Banner advertising

A banner is a strip of advertising material on a web page, often appearing at the head or foot of the page and it can be any size. The page can be a ‘home' page of a website, an advertiser's own or someone else's, or some other page which receives a great deal of visitor traffic. The banner advertisement was first introduced on the pages of a Web-published magazine – Hot Wired, the companion to the traditional-media publication Wired – in October 1994 and since then, the banner has spread throughout the Web. A banner advertisement is a small graphics link, sometimes called a ‘hot link', placed on a Web page; the banner is linked to the advertiser's Web pages, so that clicking on it transports the visitor into the advertiser's liar. Thus, the main function of a banner is to direct the visitor to a website where more information can be obtained. Once at the website, the visitor can be persuaded to purchase a product or service. Unlike a press advertisement, which can offer information, to be sent for by filling in a coupon or making a telephone call, the website, because its size is theoretically limited, can hold all the information the visitor is likely to need for making purchasing decisions.

Banner advertising features

Banner designs vary widely, limited only by the demands of the brief, the budget and the imagination of the designer. However, nearly all banner advertisements have one feature in common which is the request ‘click here', ‘click now' or an equivalent. Some banners are interactive, encouraging the visitor to carry out an action within the banner; for example, the visitor may ask one or more questions by using a pull-down menu.

What can be said here is that in many ways, banner advertisements are perhaps the ‘purest' application of traditional advertising skills on the Web. In fact, the principal difference between advertising on the Internet and general advertising arises from the initial exposure to the advert. This is not in terms of content, but as a result of the text structure of Internet adverts. Because of the structural difference, there is a potential change in the way an Internet advert is processed. Thus, while the initial processing of a banner advert is basically the same as that of any print advert, especially posters, further processing will require what Rossiter and Bellman have called a Web ad schema; this Web schema takes over when someone clicks on the banner advert and this is where the difference lies. (Steven Armstrong, 2001, p. 5)

Please see our other banner related articles for more banner advertising resources.