Effective display advertising
Having been involved in a fair few consultations regarding online display creative, I thought I’d share a few nuggets with you.
People aren’t interested in a story
You need cut-through, so get to the point. No more than 5 frames of animation; less if you can manage it.
Show me the money(shot)
Your incentive should appear fairly soon in your animation frames in order to grab attention. Money off, vouchers, a specific offer – whatever it is, do it quickly.
Know your enemy: banner sizes
There are a set number of specific banner sizes that you can use to get your message across. Certain formats will allow you to do more: others will allow very little room for messaging.The IAB set out guidelines for ad unit sizes, as follows:
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Banners and Buttons
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Skyscrapers
| 160 x 600 IMU – (Wide Skyscraper) | 40k | :15 | |
| 120 x 600 IMU – (Skyscraper) | 40k | :15 | |
| 300 x 600 IMU – (Half Page Ad) | 40k | :15 |
The takehome? A teeny-tiny 88×31 space will NOT allow you to tell a lovely, 21st-century-BT-esque-family story. Choose your sizes/locations wisely, and apply the ‘Storyboard’, ‘Moneyshot’ and ‘In-situ’ rules appropriately.
Know your enemy #2: in-situ
You know when you look at banners on a designer’s screen, or printed out on lovely pristine white presentation boards? Yeah – that’s NOT how people will see your ads: they’ll be in amongst other content – stuff that they’re actually interested in reading. Your ad is, essentially, a distraction. Make it a good one.
Who are you?
Remember: people don’t know who you are. ALWAYS include your company logo, and if at all possible, a persistent URL. People may not click on your ad, but display can be used as a Brand Response mechanism as well as Direct Response. Therefore, including your logo and a URL can only help brand recall.
George
George Rosier runs this blog. It's somewhere he can vent his spleen about web design, usability, SEO, and other such nonsense that will no doubt mean nothing in 5 years' time.
Very Comprehensive George. Simple and to the point just like good creative should be. Only point I would like to add is in the case of Financial services display ads – make sure you are clear on the product being promoted – this will ultimately help with conversion through to sale.
@Sian Birks
You make a very valid point! Thanks for the comment.
As always George an interesting read.
We’ve just been though a creative review and all these points came up. As ever we faced the issue of offline creative being shoe-horned into a diplay space.
Again, from a financial services perspective there seems to be debate around the use of T&C’s, actually in the creative for price saving propositions! Your thoughts?
Hi Mark – thanks for the comment
FS, as you know, tries to be as squeakily-clean as possible in terms of a) not mis-selling products and b) keeping the FSA happy that that is the case. Striking that balance between creative & compliance is always tricky: one runs the risk of neutering marketing messages entirely and being left with something that’s completely uncompelling. I personally feel it’s not the job of display ads to outline all the risks – that’s the job of the main site.
There are, I suppose, a couple of points to make regarding not adequately providing all the info/caveats/assumptions in price-saving creative:
* You risk customer complaints, and then all the associated TCF issues
* The quality of customer that clicks through could go down if you don’t disclose certain things (i.e. “saving based on a 60-year-old male with 10 years NCD”) – and that in turn will affect…
* …conversion rates
However, I feel there’re compromises that could be made:
* Ensuring the customer lands on a page that DOES adequately convey the caveats would help (even though the display CTR/ROI could still suffer)
* Engage in some heavy ad-targetting for the creative (I appreciate this is not always possible, but that could offset the risk of poor-quality-customer CT?)
* Perhaps utilise some different ad unit formats (flyouts, perhaps) that could allow more space for creative, but also for the dreaded T&Cs.
Specific ad unit effectiveness isn’t my forte, so someone more knowledgeable would be better placed to answer that last one!