One assumption in online marketing as of late has been that richer forms of online media are a valuable tool to generate leads and expose consumers to your brand. There is no denying that forms of advertising that appeal to multiple senses (audio/visual versus simple text-based or even banner ads) have an advantageous effect in marketing. Assuming unlimited resources, there is no cost to the consumer for being exposed to these media–other than the time commitment and the inability to skim the content, like you would with a text-based or banner ad. However, this assumption is quickly becoming challenged, as we see Internet Service Providers (ISPs) changing their models from unlimited bandwidth to limited or rated service models.

In the news recently, AT&T has joined Comcast and Time Warner in putting bandwidth caps on its users. This is ostensibly to ease network load, and mostly fair to the end-user at the upper end of the 20- to 150-gigabyte caps being tested in Reno, Nevada. For users that break this cap, a charge of $1 per gigabyte is then appended to their bill. This opens up a future for American ISPs to incorporate a per-gigabyte model, such as seen in Europe and some US universities.

Because bandwidth is fast becoming a commodity to the average broadband user, how a consumer will perceive certain forms of advertising may quickly change. Any form of online advertising that uses a large amount of bandwidth may be much more resented than today. Today, if anything, the more obtrusive forms of media-intensive advertising online are simply an annoyance. Should this trend in major ISPs continue, it could have a negative effect on a brand and its sales. Consumers are intuitively less likely to purchase something if they feel the brand is already costing them something, without an actual purchase.

Anticipating this change is an important step in doing something about the problem. Until bandwidth caps lower or rated service becomes widespread in the United States, there is most likely no reason to abandon current media-heavy forms of advertising. However, advertising is an investment, and with any form of investment, diversification is the key to protecting the resources you put into it. Here are some tips to reduce bandwidth in advertising. Other than keeping the cost to advertise low to the consumer, it will also speed up loading time, improving the functionality of the pages on which you are advertising:

1. Use compression where you can. Most browsers support gzip encoding.
2. Before investing the resources in Flash, which can be bandwidth and processor intensive, ask yourself first if your intended goal can be done with a combination of CSS and JavaScript. This is generally a faster way to present content than loading an embedded file. No one likes an ad slowing down their computer.
3. Social media optimization is a good way of incorporating a number of media while still letting the user come to you. By transferring some efforts away from flash or other video advertisements to this outlet, you may find more promising leads and bigger fans among your consumer base.
4. Never underestimate the power of a well-placed text ad. As semantic computing improves, services such as Google AdSense become better and better, grouping your messaging with individuals who are interested in its subject matter.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 11:07 am by relwell and is filed under Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.