Display Advertising Trends Shaping 2007
2007's display advertising market was reshaped by acquisitions like Google-DoubleClick and Microsoft-aQuantive, plus the rise of rich media and pre-roll ads.
Display advertising in 2007 was defined less by any single new ad format and more by a scramble among the biggest names in tech to own the infrastructure behind it. For advertisers, that consolidation quietly changed what buying a banner ad meant.
The acquisition wave
In April, Google announced it would acquire DoubleClick, the dominant ad-serving and ad-management technology behind a huge share of the web’s display inventory, for roughly 3.1 billion dollars. Weeks later, Microsoft answered with its own move, acquiring the ad technology company aQuantive for about 6 billion dollars. Yahoo, not to be left out, took a majority stake in the ad exchange Right Media the same year. Three of the largest technology companies in the world had decided, within months of each other, that owning the pipes of display advertising, not just selling ad space, was where the money would be. For advertisers, the practical effect wouldn’t be felt overnight, since the deals still needed regulatory clearance, but it signaled that the fragmented, manually negotiated banner-buying process of prior years was headed toward automation and consolidation.
Video pre-roll started showing up outside of video sites
Google’s acquisition of YouTube in late 2006 had put a huge amount of video inventory under one roof, and through 2007 advertisers increasingly experimented with short pre-roll video ads, not just static banners, as broadband penetration made video ad formats practical for a mainstream audience rather than a novelty for early adopters.
Rich media became the expectation, not the exception
Expandable banners, ads that let a user interact, browse a product or watch a short clip without leaving the page, moved from a premium add-on to something advertisers increasingly expected as a baseline option from ad networks. This mattered because rich media formats consistently produced higher engagement than a static image, and the networks racing to consolidate audience and technology that year had strong incentive to make these formats widely available rather than reserved for the biggest spenders.
Targeting got more specific, and more scrutinized
Behavioral targeting, showing ads based on a user’s past browsing rather than just the content of the page they’re currently on, became more common across ad networks in 2007. It also drew early regulatory attention, with privacy advocates and the Federal Trade Commission beginning to examine how much tracking was happening behind the scenes without clear disclosure to users. Advertisers benefited from sharper targeting, but the year planted the seeds of a privacy conversation that would only get louder in the years that followed.
What it meant heading into 2008
None of these threads were finished stories by the end of 2007. The Google-DoubleClick deal still needed to close, which it would the following spring after regulatory review. But the direction was clear: display advertising was consolidating around a handful of large technology platforms, formats were getting richer and more measurable and targeting was getting more precise even as it started attracting outside scrutiny. Advertisers who paid attention to where the infrastructure was heading, rather than just buying whatever inventory was available, were better positioned for the automated, exchange-based buying that would define the format over the next several years.
Keep exploring: browse more Paid Advertising guides, see everything we published in 2007 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
