Display or not Display?

Display or not display? Of course, many talk about the decline in the average CTR. How not to agree? I was still young during the first dot.com era so I can't compare however my experience in the last few years is that on average, a very satisfactory CTR is 0.50%, for rich media ads into highly branded environments, which goes down to 0.20% for premium ad buys through ad networks, to end to a meagre 0.05% for cheap blind buys!
I would personally cut down the expenditure for simple display advertising, especially where I can't have control of the inventory where my ads or clients' ads will be running.

A media agency featured in ClickZ suggest to complement/enrich display advertisement (standard and non standard ads) with a few tools – I omit paid search as this, for me, it is part of the online media but it is a ‘pull’ method hence does not make too much sense to put them all together especially when talking about effectiveness and response rates.

Complimentary tools are, then:
- text links - best and most conveniently bought and operated through Google content networks. My experience is positive when it is about extending the reach for my clients at relatively cheaper rates, especially if bought on a CPC base; also, they increase the impact of the overall display when accompanied by the same advertisers' display creative (see example)
- in text ads - a different, more advanced and "original" form of contextual advertising, consisting in sponsoring certain keywords which are linked to pop-up windows which contains from simple text to rich media ads to video. No experience with this but worth a try especially as these can be bought on a CPC base. Vibrant media and Kontera are leaders in the market.
- Advertorials - this is part of a social/pr strategy. Create advertorial filled with links driving to the advertisers webpage. Many bloggers in the blogosphere must be struggling to keep their site fresh and html rich for selling to advertisers - content can then be sold or given for free to either minor related bloggers or else one can ask premium bloggers to publish our content in exchange for a fee. The benefit is reciprocal, worth a try. I will investigate further on this. Anyone can help?

Leave aside Facebook social ads - it's a personal feeling I have not used this strategy and I don't think I will in the future, but I believe this is a waste of time and resources. Audience in facebook is not in the shopping mood and these ads are hardly noticed, clicked-through, and, in the worst cases, they can be simply untargeted and disruptive.

Newsletter advertising? Again, this is good if comes as an add-ons service, but I would not buy text links and/or various forms of display advertising in newsletter alone. Let's face it the general open rate is low and the CTR for the advertiser link is ridiculous. Unless you guarantee a coverage of at least 30% of the newsletter, which is the chance of being noticed?

Widget advertising could be interesting but only if the widget is original, relevant to the brands/users and useful. There is a feeling of warn-out in the sectors, and even the chance for the widget to get noticed again is very meagre. I would cross-out completely advertising within widget and/or any other applications (eg. Messenger), while give a go to cost effective white-label solutions.

Then, various video advertising (pre, post but also text links and fixed ads while the video is rolling). Again, a winning and engaging video will overshadow any surrounding advertisement, unless this is even more engaging and compelling than the video.

I am very sceptical with splash pages however my experience as a 'user' is favourable to interstitial (eg. during a page loading), especially for branding purposes.

More to follow - thanks for reading!

An inspiring source for this was ClickZ article "Ten Things to Do Besides banners"