Susan Mernit’s Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle
Susan Mernit comments on Chris Schroeder’s perspective on pay-for-performance advertising.
Susan, perhaps I’m misreading your perspective, but you seem to be mixing P4P vs. CPM with text vs. banners/animation/etc. P4P has nothing to do with the creative ad unit format and everything to do with pricing and billing.
CPM CPC CPA
From CPM to CPA represents a risk continuum; one would and should expect to pay less on the CPM side (maximum risk) and more on the CPA side (minimum risk). One may also pay a premium for graphics vs text, or animation vs. graphics, but only if the results are quantifiably better.
As for ad unit formats, remember that while CPC may be most closely associated with Overture/Google search results, we now have Google showing banners via their AdSense service. What’s to stop them from doing rich media? Nada.
The only question if advertisers will buy into a hybrid approach. For example… a study or two have been done on search engine result text advertising, showing that it does have a branding impact. Could Overture & Google start charging $0.01 a VIEW in addition to the $0.43 a CLICK (on average) that they currently take down? Adding a $0.01/impression would have a monsterous effect on RPS.