Usama Fayyad is a genuine rocket scientist. He now runs the Strategic Data Solutions (which includes data mining) division of Yahoo, and he shared some astounding numbers with me today.

There’s one big insight that ought to change everything for anyone who buys clicks online. Here goes:
If you run banner ads, one study for Harris Direct shows that you can increase your brand awareness about 7% after a reasonable buy of banner ads. That’s just fine, though I’m on the record as saying that most banner campaigns are a waste of money. The kicker? In the study, Harris did the banner buy and watched the number of clicks to their contextual ad (you know, the text ads) go up by 249% over the next week.

Pow.

This means that someone answering the ‘brand awareness’ survey says, “no, I never heard of them,” but then, two days later, is more than twice as likely to click on their text ad.

More than twice.

I think that’s very cool.