As banner ads become more and more dynamic, one of the big requests in the Rich Media front is the ability to tie into social media content and social services.
In years past, a banner ad was exclusively a highly-critiqued, tightly-tailored advertisement. Heck, the close-eyed nature of creating banner ads is precisely why we created Bannerflow (see our launch presentation).
The basic level of advertising using social media is to provide links to your social media presences. By in large, these ads are similar to previous instances, but instead of a single, dedicated landing page, advertisers may be looking to direct their traffic to their Facebook or Twitter page.
But as brands and messaging have grown into the social sphere, we’re seeing refined banner ads that include mostly unfiltered commentary from the social web. It’s pretty cool.
As ads get more advanced through concepting and development, the actual feeds and functionality is built into the SWF.
Viewers of these ads will be able to see what the general public is saying about these brands.
I’m curious if with oAuth and, more specifically, Facebook’s new Open Graph, it won’t be long until we see ads “Liked” or “Viewed” by your friend.
When sending ads out the media servers, one of the final things we all do is whip together a quick backup GIF or JPG to ensure impressions are delivered even when Flash can’t be served.
Side note: It’s interesting that the argument used to be that these backups were for visitors who had pre-IE5 browsers, or something super-antiquated. But now cutting-edge devices—a certain company in Cupertino comes to mind—are also making these backup important.
Well, rather than waiting until the last minute, you can make sure to provide impactful backup impressions by using animated GIFs to keep your creative as consistent as possible.
Take a look:
Flash
Animated GIF
What do you think? Do you use animated GIFs for the backup images?
Bannerflow is a lightning-quick resource for uploading your SWF assets for effectively managing the banner ad review process.
In most cases, this pertains to your self-container standard banner ad assets. Most rich media providers use proprietary systems that bundle SWFs, FLVs and other technology, and then they conveniently provide you with preview links for your team members and clients.
But what if your campaign contains both standard banner ads and rich media ads? We made it dead-simple to keep your entire campaign managed within your Bannerflow account.
Here’s how you can add Rich Media ads, using any rich media provder you’d like—PointRoll, EyeWonder, EyeBlaster, et. al.
» First, get started and set up your Client, Project and add your assets. You can view our getting started video here.
» To add a Rich Media ad, first upload your rich media assets to the provider of your choosing. After you upload your ad, the provider will give you a Preview URL.
» Using your Preview URL, add it into Bannerflow using the “Embed URL” option.
» Within the client view, you’ll see that your Rich Media ad is rendered in an iFrame and is manageable within your Bannerflow account.
What is the percentage of standard-versus-rich media ads that you’ve been producing lately? Let us know!
(By Tom on 16 February 2010 | Posted in Banner Tips)
The call-to-action (CTA) is one of the most crucial aspects to banner ad design. For starters, often times (impossibly) success will be gauged at some level by click-clickthrough, rich-media interactions, or video views.
As our overal ad impressions work towards building the brand, our CTA’s design can help us achieve or goals. When I’m designing ads, I make an effort to keep both of these things in mind by keeping both the logo and CTA ever-present. Do you ever see the final frame of an ad and it makes no sense? Not good. Think billboard—not TV ad—when designing those final frames.
From a more detailed perspective, I sometimes see missed opportunity with ads out the web. See the below examples and see if you notice the difference.
Did you catch it? In the second ad, the over and hit states for the button are accessed from the entire area of the state. The first ad only changes when you’re directly over the button.
As we encourage engagement and action from the ad viewers, it’s smart practice to show your state changes even when the mouse isn’t directly over your button.
What do you think? How do you design your calls-to-actions and the over/hit states?
Updated, August 10: We recently deployed a new feature to Bannerflow that allows you test clickTags directly from within the application. Visit our pricing page to sign-up for Free!
—
Do you ever need to look up publisher specs and determine whether the ‘tag’ portion needs to be written in all-caps, like clickTAG, or camel case, like clickTag?
It can be really frustrating and difficult to manage—opening up the FLA and seeing what you coded. It’s a waste of time.
Next time you’re coding a button, try this:
on (release){
if(clickTAG){
getURL(clickTAG, “_blank”);
}
if(clickTag){
getURL(clickTag, “_blank”);
}
}
Problem solved.
What do you think, do you use this on your ads already? Have you tried something different/better? Let us know!
In late April, DoubleClick Rich Media announced a new tool called DoubleClick Rich Media Studio.
We’ve used several tools in the past to create rich media ads: Atlas’s integrated Rich Media MTK, EyeBlaster’s integrated Workshop and PointRoll’s online tool. The integrated (quasi-offline) tools — a la Atlas, EyeBlaster and, now, DoubleClick — that work within the Flash IDE are great because they allow you to build the rich media components directly within the production work flow.
However, PointRoll’s online tool has one advantage in that building ads on their server replicates the latencies and testing environment very well. There’s nothing more frustrating than testing a rich media ad locally, then seeing it falter when pushed to the server!
Have you tried out DoubleClick’s tool? Do you have any other tools that you’ve used to create rich media solutions?
What’s the best way to build your rich media ad units?
(By Tom on 21 January 2009 | Posted in Banner Tips)
Are you still defaulting to AS2 when building your banner ads? If your answer is yes, you’re not alone.
When handing off files for trafficking, there are simply too many unknowns if banners are coded in AS3. It is highly unlikely that the traffic manager at the ad server or publisher site will understand “AS2 or AS3″ questions. It might even be unlikely that your project manager knows the difference (hopefully, they do).
I’ve gotten burned by building an ad in AS3, then finding out it wasn’t compatible with the ad server — so I had to re-write the banner in AS2. If you do that even once, you’ll remember to not test the waters and stay safely ashore with AS2.
But lately I’ve been really trying to improve my AS (2 or 3) coding abilities, and I’m at a cross roads — Should I be focusing on ActionScript 2.0 or ActionScript 3.0?
In the short-term, there’s no question: AS2 is what I use the most. But longer-term, I understand that I’ll eventually need to build up my AS3 skills…
How do you approach this conundrum when building banners? And from what I can tell, EyeBlaster, Eyewonder and Pointroll are the ad servers supporting AS3, is this correct, are there any others (Atlas, DART, etc.)?
