• by Michael Lee , April 10, 2008

Advertisers typically go out and spend media to place advertising at Web sites to win the hearts and minds of their desired audiences. Those people who click on a banner are driven to a landing page or Web site where the visitor may spend a little time exploring but typically leave and don't return to the destination again.

Hello! I'm going to raise my hand and say, let's move on folks! With the advantages of technology and new streams of content, it's a wonder to me why advertisers haven't considered exploring ways to: • Create destinations where you can capture recurring impressions that you own • Leverage a strategy where those visitors driven to the destination site have a reason to come back to re-engage with the brand.

What does this mean?

First, with a destination advertisers get lower-cost impressions since they own the site, and the site is brand-friendly. Also, by implementing a site where the users have access to content and community, there is a compelling reason to return. The visitors can leverage a great deal of value from both the peer interaction and information from content. This stickiness provides for a stronger brand interaction and increases the ROA of media spends.

Why is this more accessible today?

In the past, the creation of content was time consuming and expensive, so it was left to the publishers and content creators. Today, technology has lowered the accessibility of content to advertising via technology. Content can easily be filtered and found from places such as blogs, content syndication providers to user-generated content. All of these are relatively inexpensive to procure and of pretty high quality.

The second is the creation and management of these large scale content community sites. The return of technology investments have reached a level where the creation of these Web 2.0 properties have significantly more value to the bottom line of advertisers versus five years ago.

The smart and savvy advertisers will take note and take advantage of what is available to them today and evolve the advertising strategies to leverage the new technologies and accessible content to their benefit and advertising dollar.