Will New OPA Creative Sizes Help Redefine Display?

I’ve been pretty adamant that new creative sizes were needed to help advertisers so when I woke up this morning to see the OPA has announced three new ad sizes I was thrilled. Clearly my excitement has not been matched by a lot a folks who see this as “shouting louder” and in fact if theses sizes are being used to just create bigger billboards that is not going to help anyone.

However, if they are weaved into the distributed web and are more like landing pages than ads these sizes offer phenomenal potential to share content and functionality that will possibly redefine display by bringing back higher CPMs to pubs, huge ROAS to advertisers and great experiences to people.

Here’s a look at the new sizes I put together since I have not seen anyone lay these out yet:

I have little interest in the 970×418 pushdown. Any interruptive experience is a bad one for your audience. This should be killed on sight. But the other two formats are incredibly interesting.

Let’s take a look at this from a transactional advertiser perspective. Let’s say Old Navy is the advertiser and we use those sizes to deliver the kids clothing section of their website in an ad for a back to school campaign. The ad has full site functionality up until a product page or an add to cart.

Let’s say the ads run at $30 CPM as a direct buy with top tier publishers. Here’s a numbers crunch.

$100k buy = 3.33M Impressions
Assume 5% of audience engages in the ad= 166,666
Assume 3% of engagers convert to a transaction (industry avg.) = 4,998 conversions
Assume AOV (average order value) is $40 = $199,920

That’s a whopping 99% ROAS!

Of course these are just estimates but I think they are exciting. The key is getting the proper advertiser functionality in the ad so that is a useful utility rather than a billboard. But as far as I’m concerned, been there, done that.

The other nice part about this is working with direct sales teams can offer a greater understanding and ability to provide contextual relevance with the ad content and the publisher content. My semantic tech brothers and sisters should be stoked about this as well.

So, I’m immediately in the market to build these ads and test them in July. My contact information is above if you’re an advertiser or publisher interested in being a part of it.