Why social advertising beats display advertising

Introduction

I’ve long been skeptical of display advertising. At least my students know this, since ever year I start the digital marketing course by giving a lecture on why display sucks (and why inbound / search-engine marketing performs much better).

But this post is not about the many pitfalls of display. Rather, it’s outlining three arguments as to why I nowadays prefer social advertising, epitomized by Facebook Ads, over display advertising. Without further ado, here are the reasons why social rocks at the moment.

1. Quality of contacts

It’s commonly known Facebook advertising is cheap in comparison to many advertising channels, when measured by CPM or cost per individual reached. Display can be even cheaper, so isn’t that better? No, absolutely not. Reach or impressions are completely fallacious metrics — their business value approaches zero. Orders of magnitude more important is the quality of contacts.

The quality of Facebook traffic, when looking at post-click behavior, tends to be better than the quality of display traffic. Even when media companies speak of “premium inventory”, the results are weak. People just don’t like banner ads. The people who click them, if they are people and not bots to begin with, often exit the site instantly without clicking further.

2. Social interaction

People actually interact with social ads. They pose questions, like them and even share them to their friends. Share advertisements? OMG, but they really do. That represents an overkill opportunity for a brand to interact with its customer base, and systematically gather feedback and customer insight. This is simply not possible with any other form of advertising, display including.

Display ads, albeit using rich media executions, are completely static and dead when it comes to social interaction. Whereas social advertising creates an opportunity to gather social proof and actual word-of-mouth, even viral diffusion, in the one and same advertising platform, display advertising is completely lacking the social dimension.

3. Better ad formats

Social advertising, specifically Facebook gives a great flexibility in combining text, images and video. Typically, a banner ad can only fit a brief slogan (“Just do it.”), whereas a social advertisement can include many sentences of text, a compelling picture and even link description that together give the advertisers the ability to communicate the whole story of the company or its offering in one advertisement.

But isn’t that boring? No, you can craft it in a compelling way – the huge advantage is that people don’t even need to click to learn the most essential. If the goal of advertising is to inform about offerings, social advertising is among the most efficient ways to actually do it.

Conclusion

That’s it. I don’t see a way for display advertising to overcome these advantages of social advertising. Notice that I didn’t mention the superior targeting criteria — this is because display is quickly catching up to Facebook in that respect. It just won’t be enough.