Someone needs to help me with this one:
I need to understand where we're headed with this, because I use banner ads to sell things, and if bright, goofy-looking peacocks with call-to-action tailfeathers have supplanted the more orthodox "happy consumer" as the default image for selling things to people, then I want to know where my copy of the memo was.
This banner was on Yahoo today (I have seen permutations on other high volume sites), which leads us to two very simple conclusions. 1) Somebody believed in the peacock strongly enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, and 2) It is surpassing more...erm...conventional ad images in conversion rates (or otherwise it would have been replaced).
I understand the trend of using "fun" if utterly irrelevant images for an ad, although it has been my experience that one ends up seeing an increase in clicks but static total conversions. I'm just surprised that it's working well enough to maintain a foothold in the banner inventory I've been seeing lately. Let's play a little game....
Take the following three images (sorry about the fuzziness) that I pulled directly from Yahoo Mail's left navigation sidebar:
Now match them to the following text ads with which they were associated:
Not easy to do. In truth, the images are matched to the text ads right below them, but this makes about as much sense as a peacock getting me to investigate mortgage services. Yet, these things are all over Yahoo and hotmail, as if they are the most natural associations in the world. That being said, any good online marketer follows the numbers, and if a headshot of Ernest Borgnine will give my conversion rate a half percent lift over an image that makes sense, then I'll more likely than not put him up. We're all willing slaves to the numbers, to some extent.
I just can't help but feel a little silly about it. People, us, we, are smarter than this, aren't we? These ads shouldn't work at all. We should look at a peacock ad and say out loud "Wha-huh?" for a split-second before we ignore the banner utterly and move about our business. But evidently we don't. And that both fascinates and scares me a little, because I have no idea where this line of reasoning ends. I suppose these random image pairings are no different than letting Paris Hilton tell me where to buy hamburgers on TV, but one wonders if we are not witnessing the devolution of our career paths to the point where we just throw darts at the royalty-free section of Getty Images to see what sticks.
I hope my job stays more interesting than that.
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