AET should be measured for a campaign.

The amount of times an advert serves would seem looking forward fairly irrelevant for an advertiser. It is the relevance the advert has and the time on screen that is most important. If an advert serves 10,000 times but the user only ever sees the first 2 seconds of the advert then a campaign is not going to have a discernable ROI for a client. Surely what is more important with rich media adverts is the length of time they have been displayed to a user for.

- Display adverts are increasingly using video and graphical content without the expectation that people will click the advert. For example the recent Burnout adverts were all about showing the user a video ad. This is an increasing trend and one that will continue.

Google have been massively successful with their pay per click directional advertising because their users encounter their adverts while they are searching for a related subject. They are dynamically displayed to the user. It’s not based on showing them and unsolicited advert they might like. Users will be very likely to click their adverts because they are appropriate to the content users are searching for.

We are in the business of displaying unsolicited adverts to users that are however appropriate to the landscape of content available on our websites. In order to make them meaningful lifestyle messages the entire message must be given AET in order that the user consciously or subconsciously digests the message.

If we actively seek to develop a system that increases the amount of potential AET then we could look at serving adverts in a different way.

- Advertisers should be able to specify a length of AET that they want from their adverts. As adverts are predominantly flash based when the advert has finished playing the flash advert should automatically load a new advert without having the page refresh. This will have more of an impact on a user and maintain ad impressions whist improving the user experience

- This might work well for image galleries where we traditionally pick up a large amount of page impressions.

- Ajax java coding could significantly reduce the waiting time users experience when viewing galleries and display adverts to a user for a longer period of time. It could also be applied in other areas to improve the user experience and increase AET whilst improving the user experience.

Coupled with the idea of AET we should look at what the future holds for online publishing.