Ross McNab, director of business development at MediaMind, shows how to court the consumer with display advertising, and why this is what everyone should be doing.

At the Brand Summit in Coronado, Calif., Ross McNab, director of business development at MediaMind, addressed the biggest barriers to digital investment.

"We have an overreliance on the click -- only one in 1,000 people click on a banner ad, and half of all display ad clicks come from only 6 percent of the online population," he said. "In other words, it's becoming increasingly hard to get people to click on your ads."

The concept of "time spent" has entered into the marketplace as marketers are beginning to talk about how engaged users are. As the audience becomes more engaged in the content, it becomes exponentially harder to provoke a direct response.

"In fact," McNab said, "sites where you have a longer time spent have less clicks because users do not want to navigate away from the content."

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Taking this into account, MediaMind is focusing on quality, or time, instead of quantity, or clicks, turning branding into an interaction and learning experience. Studies have shown that people remember 70 to 90 percent of what they see, hear, and touch (compared with remembering only 30 percent of what they see, and 50 percent of what they see and hear). McNab noted that online is especially effective because it can employ all three sensory perceptions.

Understanding all of this is necessary when building a storyline for advertisements. MediaMind found that giving the viewer an easy way to be in control encouraged engagement. This type of interaction can also be promoted with social media; the fact that 80 percent of content on YouTube is professionally produced implies that the marriage between social and display advertising is being recognized as a valuable one.

MediaMind has created a rich meter engagement unit called the "dwell rate," which is a percentage of impressions engaged with by the user. The dwell rate came about because "people who dwell are 69 percent more likely to go to the website, and three times more likely to do branded keyword searches."

Picking up on this trend, MediaMind is now able to effectively track consumer behavior and continue to challenge passé perceptions about display advertising.

McNab concluded by saying that display advertising is entering a new phase of delivering content to page viewers without leaving the publisher's site and engaging consumers by giving them control.

"Don't trust click-through as the sole means of campaign success," McNab warned. "I truly believe the most innovative thing a marketer can do is to justify a campaign with a 0 percent click-through rating."

Lucia Davis is associate editor for iMedia Connection.

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