Display is big business, it accounted for £3.03bn of UK digital ad spend in 2016, but core channels like display, which were previously a stalwart of brands’ media investment, are now increasingly under the microscope.

While it’s undoubtedly great for mass brand exposure, display, for example, must offer lower and lower cost per thousand impressions rates to yield the ROI that Marketers are under pressure to achieve. Additionally, programmatic buying of display ads, whilst delivering on volume of impressions, has recently come under fire from advertisers concerned about the damage that the wrong ad environment can do to their brand (particularly in the current political climate, with agencies scrambling to reassure advertisers that their brands will not appear on controversial blacklisted sites including Breitbart). Then there’s the straight up issue of performance. The average Click Through Rate for a display campaign is 0.06%, with email acquisition yielding on average 2-4% for comparison – over 30 times more website clicks for a similar spend. That’s a mathematical no-brainer.