A trend toward super-sized ads appears to fly in the face of Internet user preferences.

Small ads, embedded within the content of a webpage, are far more effective at driving purchase intent and awareness than large, screen-hogging units, according to new findings released this week by Dynamic Logic.

In their study of 2,390 display ad campaigns that were implemented over the last three years, Dynamic Logic found that smaller ad units, such as “half banners” and “rectangles”, had a greater impact on brand awareness and better conversion rates than larger, more intrusive ads that “frame” content, such as “leaderboards” and “skyscrapers”.

Yet advertisers’ desire to “own” the page and eyeballs of viewers appears to have spawned super-sized ad units. Banner blindness, too, plays its part. AOL.com introduced large format ad units last year, and more recently the OPA and Burst Media did so.

Advertisers appear to be forsaking creativity and engagement for size, yet saying something louder doesn’t make it any more convincing, or relevant. As Senior VP of custom solutions at Dynamic Logic, Ken Mallon, said , “Just about any size will work better than a bad ad that’s huge”. The other issue at play is that large ads are, by their very nature, intrusive. Previous studies have found consumers find ads that obliterate all or part of a webpage’s content, or are hard to minimize or close, annoying.

So, the answer online, as always, is it’s not the size of the ad, but what you do with it. “We continue to believe that creative quality is the most important factor driving the success of online advertising,” said Mallon. “However, it will be interesting to see how the new, larger ad formats that publishers are beginning to debut will rank next to the more traditional online ad formats. Based on the current data, bigger doesn’t always mean better, but these new ad formats are quite unique and we look forward to testing them.”

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