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4  Interactive advertising

How positively do you view interactive advertising as a communications tool? Even today, 

there are relatively few advertisers who have used interactive advertising. The first 468 by 

68 pixels banner ad was placed on Hotwired in 1995 and the call to action ‘Click here!’ gen-

erated a clickthrough of 25%. Since then, the clickthrough rate (CTR) has fallen dramati-

cally as many consumers suffer from ‘banner blindness’ – they ignore anything on a website 

that looks like an ad. The Doubleclick compilation of ad response (

www.doubleclick.com

) 

shows that today the average CTR is typically less than 0.1%, although video ads can receive 

a higher response rate. This low response rate, combined with relatively high costs of over 

£20 per thousands of ads served, has seemingly made some marketers prejudiced against 

interactive advertising. But we will see that there are many innovative approaches to inter-

active advertising which are proved to increase brand awareness and purchase intent. Given 

these limitations to banner ads, most media owners, digital marketing agencies and industry 

bodies now refer to ‘interactive or display advertising’, which is more suggestive of the range 

of options.

Online ads also seem to provide a