New Life for Online Image Advertising

• by Dan Bailey

Gone are the days of expensive AOL banner ads – today SEM text ads are reigning king (for ease of serve and reporting). Yet it’s difficult to think that image holds a weak place in the web world. As the visual powers of media channels such as Second Life seem to dwindle, image media technologies are still under experimentation for advertisers to find what “sticks.” While all doubt seems quelled regarding the need for company websites, it is the web “spokes” around these hubs that still require exploration.

I recently read an article about the rise of wallpaper advertising. Specifically, the company WeTransfer grants users free file transfer but achieves revenue from wallpaper advertising shown during file transfer (http://www.springwise.com/marketing_advertising/wetransfer/). Meanwhile services such as Google Images and Flickr continue to grow keyword indices of available image for online search results. The greater such libraries grow the more they help the cause of online visual advertising with contextual or semantic relevance to the viewer and reporting to the advertiser.

We are visual people – all integral to evolving the optical experiments of this great online world.

– Jake Aull, www.zenofbrand.com