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Display advertising accounted for around $5 billion in online advertising spend in 2009, which sounds respectable until you consider that Search advertising on Google alone was roughly 12 billion last year. Amazingly, those 12 billion dollars were generated on search engine results pages (SERPs) that represent roughly 5% of the Internet’s page views. That’s right, 5% of the Internet’s page-views generates more than twice the revenue of the rest of the Internet combined!
Massive imbalance.
Why the massive imbalance? Simply put, the primary difference between Display and Search is targeting. Search engine marketing works because it is a one-to-one advertising system that focuses on the purchase intent of a searcher. Type “Mexican vacations” and presto - you see ads that match your search term. Display advertising, on the other hand, has traditionally been more of a broadcast medium where advertisers buy large blocks of ad space and cannot modify or tailor their campaign down to an individual level. While suited for brand focused campaigns, Display advertising has not been attractive to direct response marketers focused on CPA metrics.
Restoring balance.
A host of new technologies including real time bidding across ad exchanges and dynamic ad serving promises to start balancing Display and Search in 2010. Real time bidding enables advertisers to literally bid on 1 impression at a time - thereby cherry picking the right impression (user) at the right time on the right site, just like search engine marketers have been doing for years. J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan says “display spending will surge by 10.5 percent” in 2010, partly due to improved targeting capabilities. Display advertising is going to start becoming very interesting for search engine marketers and retailers traditionally focused on search-only campaigns.
But it won’t be easy.
Participating in this new Display world requires advanced tools and techniques. There are many technical challenges that need to be overcome to accomplish real time targeting of single impressions at scale. Fortunately, a few demand-side platforms are emerging to enable smart advertisers to start dipping their toes into the real time waters in 2010, Chango being one such platform. Stay tuned for more posts on real time bidding, data sources and dynamic ad capabilities.
Chango will be heading down to the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago next week (Dec 7th-9th). We are looking forward to all the panels and in particular the “Search Becomes the Display OS” track moderated by Incisive Media. We would love to buy a beer and chat with any SEM buyers interested in extending their search-targeted campaign into Display ads. Anyone heading there be sure to 
Assume you only want Chango in-text ads to be displayed in a specific area of a page. For example, you don’t want Chango to accidentally add hyperlinks to content in the left or right column of your blog. To do this you need, you need to define an area around the content where you want the ads to appear. Create a new DIV with a class called something unique like ’showads’.