Why are your banner ads so boring?

You know it: most of the people who are seeing your digital ads are going to ignore them. You can put a lot of effort into targeting, and segmenting your specific audiences, using all the advanced features of Facebook’s pixels and Google tags but, basically at the end of the day, only a small percentage of the people you reach will be engaged. It’s not your fault, that’s just how digital advertising works today.
Banner ad click through rates have fallen to 0.06% (Google), but this is far from the only problem. Many banners are never actually viewed by anyone, automated bots carry out click fraud, ad blockers enable users to block unwanted ads and viewers have learned to ignore banners.
Yes you spend…
You can do your best trying to follow the best practices and to apply all the tricks you’ve learned in years of hard work, but you have to take into account that the same PC, often even the “personal” smartphone, is shared by many people inside the household and not everyone log in their account while surfing the web from the spouse laptop or mom’s iPhone.
Even if you are lucky enough to show your ads to people who don’t share their devices with others, fact is that you can’t target your ads to any specific audience. Think about that: if you want to target all people interested in your beautiful shoes, you are talking to many different personas: the Millenials, the X generation, men, women, students and workers… In order to get anyone’s attention you need to dilute your story and you will never be sure if everyone is getting the right messages out of the many you’ve worked on.
The good side of AI
A solution to this problem comes from Artificial Intelligence. No, we’re not talking about those boring bots who try to get your attention on most websites and Facebook’s pages. That’s just a basic example of AI. Think about a system that’s capable of understanding who’s looking at the screen, and shows them only the ad or version of the ad that is relevant for them. Does this seem possible? The good news is that will be soon available thanks to a technology called MorphCast. What it does is in fact pretty simple. It accesses the camera of user’s device to find out some basic facts, like age and gender, in order to deliver the choose the best message, reassuring you that the pink and cute creativity you’ve crafted for the Millenial wannabe influencer won’t be delivered to the long bearded 50 something Generation X that’s staring at the screen.
That’s just the beginning. Even if you manage to match the message with the specific target, you can’t be sure that the person on the other side is looking at it. With the standard marketing tools you can know how many advertising you’ve delivered and how many seconds of your video have been streamed, but you will never know if they’ve really been seen. One can open a page and, while the video is shown, do anything else: talk with someone, cuddle his pet, peek at his tablet’s display. In any case, your ads has been delivered, you’ve paid for it but it won’t convert, and you have absolutely no clue on why. By using Morphcast, you can see if your audience is not looking at the screen and pause the ads, or call for their attention. Even better, you can understand from their facial gestures if they are entertained, amused or just bored. Basically, a marketer’s dream.
Skeptical about privacy?
That’s understable but we’ve got good news: MorphCast is fully respectful of user’s privacy and personal data, does not need any app or plugin installed by the user and it’s fully GDPR compliant. Yes, the adaptive era of advertising is here…

