Shopframe Reframes Digital Advertising on the Internet to Increase Clicks and Revenue
Advertising becomes information without interrupting the user experience.
If you’ve ever shopped online, that puts you among 80 percent of the U.S. population. It also means that you visited web pages with banner ads you likely ignored.
Banner ads are those promotional insertions (often identified as “sponsored content”) that online advertisers place in high-visibility locations on websites. The idea is to attract attention, cause click-throughs, and build brand recognition—all advertising benefits intended to drive revenue and sales.
“Advertisers spend over $60 billion on banner ads each year, which mostly go ignored,” said Adam Thomas, founder of Shopframe, a Columbus startup with an AI-driven platform that creates an entirely new approach to online advertising.
“More than 85 percent of consumers suffer from “banner blindness,” Thomas said. “A form of selective attention in which web visitors ignore information presented in banners, even if it is contextually accurate or on target. Our technology allows brands to insert their products within existing images across a publisher’s site. This allows brands to deliver advertising without interrupting the user experience.”
How it works
“Advertisers try to capture consumers’ attention by interruption. I don’t like that model,” Thomas said. “We are creating ads inside content that the consumer wanted to see in the first place.”
Now imagine that instead of placing a rotating banner ad at the right-hand margin of the article (an ad that 85 percent of viewers are likely to ignore), an advertiser could build a campaign on Shopframe’s platform that would place their products within existing images across punishers sites in real-time.
“Our algorithms make the bike look like a part of the original image with hot spots and tags. Publishers really care about the look and feel of the images. They want quality, and it has to look like it is part of the original image,” said Thomas.
“The consumer can click and get pricing, ratings, and reviews without leaving the article they were reading. If they want to click to a retailer and brand site to complete a purchase, they can,” he said.
Next Steps
In the Shopframe model, advertisers don’t have to worry about creating advertising assets, driving traffic, or modifying the brand’s product images. The publisher benefits from a new revenue stream by monetizing the images in their articles. The customer gains in-context information about products that they are already interested in.
“I believe we are building the advertising platform of tomorrow,” Thomas said. “We have an early-stage prototype and a publisher who wants to pilot. The goal in the short term is to complete the pilot, understand how consumers react, and get real data. If we can increase the click-through rates that proves that we can get more attention for brands and validate the cost-benefit model of moving advertising dollars from display to Shopframe.”
