Seth Godin writes that some data from a division of Yahoo shows that people who were exposed to banner advertising became more responsive to text link ads. Even people who didn’t seem to notice the banner ads responded better to the text links. The results suggested a decent ad buy could improve text link click through rates by 249%.
Obviously Yahoo has an interest in this research being correct: they’re a major purveyor of both banner and text link advertising. It does seem intuitively right that good banners will improve text link performance as long as messaging from one to the other is harmonised, but there must be lots of variables that would confound anyone trying to achieve this result for themselves.
Certainly advertisers who use affiliates make much of the fact that they’re doing broad reach banner advertising as well, and sell this as an advantage to affiliates. They do the same when they’re running big TV campaigns, though, so perhaps it’s just the case that brand recognition isn’t 100% conscious. I guess someone will hook TV viewers and internet users up to an MRI scanner soon to establish how and how much this works.
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