Poor display ad performance is not the result of poor targeting or placement, but rather the result of bad creative, according to a new study by Dynamic Logic.
That statement seems fairly obvious, but it could take the wind out of the sails of new, larger ads from publishers like Gawker and ESPN.com.
But Dynamic's study also unveiled some interesting ways in which marketers fail with their creative, Ad Age reports. Many banner ads are too reserved when it comes to branding. Instead of broadcasting a brand's logo from the very beginning of a Flash animation, many save the logo for the very end -- a costly mistake when most consumers hardly linger on banners.
But there's a flipside to the creative collapse. According to Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer at AKQA, creative is suffering because there are few standards for advertising across the web. "Agencies have to create so many of the same thing," Inamoto said. "Thus the creative becomes somewhat generic, and standards are all over the place."
Dynamic Logic's study examined ads that performed in either the top or bottom 10 percent of the more than 170,000 ads in its database.