Banners don’t work too well, right?

It’s not nice to be interrupted by an ugly banner when I’m in the middle of looking for something completely different.  We can agree on this, correct?

Then again, banners are merely advertising.  Albeit not a very effective form of advertising, but if you’ve got the budget, you may do what you please.  What if though, just WHAT IF, the advertising you saw online was actually useful to you?

Consumers go online to learn, to obtain value, or for leisure.  Let’s call what you intend to do, learn, or find online “intended content” (or “parent content”).

Almost all intended content on the Internet includes some form of advertising.  When this is the case, why not actually create advertising that has value?   Your company can create value in the message it broadcasts, and not necessarily just in profits gained through clicks and purchases.

With the value in the advertising, the message will no longer be a bullhorn into thin air.  Your company’s message could be the provider of added value – perhaps value that the consumer didn’t even intend on receiving.  We’ll call this type of advertising “supplemental content”.

The convergence of content and advertising is an idea that I wrote on a few weeks ago, which I called invisible advertising.  One day, advertising will not be something that is intrusive, disruptive, and unwanted.  It will be something that adds value by being so perfectly placed, perfectly timed, and perfected executed that the line between what is content and what is advertising is invisible.

If supplemental content is another facet of the future of advertising, we have a great deal of creativity and exploration to deal with.

A few ideas on supplemental content

• Picture this: every piece of advertising you see is a vocabulary word with a definition.  Or a piece of trivia.  Or a fact from world history.  This is value — increasing your consumers’ knowledge and intelligence — becomes supplemental content to whatever the parent content they are viewing.  I’m not suggesting that you teach your consumers to have a vocabulary the size of Webster’s.  What I am saying is that your company can innovate to add value in whatever advertising you choose.
• Web overlays on websites should be utilized more.  Educational content via web overlays on websites provide great supplemental content in addition to the intended content on the parent page.  General Electric on the NYTimes.com advertises well like this.
• Creating value through video is underutilized on the web.  On LinkedIn.com, some advertisers use video, which the user can play at any time.  It looks appealing and incites one to click out of sheer curiosity.

Does this make sense?  I’m sure no one would be terribly upset at the idea of getting value instead of interruptions, yes?

Photo via Tahir