For small-business and ecommerce marketers, cheap, performance-based text ads placed alongside search-engine results have long been a stock in trade.
But a new analysis from online metrics firm comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) suggests that marketers are renewing their interest in display advertising, a format that fell on hard times amid the economic downturn that put advertising budgets in free-fall.
In its latest report, comScore found that impressions for display ads have climbed 15 percent over the past several months, while the average CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, has also been on the rise.
"We've witnessed a strong resurgence in the display ad market over the past several months," comScore Senior Vice President Jeff Hackett said in a statement.
The rebound of display advertising fits into a broader pattern of recovery in the online marketing arena. In May, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its accounting partner PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that marketers spent a total of $5.9 billion on Internet advertising in the first quarter, a 7.5 percent increase over the same period in 2009 that set a new first-quarter spending record for the industry.
In addition to the economic recovery, Hackett said that the growth in display has been fueled in large measure by the evolution of new ad formats of increasing sophistication, capitalizing on rich media and Flash technologies.
"One of the several drivers of strength in this market has been the innovation occurring with respect to ad units, as larger and more engaging creative ad formats are employed," he said.
In May, Flash and rich-media ads accounted for slightly more than 40 percent of all display advertising served up on U.S. websites, comScore reported.
Both formats offer advertisers an enhanced creative medium over traditional, static banners ads. Flash ads commonly offer animation and some form of interactive click-through enticement.
Rich-media ads, by comScore's definition, offer a higher level of interactivity that can include in-page videos, expandable creative, floating units and interstitials.
Of the more conventional banner ads, which accounted for just under 60 percent of all display placements in May, the JPEG was the most popular format at 42 percent of the overall display mix. Ads in GIF format, either animated or static, accounted for 14 percent of all display ads.
Analysis from comScore highlights the continued popularity of Flash as an ad format, but that technology from Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) has been mired in controversy of late after a lengthy essay posted by Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs defending his company's decision not to allow Flash to run on the iPad or iPhone. Jobs castigated Flash as unreliable and vulnerable to security threats.
Adobe responded in defense of its technology, and lined up several of the biggest names in tech, including Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), to offer statements of support for the newly released Flash Player 10.1.
But whether it's Flash or any other engaging rich-media technology, such as HTML 5, comScore's analysis highlights the growing sophistication of the online display sector as marketers seek to develop new creatives in more engaging formats to spread their messages across a host of new devices and the applications that run on them.
They're getting a little support on that front from the principal industry association. Earlier this month, the IAB commissioned a task force to develop standards and infrastructure for advertising on the burgeoning crop of tablet computers and e-readers.
Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
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