Banner Advertising in Social Networks
Have you ever clicked on a banner ad and immediately regretted it? You're sitting at your computer, relaxing with some wine, chatting with a friend on Facebook and there it is, "Are you a **INSERT TARGETED AD HERE**? So, you take a second of self reflection and decide if you really are a deep sea coral collector. Well, you are, and that's enough reason to click on the ad.
CLICK...loading..loading..."That's not what I wanted, I thought that said deep sea coral collector."
Leaving the website in disgust vowing never to click another banner ad again. This ever happen to you? It's the catalyst for this post and the reason for me to lose two days of sleep pondering about the actual effectiveness of banner ads within social networks.
Honestly, I don't have a ton of faith in marketing through social networks for most consumer products and services regarding the intent to buy. I've never met anyone in my years on this earth that joined a group of friends in order to be sold something, never. The notion that people want to connect with their friends and relatives all while buying a new cell phone seems a bit far fetched. The mind set of a typical social network participant is solely to connect with the people they may or may not care about. Not to be sold on the latest and greatest,"Who's face is this" banner ad.
The overabundance of misleading advertisements within social media venues online is astounding. Putting banners in these networks was a great business idea. It had all the right attributes to be a great revenue stream for the owners of the networks. However, the abuse and neglect of the quality and amount of ads that penetrated these networks went unchecked. Making money on advertising prioritized itself above the experience of the users within the network.
This brings me to my point.
How will the over saturation of banners and marketing within social networks affect the tendencies of internet users going forward? Will it help promote business or will it desensitize users in such a way that banners become an ineffective means of advertising? I think the latter. I'm going to try and apply a law of economics to this situation to explain, bear with me. The law of diminishing marginal utility states, "as a person increases consumption of a product - while keeping consumption of other products constant - there is a decline in the marginal utility that person derives from consuming each additional unit of that product." Basically, this states if you tried to eat 5 hamburgers, each hamburger you ate would give you less and less satisfaction. The satisfaction potentially could diminish to the point that the hamburger takes satisfaction away from you. Make sense?
Thus, applying this law to the consumption of banner ads, one can conclude that the over saturation of banner ads within social networks will only achieve a reduction in banner effectiveness in the future. Now this only applies to the users within the social networks that have been exposed to the banners, but looking into the future, that's a massive amount of people! 175+ million on Facebook, 110+ million on MySpace and then there's OrKut, Bebo, Classmates, Hi5, Imeem, Digg and others. If what I'm saying here comes to fruition, it will be a big problem.
