Formats & creative · also called display ads, banner advertising
Display advertising
Display advertising is visual online advertising, such as banners, images, animations and rich media, shown in ad slots on websites and apps, as distinct from search, video or audio ads.
Display ads are the rectangles and strips you see around online content: a leaderboard across the top of a page, a box in the middle of an article, a banner at the bottom of an app. They can be static images, animated GIFs, HTML5 animations or interactive rich media, and often native formats are grouped with display too.
Display is bought by CPM in most cases, through direct-sold advertising deals or programmatic advertising, and it follows IAB standard ad sizes so creatives fit slots across millions of sites. It is used for both brand awareness and performance tactics such as retargeting.
Display has a reputation problem: low click-through rates, "banner blindness", ad blocking and lots of non-viewable or fraudulent inventory. That is why viewability, invalid traffic filtering and brand safety checks became standard in display buying. The first widely cited clickable web banner ran on HotWired in 1994.
Think of it like this
Display advertising is the digital version of posters along a street: they sit beside what you came to see, hoping to catch your eye.
An example
A bank buys 5 million display impressions in 300×250 and 728×90 at a US$3 CPM (US$15,000), with 0.12% CTR delivering 6,000 clicks.
Related terms
IAB standard ad sizes
IAB standard ad sizes are the common banner dimensions, such as 300×250, 728×90 and 320×50, recommended by the IAB so one creative fits ad slots across many websites and apps.
Rich media
Rich media ads are interactive or animated ads, such as expanding banners, video-in-banner, games or carousels, that invite user engagement beyond a static image or simple click.
Native advertising
Native advertising is paid advertising designed to match the look, feel and placement of the content around it, such as sponsored posts in feeds or promoted articles, and labelled as sponsored.
Viewability
Viewability measures whether an ad actually had a chance to be seen on screen; the MRC standard is 50% of pixels in view for one second (display) or two seconds (video).
Creative
A creative is the actual ad content a person sees or hears, such as an image, video, audio spot, HTML5 animation or native text, delivered into an ad slot.