This week, we’re celebrating the birthday of the banner ad, which just turned 25 on October 27. Love them or hate them, banner ads have become a mainstay of the web browsing experience, lining web pages across devices and even showing up within mobile games—but they didn’t always have the ubiquitous digital presence that they enjoy today.

25 years ago, AT&T bought space on HotWired (which became the Wired magazine we know today), to offer a cheeky—if not a bit threatening, in hindsight—banner ad asking, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? YOU WILL.” It’s unlikely that a modern, internet-savvy consumer would be tempted to follow through on the message it pushed, but its novelty at the time resulted in an impressive click-through rate of 44%.

Now, we know that today’s users may not be as excited about banner ads as us (we are Google’s first Global Certified Marketing Partner for DoubleClick, after all). To us, banner ads are a bit misunderstood, their image tainted by annoying banners and low-quality work when they were treated largely as an afterthought by creatives. So, what is the state of the banner ad today, and where do its opportunities lie in its maturity? Grab a glass of champagne while we extol our love for the internet’s most ubiquitous format.

Diving Deep into Data

The banner ads of yore may have felt invasive and interrupting, but technology today enables banner ads to better blend in or add value to the user through personalization. The role of programmatic and data have catapulted the simple format into a cog within complex marketing engines that enable brands to learn more about their audiences and tailor content effectively.

“These days, everything is bought in a programmatic way, where ads are serviced to specific users on many different sites,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “That’s why banners have gotten progressively more interesting: the ability to target specific users has improved tremendously, and the metrics—with the ability to measure response and effectivity—have as well.”

In essence, a programmatic landscape has encouraged marketers to look beyond just a click-through rate to measure ad performance and effectiveness, allowing new opportunities to make their content more contextual and useful to consumers. Through continuous optimization of their display ads, brands can achieve a greater value on their ad spend, not to mention a closer understanding of their audience as metrics roll in. Whether employing dynamic assets or manually tweaking assets to respond to data, brands can pinpoint the perfect permutations of imagery, layout and copy in their assets to appeal to audiences through personalization.

Banners Become Truly Interactive

The historic conception of the banner ad—a strip or box of pixels demanding users to view and click—might not seem so exciting today, but today’s banner ads are no longer limited to that definition. Take Google Swirl ads, for example: this innovative, mobile-exclusive ad format features an interactive 3D model that users can touch and rotate to inspect a featured product from any angle—and opening up new moments for storytelling in the process.

Swirl ads are emblematic of the new modes of interaction made possible by mobile. “People are spending less and less time on their computers and more on their phones, so while traditional banners aren’t going anywhere, there’s also new avenues to explore in the mobile space,” says Tommy Lacoste, Senior Project Manager at MediaMonks. Lacoste, whose expertise is in assets that extend beyond the typical banner ad, has worked closely on developing these 3D, interactive banners. “While they’re technically still banner ads, consider them to be the next step,” he says.

What’s impressive about Swirl ads aren’t just their interactivity, but also their mobile friendliness by being so lightweight compared to the rich media that has come before it. “Improvements in cell phone processing power as well as network speed have been imperative in making this a possibility,” says Lacoste, “And by using our and Google’s proprietary tech, we’ve been able to make the 3D files actually smaller than videos.” By comparison, video banner ads hadn’t caught on at the introduction of HTML5 because they were too heavy to provide a comfortable user experience for many.

Facing the Future of the Banner Ad

As we celebrate the history of the humble banner ad and explore recent innovations in the format, what can we look forward to on the horizon? It might be an even more immersive iteration of how users can learn about products and services, much like Swirl. “Imagine the following: you see an ad for, let’s say a coffee maker, on your phone,” says Rood. “You press it, and suddenly you can place the coffee maker in your own home using advanced augmented reality, seeing how it would look on your kitchen counter. I think that’s the next step.”

In fact, even that might soon be a reality. Facebook recently opened new interactive formats for all advertisers, including ads that allow users to try on products through AR. The display ads are a natural fit for products worn on the face (glasses, makeup) thanks to the selfie focus of Facebook’s Camera Effects lenses, but invite users to imagine what could be done with more advanced augmented reality.

“Within the framework of a banner ad being ‘a visual advertisement on the internet that you can click on’–which includes pre-roll video ads, ads on social, etc.–there’s just a world of possibilities nowadays, and it continues to grow,” says Rood. He’s right: as banner ads become more advanced, users may begin to think of them as desirable digital experiences and content in their own right. In this respect, the future of the banner ad looks good.

Take your banners to the next level with data.

Many brands worry about how to produce top-quality, scalable content at an ever-quickening pace. The challenge in achieving this is two-fold. First, brands require the ability to produce a staggering volume of content to tailor their messaging to specific segments of their audience. Second, producing this content often requires navigating through several parties and vendors across markets—each with their own particular requirements or nuanced understanding of their audience.

In my time at MediaMonks, we’ve helped clients plug into the resources and talent they need to remain relevant. But every so often a unique situation comes along that challenges all stakeholders involved, pushing us to go further in finding ways to achieve better creative, faster.

Identifying an Opportunity for Efficiency

Recently, we worked with a global automotive brand and their dedicated agency to develop and animate dynamic banner ads across three of their markets. The brief was simple enough on paper: animate banners with 15 variations, which would scale up with each successive phase of the campaign. We put our nose to the grind and sent the deliverables off for review.

But there was a snag: one market required a legal disclaimer on the banners, which hadn’t been mentioned beforehand. This is a common situation for global brands in particular, whose regional offices have their own guidelines and unique legal requirements. Still, they must meet global brand standards. This careful balancing act between local market relevance and global brand consistency often makes it difficult to gather everyone on the same page, just as it had with this project.

We successfully reworked the deliverables, but the miscommunication resulted in a longer time to delivery—not an ideal solution for the agency or their client. And this situation arose just from 15 variations! Seeing the potential of dynamic creative, the client decided to ramp up to… over 65,000 variations, across 8 markets and languages. It became obvious that we needed to make a change to accommodate such a massive jump.

This scenario may sound all too familiar to many brands, especially given the increasingly fractured partner landscape. In this case, the primary problem wasn’t our clients, but the communication and delivery methods through which each stakeholder collaborated. This inspired us to instead develop a dedicated CMS platform that would empower the client to create, review and approve banners by themselves, working more efficiently in the process.

Balancing Stakeholder Goals for Healthier Collaboration

Didn’t this move make our role in the project obsolete? Not really—even as vendors, the promise of partnership isn’t lip service that we tell clients in sales meetings; it’s a concept that helps us produce work better quality of work, faster. In implementing the CMS, we achieved this by effectively trading in our banner-builder hat for a platform-building one, giving control of production back to our clients.

In developing the new platform, our rich media team continued supporting the client’s ongoing requests, while the platforms team worked out the asset requirements and designing the best flow for their delivery. Throughout our involvement with their campaigns, we gained a clear understanding of how the client worked, and could apply those insights to build a frictionless user experience on the platform. The traditional production process involved close collaboration among all stakeholders: the banner creators, review from the client and the media agency. Our platform sought to streamline these steps into a series of low-complexity tasks that were not only faster, but cost-effective.

A New Partner Landscape Enables Better Production Methods

To meet the critical need for diverse and always-on content, the right partner must be able to adapt to production problems the moment they arise by implementing creative solutions. Without being able to draw upon extensive experience in designing and executing platforms, we likely wouldn’t have been as successful in making such a pivot.

It’s important that brands have the tools and resources they need to retain greater control over creative production—especially when so many brands seek to take their creative in-house as efficiently as possible. The old adage of “If you teach a man to fish…” certainly applies here, and this platform serves as one small step within a greater initiative for our client to build up their  capabilities in-house.

Grown organically from a specific client need, our platform is tailor-made to support the client’s unique workflow. For example, we’re working toward adding commenting and tagging features to augment the way we communicate to the team in banner creation. It goes to show how a nimble partner can provide brands with the tools they need to shift gears and get their network of vendors on the same page.  Stumbling upon an unexpected need that challenges habitual ways of working can become a daunting task—but with the right talent and tools, brands can activate new solutions with ease.