With display advertising getting such a bad rap when it comes to user experience – slowing down the page load time – and low click-through rates, LinkedIn’s global head of products, marketing solutions Russell Glass is doubtful the ads will remain on platforms like LinkedIn.
“In terms of how I think in a number of years there won’t be display advertising on a site like LinkedIn,” he told B&T.
Speaking further from his own perspective, he suspects, “most of the large publishers and large media providers like LinkedIn will move away from display advertising over time.”
Microsoft called it quits a few months ago on its display advertising unit, and Glass also pointed out many social platforms like Twitter don’t have display advertising anymore.
He puts the eventual abolishing of display ads down to the fact many of them have been irrelevant and “people have been trained to ignore it”.
“The other part of it is, it’s really not the best format to have engaging conversations with marketers. And it just happens to be all we have today,” he added. “It’s the shipping crate unit of the internet today.”
However, earlier this year in January Christian Bartens, CEO of analytics company Datalicious, reckons display advertising, particularly on Facebook, wasn’t getting the credit it deserved.
He believed too many companies focus on a ‘last click attribution’ model, a model where the last media channel a consumer visits to purchase something is the one that gets all the credit for the campaign. And typically that’s not display advertising.
In an effort to ramp up display advertising and make it not suck, programmatic company Rocket Fuel released a large study with exactly how to make your display ads work.
The study delved down into numerous verticals, such as automotive, media, entertainment, showing which colours work, what messages provide higher engagement and the like.
However, when questioning LinkedIn’s Glass about how displayed advertising was going, he said “in the wrong direction”.
He noted that much of the LinkedIn traffic is coming from mobile, as every other site, and display advertising isn’t great on mobile devices.
It’s one of the reasons ad blocking has become so prevalent, which has led to ad experts having opposite opinions on the matter on whether it’s good or bad for the industry.
Instead of display advertising, Glass hailed the sponsored update offering the platform has for brands, calling it “phenomenal”.
“They’re rich, they’re relevant, they’re targeted, they’re temporal.
“That’s where all of this I think will go over time.”
