The first ever ad banner is twelve years old this month. On October 25th 1994, HotWired published the first ever banner ad. The creative wasn’t particularly great, and didn’t even have the logo of the client (phone company AT&T), but did contain ‘You Will’, the company’s advertising slogan at the time. Interestingly, the rest of the advertising campaign on television and in the press promoted where the future was going - including IPTV, video on demand, and RFID; part of the campaign, narrated by Tom Selleck, went: “Have you ever sent a fax from the beach? Someday, YOU WILL. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.”

The size apparently wasn’t just plucked out of the air. Most users at the time were using 640×480 screens, and 468 pixel wide ads enabled them to fit inside the page while leaving plenty of space for scrollbars and borders of the web browser. 468 and 60 are divisible by six, which web designers tell me is how you should lay out your web pages - in grids of six pixels square.

We’ve moved on from a 640×480 screen. Doing some work on, cough, a large consumer website, over 90% of all users are now using a 1024×768 screen or larger. Most software and websites are now impossible to use on a 640×480 screen; and while the BBC’s websites are still designed for an 800×600 screensize, many others have moved on. The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” was one of the first main-market sites I remember seeing which displays within a fixed 1000-pixel-wide screen (though it, like the one I work on, are designed in such a way that the comment occupies less than 800 pixels wide, so is easy to read on a smaller screen).

Curious, then, that many websites still use 468×60 ad banner spaces within them.

As a space within a website, larger screens mean they’re now almost four times smaller than they used to be. In addition, the wide use of broadband negates any issue of speed of loading - as long as the ad’s underlying code loads quickly, of course.

Some websites are using larger displays - leaderboards and MPUs, for example - but many are still sticking to the 468×60. I’d really like to work out why. Do those tiny things still work (for the publishers and for the advertisers)?

Mark Ramsey is a pretty interesting chap: pretty miserable about HD Radio, and quite bullish about the future of radio.

In a recent post, he discusses how CBS have totally ruined a sixty-second television podcast… by putting a thirty-second ad in it.

Sales people aren’t podcast specialists. If they’re told that there’s a podcast which lots of people get, which they can sell advertising in, then they will. It’s the salespeople’s job to sell an ad. And they’ve done it - they’ve sold an ad on something which is so brand new, it has no track record of being a success. Surely, this is something for them to be congratulated about?

But the truth is that the geeks - who understand the world of the internet - rarely inhabit the world that the broadcast salespeople inhabit. They simply don’t understand each other. To someone that uses podcasts on a daily basis, it’s mindnumbingly obvious that a thirty-second advert doesn’t live in a sixty-second podcast. To a salesperson who doesn’t use podcasts at all, if they can get a couple of thousand dollars by selling ads in a podcast, or - more likely - get the airtime deal they want by giving away the podcast inventory, then that’s job done.

This is the classic case of two worlds colliding. But would a television salesperson survive if they simply didn’t understand the world of television? So, why should they survive if they are responsible for, but don’t understand, the digital world?