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Let’s face it: Display ads are lame. Eye-tracking analysis suggests that most people ignore them. Consumers find them significantly less trustworthy than search ads, and it even seems doubtful that clicks are a good measure of their success.

Despite this, display advertising was responsible for around $4.41 billion of the approximately $21.1 billion spent on online advertising last year. Improved targeting methods might make display ads more useful for brands and publishers, but there aren’t many companies actually deploying those methods to improve the web for everyone else. Enter Avanoo and Spongecell, two start-ups whose display advertising products can actually be useful. Avanoo’s simple ads raise money for charity. Spongecell’s fancier, more functional banners for events make it easy to add these events to your calendar or Facebook, let you download coupons and invite friends.

When we first wrote about Avanoo last year, the company was focused on becoming a “community wisdom” bank, a destination site that polled its visitors on a range of issues and tried to get them to provide their demographic information. This concept did not get off the ground and so the two founders settled on a new one: Display ads for charity.

Each of the ads, which at this stage appear quite rudimentary, is a promotion for a non-profit, and each click on them will, in theory, be sponsored by a company or brand. Clicking on an Avanoo ad takes you to a simple page with information about both the charity and the sponsor and nets Avanoo a small transaction fee. Avanoo’s concept is somewhat similar to The Hunger Site, which invites you to visit it every day and click on a banner, but Avanoo is going with distribution over destination, which seems more likely to produce results.

Avanoo could be easy to dismiss as a pleasant but unlikely idea, but its list of advisors, which include an executive vice president of ABC, a member of the Bronfman family and an early investor in Skype, makes it harder to write off.

Spongecell’s goals are less charitable but nonetheless useful. The company started off with an event-planning service that tried to compete with Evite, but has repurposed its technology to turn display ads into mini-event planning widgets. A Spongecell banner lets you add the advertised event to your preferred calendar application or to Facebook, invite your friends or navigate to a page to buy tickets. Part application and part advertisement, these banners actually serve a purpose beyond forcing a brand or product into your consciousness.

Spongecell’s approach to functional advertising shares some elements with Mixercast, which creates interactive multimedia widgets for brands.

Both of these companies, however, face the problem of oblivious consumers. Most people are so weary of display advertising that a clever twist could easily go unnoticed. Avanoo has the advantage of a novel and appealing concept (your click can help the world!), but its presentation has a long way to go. Spongecell’s banners are, well, still banners, even if they are potentially useful. Adding steps into the process of clicking on an ad probably won’t help, either.

Avanoo is based in Palo Alto and Spongecell is in San Francisco. Spongecell raised a $2.25M in 2006, before it changed its model to advertising.

[Update: The original post said that Spongecell had deals in place in BMW and Jay-Z. These deals are actually not yet closed. It also said that Spongecell had yet to raise venture capital. In fact, it had raised a round from Halo Venture Partners, the Interpublic Group of Companies and The Pilot Group in 2006]

Avanoo, a site that aims to tap into the “wisdom of communities” to offer answers to your questions about life, is officially launching today.

There are several question and answer sites already out there, such as AllExperts and new start-up Megabuzz, of Seattle. Each seek to maximize page views, and therefore advertising.

Avanoo appears to want to go deeper. Its idea builds on the “Wisdom of Crowds” theory, laid out in James Surowiecki’s book of the same name. For those who haven’t encountered it, the “Wisdom of Crowds” posits that the collective opinions of the many are more likely to be accurate than those of any expert.

However, Avanoo’s founders, Dan Jacobs and Jeff “Wilford” Vander Clute, say the Wisdom of Crowds, currently embodied on sites like Digg and Reddit, often represents the wisdom of a dominant social group and its sometimes mindless followers. Avanoo is designed to break down big crowds into discrete communities, along demographic lines. By doing so, Avanoo hopes to enable people to find opinions from the perspective they share.

Dan and Jeff, who are based in Venice, CA, have spent the last year stealth mode, developing a site and technology designed to ask any number of questions, capture the answers from any number of perspectives, and deliver results on demand. Today they are launching a wildly ambitious marketing campaign: 100 million opinions in 100 days. While this goal is pure madness, the world could have a pretty interesting resource for fun and research if it went according to plan.

The site offers questions ranging from “Do you think Global Warming will threaten your way of life in your lifetime?” to “Which of the following acts do you consider cheating?” and everything in between. Each question has a set number of possible responses, and selecting your answer enables you to see the cumulative results. To get demographic information, Avanoo offers an exchange: If you want to see what people from a certain race think about a certain topic, it asks that you for your race. Same goes for age, gender, and income level. Nowhere does it ask your name. Right now, however, the categorizations are limited. The only options under occupation, for example, are “student” and “professional.”

Ananoo’s concept is compelling: If I could ask a large and diverse set of users what they thought I should get my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day and then filter the results to find out how moderate mid-twenty-something female New Yorkers responded, that’d be pretty cool. In general, the opinions of groups of people that share my perspective, or who have perspectives I admire, are more useful to me than those of, say, deeply religious 60-plus-year-old Dallas natives who are afraid of their toasters, but I might like to know what they think, too.

But therein lies one of a number of rubs. The chances that a meaningful number of 60-plus-year-old Texan luddites will sign on to Avanoo anytime soon are slim, and the same is probably true across number of lower-income demographics. What’s more, until Avanoo reaches critical mass, its results are all but worthless, and even then, because people can easily lie about their info, statisticians will probably consider them suspect.

There is also the problem of spam. Right now, Avanoo moderates submitted questions, but its founders know that this method cannot scale. Avanoo hopes that a passionate community of administrative users, a la Wikipedia, will emerge to help keep the site clean, but hasn’t figured out exactly how this will work.

None of this means it’s doomed to failure, and Dan and Jeff convinced some notable angels otherwise. In April of 2006, they raised $400,000 from Morten Lund, an early investor in Skype, Jeff Bader, VP of Entertainment at ABC, and Sam Bronfman, of Bronfman family fame.

If it actually achieves its goals, brings on some professional statisticians to iron out the questions and possible responses, and attracts a numerous and diverse range of users — even if it takes a bit longer than 100 days — Avanoo has a shot at becoming much more than a fun idea.

(Download Squad and Mashable covered Avanoo’s beta last week. You can read Avanoo’s manifesto here.)