(By Tom on 24 November 2008 | Posted in Advertising)
I wanted to show couple ads that I noticed over the past few days.
The first is from eBay. What struck me was how the items are dynamically pulled into the banner — a very nice way of keeping the ad current. Especially since eBay’s product lineup, if you can call it that, is constantly changing. Take a look:
Next up is a banner ad for Target’s Weekly Ad. I think the banner ad is done nicely — the double calls-to-action are handled well in terms of spacing. Target does a great job bringing their Weekly Ad to life online; it is traditionally a newspaper insert.
What do you think? Have you seen any other good banner ads for the upcoming holiday retail season?
(By Tom on 16 November 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
— HOW WE BUILT OUR DEMO —
This past Wednesday, November 12, Mike and I participated at MinneDemo.
It was a great opportunity for us to showcase Bannerflow in front of the Minneapolis tech community. We were the final presenters at the event, and we’re thankful that everyone stayed to listen with free beer a mere 25 feet away.
Here’s how we built our presentation:
— PLANNING THE DEMO —
Once we heard from Luke Francl that we were on the shortlist to present at MinneDemo, Mike and I set up an hour-long meeting to discuss what we’d say in front of 300+ people. Obviously, “Bannerflow is for showing banner ads to clients” was a good start, but we needed a little more meat.
After talking for a little bit, we wanted to make sure to define the problem that Bannerflow solves. It was important for us to specifically define why Bannerflow exists — we focused almost a third of our presentation on the HTML-FTP manual upload process that most agencies use today.
After defining the problem, planning the rest of the presentation was easy — we’d literally just show a demonstration of using Bannerflow. It is MinneDemo, after all.
With the messaging mostly complete, we hashed out an outline.
— PREPARING THE DEMO —
For our second meeting, Mike and I each talked about how we’d like to tweak the messaging. Basically, we just traded comments and revisions back-and-forth.
As we tightened the MinneDemo presentation, it became clear that we needed to prepare assets. I was responsible for creating a screencast of the manual upload process and making fake ads for the fake client, Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Mike was responsible for the more important stuff (per usual): making sure Bannerflow ran locally on his machine. We didn’t want to mess with the fickle nature of a WiFi connection.
— PRESENTING THE DEMO —
Upon arriving, we immediately found that Intermedia Arts was a wonderful venue. It allowed for a clear division between people who wanted to socialize and those who wanted to hear the demos. Both the social-zone and the theatre were packed — very cool.
During setup, we hit a few snafus getting our laptop to display on the projector, but we fixed the problem pretty quickly. Other than that, everything went pretty much to plan.
The audience laughed at our bad jokes, and we were able to get the demo done in seven minutes. Overall, a successful evening.
— AFTER MINNEDEMO —
Since MinneDemo, we’ve had record traffic to Bannerflow. And we’re receiving inquires from interested local press. We’re excited by the future of our company and we’re looking forward to what comes next!
(By bannerflow on 13 November 2008 | Posted in Announcements)
Last night we had the opportunity to present Bannerflow at MinneDemo. We’ll have some more detailed comments later, but here are some quick bullet items:
Any attendees who would like an upgrade to our Standard account, send us a message @bannerflow
Luke provided a summary of all the MinneDemo participants, and we’re really impressed with the talent demoing. (Even a bit intimidated.) Wednesday should be a lot of fun. @bannerflow us if you’re coming, or leave a comment.
…It was McCain who first saw the internet’s potential in a presidential race, running an experimental set of targeted banner ads during his doomed 1999 primary battle against George W. Bush.
The article explains that McCain’s 1999 banner ads received a 2% click-through rate and had supporters registering to help him get on the ballot in Virginia.
Although McCain conceded the presidency again this year, we gotta give him props for a 2% CTR!
Over the course of this year’s campaign, we did see banner ads for many candidates all over the web. One set of Obama ads ran side-by-side on the Washington post, and had drastically different designs — especially in the CTA buttons. I thought it was odd they weren’t consistent.
If the designers had used Bannerflow, the candidates themselves could have easily reviewed the ads for consistency, yes?
