Your view of ad networks and the banners they sling all depends on where you sit in the marketing landscape of the consumer, the agency, the client, the creative and, yes, even our industry.

Ad networks are an insidious evil that have perpetrated our industry. They are a viral, exploding business model that fills our world with more annoying drivel fired at us one 30k banner at a time. It’s the business equivalent of a massive outdoor flea market. It’s eBay for display advertising. OK, OK… I’ll calm down.

Ad networks are causing some profound changes to the advertising landscape. Is it their fault that we’re stuck with the banner? No, of course not. It’s our fault. We all stopped doing truly innovative advertising online. Publishers became locked in their designs, and sites became so expensive to modify with ever-expanding and more technical infrastructures, that we all got stuck in a system.

The agencies and the clients have produced so many ads at specific formats and requirements that any new format has a massive uphill battle. We’ve built a banner infrastructure. Getting out of it may be as difficult as reducing our dependence on oil. You could create the greatest human transportation device in the world, one that runs on electricity, that allows almost 30 percent of the entire U.S. population to commute back and forth to work, but if you couldn’t use it when it was raining, and if cities banned their use on sidewalks or roads, it wouldn’t work. We’re mired in the same atrophied place online.

So what changed over the last three years in online advertising and why is it worse than ever? Why does it seem like the quality of advertising online is going down at an ever alarming rate? Ad networks.

Again, it is not their fault, it’s what they’ve enabled that has created the current situation. The web grew too fast. Our consumption of online content grew too fast. And there is still not a model other than advertising that really pays for it all. More and more pages are viewed, and yet there just isn’t enough advertising at premium prices to fill the space. Thirty percent of consumption and only 6 percent of advertising spending is done online. That’s basic market economics. Too much supply, too little demand, prices plummet.

Enter the ad network to fill that void of billions and billions of ad impressions. The sales staffs at the larger sites could not possibly service all the potential clients, and the smaller sites with minimal traffic didn’t have a sales staff. What we ended up with is blinky-blinky horrific eye-piercing creative to break through the clutter. Aesthetics went out the window. Our world became a direct response monster. The last time it happened was with Google AdWords. That revolution helped bring an effective advertising vehicle to the hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country, and the world. The difference this time? Well, it’s fairly difficult for any business to truly make something in AdWords look horrific. But banners? Oh, the horror!

It is, however, the ad networks that are going to save our industry, at least until we figure out how to really impact consumers online, and impact them in a way that is not custom ad creation, but a standardized format that is relatively easy to create, easy for clients to understand, and easy to measure.

Uh, yeah, we are so not there yet, are we? But when we do get there, ad networks will be the delivery mechanism for that creative. The ad servers will dish them out, but it’s the ad networks that will be the nation’s entry ramp. They are steadily becoming the backbone of our whole online ad delivery system. Until then, though, I’m stuck with the banner. We are all stuck with the banner — the stupid moving pixel monstrosity.

The agencies and brands that do online advertising will someday have the budgets to create meaningful creative, with advertising agencies on retainer, internal staff to run marketing, and digital strategists who understand the medium. They will be able to attack social media, sponsorships and get away from the banner ad. But right now, they have AdWords, and they are hungry for more.

Banners? The consumer hates them, the creatives abhor them, but the clients love them, the agency makes a profit on them, and our entire industry benefits from them. Your view of ad networks and the banners they sling all depends on where you sit in the marketing landscape of the consumer, the agency, the client, the creative and, yes, even our industry.

The Consumer
Let’s face it, the consumer wants everything, doesn’t want to pay for it, and doesn’t want to be annoyed in the process. The proliferation of banner advertising enabled by ad networks is not something they enjoy. In fact, if they actually knew who all of you were, they would start campaigns against you. Luckily, the consumer has started to get numbed-out by the whole banner experience anyway. There are just so many that they all blend into the background, which really, if you think about it, is doing none of us any good. We’re still throwing a thousand pennies at the consumer hoping one gets lodged in their skin. Have you ever had someone throw a thousand pennies at you one at a time? Try it. It’s really annoying. But eventually you just start to let them bounce off of you and go on about your business. That is the current state of banner advertising. Don’t believe me? Name one banner ad that you didn’t create that you remember. OK, now another, and another. Now, name some television commercials. Easy wasn’t it?

The Creative
Ah, crap, people like me. The copywriter and the creative director in me just wants to create something magical, something aesthetically pleasing that I can be proud of, puff up like a peacock and say, “I did that! Now all bow down to me and bask in my glory.” Uh, yeah, that doesn’t happen. However, it once did. You still see traditional creatives point to that 30-second work of art they created while sipping a martini at a bar, pointing to the screen in response to the question, “What do you do?”

My friends, colleagues, and everyone else who now hates me for pointing out that they now work in a business that slings droll banality at people all day in a bygone era of advertising — those days are not coming back. There used to be real writers who were copywriters. They wrote books and articles, and not on advertising, but on life. They had the ability to make words that would move you, twist the subtle innuendoes and cascading eloquence until you cried. Have you ever cried at a Google AdSense ad?

The Agency
Be it traditional or online, the agency knows the transition has reached the tipping point for online. Agency management loves the banner; it is probably one of their most profitable areas of online advertising. Creative agencies have long had the SEO and SEM programs stripped from them and put into the hands of specialists. Site creation is often done by someone else, and even if it’s created by them, it’s managed internally by the client. What a lot of online agencies are left with from a creative standpoint is the banner. Oh sure, they’ll be able to sell them on an occasional microsite that does the client no good, but at least it shows well and gets the creatives busy on something they’ll bitch about less. But between the creative, media planning and analytics, the banner is becoming the bread and butter baby of online agencies. The smart agencies, however, are now working on more strategic projects in the social media space. But agency management is going to ride the banner horse until it drops dead, and take all the money to the bank while doing it.

The Client
The massive reduction in the pricing of display advertising, due to ad networks, is having profound effects. The most important of which is that display advertising is now in reach of the hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country — the clients without agencies. Much in the same way that Google is the conduit for these companies in SEM, they are now able to advertise with display advertising online in an effective, meaningful and cost effective manner.

Someone is going to create a banner-creation tool where clients can just log in, choose the background, upload their logos, type in some text and automatically — poof! — a banner ad: fully coded, animated and ready to go, with myriad options on ad networks to run it. It is the only way to remotely control the aesthetic for the hundreds of thousands of small businesses wishing to replicate their AdWords success in display creative.

Look, those businesses don’t want to create ads that look like crap. They just cannot afford to work with the high cost of agencies. Let’s start to give them the tools they need, shall we? If I have to deal with what’s coming, I think I’m going back to traditional.

The Industry
The industry lumbers on at its ever-accelerated pace. It does not care where the money is coming from, what format, what creative. Pretty or not, the industry is aesthetically neutral. It goes where it wants to. When all of this starts to stabilize in 20 years, will we be proud of what we have accomplished? What we have created? What have we foisted onto the public? Or will we be horrified?

I love this industry. I love the people in it, the eclectic group of misfits that now run real businesses, the ability to help shape the future of it, the energy that is always about the “new.” Let’s not forget that. Let’s all work to create something meaningful for consumers. Let’s create an ad format that will shape that future for the better — one that benefits us all.

ranty rant signing off…