“Banner blindness” — the tendency of online users to mentally screen out ad units that are obviously ads — has long been a bane of the online advertising ecosystem. Users are bombarded by ads each day — according to Spaceback, a company whose ad units more closely resemble social content than traditional display ads — users are exposed to more than 1,000 display ads each and every day. Consequently, “cutting through the clutter” has become the priority for many brands, with forward-looking brands beginning to experiment with new ad unit forms that are less susceptible to banner blindness.
“Social display” is a new and highly innovative category of display advertising designed to cut through the clutter, and Spaceback is one of this category’s foremost exponents. The company’s mission is to connect the power of social media to the billions of daily advertising opportunities that are programmatically available outside the walled-gardened social networks themselves.
In this interview clip, Kevin Lee and Casey Saran, Spaceback’s CEO, touch on a range of issues that are highly relevant to anyone doing programmatic advertising today, including the fact that while the adtech industry has made major strides in audience targeting, innovation on the messaging front has lagged behind.
In the complete interview, Kevin and Casey discuss Spaceback’s origin story, how the platform works, how marketers can use social signals to predict ad success, how marketers can use social activity to source creative, Twitter’s future, how Spaceback is building remote culture using the Metaverse, and other issues related to programmatic advertising and digital marketing.
