Problems With Digital Advertising

Personally I cannot stand digital advertising, all of the pop-ups and banner ads on websites are annoying, and many people agree that digital advertising needs to make some major changes before it can be considered effective.  Some people argue that the majority of people now own DVR’s and TiVo’s, allowing the viewing audience to skip the commercials, rendering the traditional television ads increasingly ineffective.  These people say that due to this phenomenon, digital advertising is the way to go to get the message out to the masses about your product or service.  I find this view to be false.

I believe that digital advertising faces many problems that disallow it from being effective.  For one, on a majority of websites, the ads are displayed as banner ads, and they are ridiculously cluttered.  There are often ten to twenty ads thrown onto a single webpage with no sense of rhyme or reason to their placement.  Also, some ads seem shady as if they are scams trying to rid us of our money.  This has taught us to become wary of banner ads and to promptly “x” out of all pop-ups, never really giving the real ads a chance.  Finally, people want to be in control when they are on the web.  When surfing the web, the last thing I want to do is deal with the usually irrelevant advertisements because I am on the web for a purpose.  For example, I visit ESPN’s website to check the NFL and college football scores and stats, not to view the ad telling me how cool the nexus7 tablet is and why I must buy it.  An audience will watch the humorous ads on TV because they are already there to view something, they’ll listen to the catchy advertisement jingles on the radio because they are already there to listen to something, so how do you catch the audience surfing the webs attention?

A final issue is that more and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile phones and tablets.  The small screens of these devices make the banner ads used on the web extremely ineffective.  It will be interesting to see what changes will be made in digital advertising in order to deal with this relatively new issue.   


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