Google’s Neal Mohan recently spoke at IAB Innovation Days 2011 about the future of display ads. I’ll post the video below, but for those of you who don’t feel like watching the 36 minute keynote, let me summarize some of the points that I found to be significant:

• Up until now, users have largely been ignored when it comes to display advertising. (I’m thinking, “Yeah, I hate those annoying banner ads.”)
• As we shift from an outbound, push marketing approach to more of an inbound, permission-based interactive strategy, we are going to be seeing some changes.
• Most ads in the future will have some option to opt out of such ads and/or adjust preferences of what ads the user would like to see.
• Users will be able to easily find out what information was used to generate the ads that they see.
• We will be seeing more formats for display ads.
• More ads will have interactive features and will utilize video.
• Impression and click-through rates will go down, but the quality of leads will increase dramatically because users will be engaging in advertisements that they are interested in.
• The time spent interacting with ads will increase for users that choose to engage.
• Overall, the value to advertisers will increase because they will be able to target very specific audiences.

I like the way the industry is heading, because it means that marketing is starting to do what it should do: provide customers with what they want instead of overloading them with useless information.