalized. They might be able to fight against the tide of crime.

And while this isn't probably going to be a smooth arc to perfection, since ad fraud is such a target rich environment with worldwide access, the fact that the world got better in 2015 is, just by itself, incredibly encouraging. It proves that there is not an ocean of malfeasance, and the good actors are not armed with brooms. It's more of a fair fight than that.

But hold on. Aren't banners still something that no one ever clicks on purpose, and built on the current user experience mirage of error clicks on mobile? Well, there's some of that, especially for low brands and pure acquisition moves, and marketers that are dumb/lazy enough to think that anything, even a premium ad campaign in the safest of environments, is truly set and forget.

But for good brands on solid content sites, for advertisers that know enough to run A/B tests to show lift, and use the medium for a constant stream of learning engine goodness?

Well, they probably never stopped running ads. Because ads work. Always have, always will, especially if you've got the right list, offer and execution. T'was ever thus, t'was ever will be. Even in a world with fraud.

Oh, and one last thing for all of the people who seem so invested in the death of a medium...

What medium were you hoping would gain from the demise of this one?

And hasn't someone else declared it's dead yet, too?

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