Look Who�s Making a Comeback: LGBT Banner Ads

State-of-the-Art Technology Allows for Hyper-Targeting ofBanner Advertising to Specific Demographics and RegionsThere is a major shift occurring in terms of how companies are able to market themselves online, tapping into many of the techniques learned first with Google AdWords and then with Facebook Ads, and applying those techniques to the world of highly targeted banner advertising in 2014.Search marketing taught companies how to efficiently target their specific demographic, tapping into the search terms their potential customers were typing in to Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. With Google AdWords dominating this landscape, the concept of managing and optimizing a marketing campaign based on knowing what the ideal search terms were for driving the best customers to one�s website became commonplace, and for the most common search terms, such as �gay travel�, the cost was higher because companies were bidding against one another to be the #1 advertised search result. Since the majority of these search engine ad buys were CPC-based (cost-per-click, or paying a maximum dollar amount for each click-through to a company�s website or landing page), online marketing became highly monitored, measured and analyzed for maximum performance. As a result, this became the norm, raising the bar while setting a new baseline for ad performance expectations.With social media, online advertising took what worked for search, but added a twist. Rather than focus on the key search terms a company�s target demographic might be searching for, an ad on Facebook allowed the advertiser to focus on a person�s profile demographics instead. So if someone identified as gay, lived in Chicago and showed a love for history or museums or nightlife, this individual could be targeted with an ad based on those interests. Many of the same rules and concepts from search engine marketing applied, including bidding against competitors on highly desired profile demographics and paying on a CPC (cost-per click) basis. When it came to monitoring, measuring and analyzing performance, Facebook wrote the rulebook from scratch with Facebook Insights, focusing on new marketing terms such as �engagement� and reinforcing the idea that the most successful campaign, paid or free, in social media is a campaign where individuals comment, like, share (or ReTweet) the advertiser�s content.Fast forward to 2014, and we find that much of what has been developed and learned over these past few years in search engine and social media advertising techniques is now being applied to the world of banner ads as well. The most difficult hurdles were bringing all of the various banner ad server technologies together into a system that could all speak the same language, as well as harnessing computer power that c

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