Kantar Media has released its 2012 Canadian Online Ad Trends Analysis report, highlighting the rapid movement toward rich media units and the subsequent disappearance of display ads, as well as addressing ad clutter and the different formats that exist on various types of sites.
While the shift from display advertising to rich media formats is considerable, moving from around 20% of all online ad occurrences in 2007 to just over 50% at the end of 2011, there are still a number of site categories that rely mostly on standard advertising.
For example, on local news sites, an average of 56.4% of placements are standard display ads and on music, broadcast and radio sites (such as the music sections of AOL and Yahoo! as well as sites operated by national radio networks) 58.1% of ads are the same. Newspapers have 60.1% display ads on their sites and local market radio station sites have an average of 29.6%.
On the other hand, automotive sites have been found to use the least amount of display advertising, where the average amount of rich media ads sits at 75%. Other sites that rely more on multimedia advertising include computer and technology sites (74.7%), business, finance and investing sites (68.5%) as well as movies, cable and TV sites (64.9%).
Also, according to the trend report, leaderboard and medium rectangle ads are the most favoured sizes for online advertising, with 36.9% and 35% (respectively) of all ads tracked by Kantar Media sitting in those two categories. Non-standard sizes account for 13.9%, skyscrapers for 8.7% and other IAB sizes for 5.5%.
More than 6.7 million pages of Canadian websites were analyzed by the media company in 2011, and across the representative sample, it found that there was an average of 2.06 paid ads per page (this excludes in-house ad messages from publishers). Taking the average and expressing it as an index of 100, Kantar Media found that careers and employment sites had the least amount of clutter, followed by other categories such as travel, TV station and radio station sites. The most cluttered categories include shopping, local news and guides, and women’s sites.
The report also looked at which brands spent the most on online advertising for new product launches, with Microsoft Office 365 having seen the highest share of web ad occurrences, followed by Pennington Plus Store, Bell Wireless, LeRenard.ca Coupon Marketing and the Threadless Tee Store. In addition, the top advertisers who typically allocate their display advertising placements between both French and English include P&G, Capital One Financial, Ford, Honda and General Motors.
