What is Impact-Based Advertising?

Impact-based advertising is a form of advertising designed to have a lasting psychological effect on viewers so they will remember the product or vendor. This approach can help advertising produce the greatest results for a given expenditure.

Impact-based advertising is often contrasted with impression-based advertising, which is focused on the number of times that an ad is seen and does not differentiate between segments of the audience. Impact-based advertising seeks to give the user something of value, whether that is entertainment or information and create a positive association with the product or service advertised.

On the Internet, impact-based advertising applies mainly to Web-based content although it can take the form of marketing email messages. With the increasing availability of high-speed Internet connections, sophisticated Web-based ads have become practical. A good example is a video that plays while the viewer looks at a Web page. Such videos often have distracting features such as handsome heroes, dancing dogs, crashing cars or marauding monsters.

When an advertiser wants to maximize the impact of an ad, the placement of the ad is a critical consideration. Effective ad locations are in transitional Web pages or in pages that viewers are likely to look at for a sustained period of time. Some advertisers use pop-ups that block desired content or pop-unders that remain on the screen even after the user exits the browser. However, many Web users find these tactics annoying and may react to them negatively.

Ads that come between users and the content they have requested are a form of interruption marketing, a category that also includes telemarketing calls during the dinner hour and commercials during your favorite television show. According to a report from IBM, The End of Advertising as We Know It, the advertising world will go through more change in the next five years than it did in the previous 50. An increasing trend towards impact-based and permission-based marketing is expected to be a part of that change.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor