Controversial, perhaps, and we’re not suggesting banner and display advertising doesn’t have merits.

But - and it’s a big but – people are still reluctant to put money into social media outreach because they feel the case for it hasn’t been proved.

We’re lucky enough to have run a social media campaign directly benchmarked against a banner ad campaign to get real results.

What we found out was fascinating…. check it out:

http://www.qubemedia.net/banner-ads-social-media.php

Agree, disagree, interested, not interested… let us know what you think.

The more we spend time online the more it makes sense for businesses to try and reach us there. The tumbling prices of banners ads may sure look enticing, but the price is dropping along with their effectiveness. Companies spend huge amounts of money on online marketing but as we move forward more and more users will start to become banner blind. This means they will need to find new ways of reaching them.

This might explain why in a recent survey we conducted with the games industry spending on Social media was on the rise. We found publishers were looking to increase their social media spend with a quarter of them saying 21-30% of their budgets would be spent on it. All of our contributors also said they would be spending money on social media this year compared to previous years in which some had opted not too.

Social media helps to create real and memorable engagement with your consumers and is much less passive than the aforementioned banner advertising. The games industry and its consumers are largely tech savvy people so it would make sense that they would be among the first to start to become numb to traditional online advertising. I expect this to start becoming a trend across all industries with an online presence.