Archive for the ‘News & Opinion’ Category

I’ve found an interesting video about how to buy advertising space for your banner advertising campaign when you don’t have tens and hundreds of thousands dollars to spend.

Besides what is said in the video, before buying any ad space on a website, I would recommend you to check the website’s traffic. I know this is obvious, but some websites won’t tell you anything about their traffic and others will give you bloated figures. So the best thing to do is to take this info from another, independent source like Alexa or Compete.

Google AdWords ACTUAL image ad sizes

Introducing the new banner standards from Google AdWords:

• Void Banner: 468×49
• Followerboard: 728×79
• Almost-Square: 250×239
• Small Almost-Square: 200×189
• Depressed Large Rectangle: 336×269
• Depressed Medium Rectangle: 300×239
• Short Skyscraper: 120×578
• Wide-Short Skyscraper: 160×578

You might think this is a joke, but it isn’t. While Google tells you to use standard sizes for your banners, what they will display is a shrinked version of your ads, “to accomodate your URL and a Google link”.

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PhotoSnack.com

We have just launched another SnackTools product called PhotoSnack, a photo sharing service that will help you create professional-looking photo slideshows.

The following photo slideshow was made using PhotoSnack:

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At the beginning of this month, OPA (Online Publishers Association ) announced that 37 publishers began to offer new bigger ad formats:

• The Fixed Panel: 336 wide x 700 tall, remains constant as the user scrolls to the top and bottom of the page
• The XXL Box: 468 wide x 648 tall, opens for seven seconds to 936 wide x 648 tall with 1/24x frequency
• The Pushdown: 970 wide x 418 tall, opens to display the advertisement and then after seven seconds rolls up to 970 wide x 66 tall, with a frequency of 1 time in 24 hours per user.

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For marketers who want to start an online ad campaign and for the ones that already did but are not sure about its success, the Online Publisher’s Association (OPA) released a new study. It is called “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online” and confirms the fact that display ads create brand awareness.

The study had the purpose to analyze the behavior of the customers who were exposed to display advertising. It was conducted by comScore who researched 80 big brand campaigns across 200 sites, over a month.

The findings, as written by OPA on their website:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

Here you can read OPA’s press release regarding the study.

Seth Godin on banner ads:

It turns out that this [building brand awareness] is an overlooked benefit of banner ads. Banner ads are fairly worthless in terms of generating clickthroughs… you have to trick too much and manipulate too much to get clicks worth much of anything. But, if you build ads with no intent of clicks, no hope for clicks… then you can focus on ads that drill your name or picture or phrase into my head. 100 impressions and you’re almost famous.

Read the whole blog post here.

You probably already know that BannerSnack and banners created with BannerSnack work only with Flash Player 9 or 10. This compatibility problem made some of our members worry about their banners not being seen by the Internet users who have older flash players installed. Ad networks that don’t accept ActionScript 3 banners fear the very same problems.

Your concerns are fully justified. Their concerns are fully justified. So this must be of our concern too.

Let’s see what the surveys say about the Flash Player versions penetration:

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We have written a lot about the IAB and its practical and time-saving standards. And we can hardly say we exhausted the subject.

A couple of days ago, IAB launched a new set of best practices for social advertising.

IAB defines a social ad as “an online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.”

In other words, social ads can use user profile data, such as name, photo, age, preferences, connections etc. in the ad unit itself. Moreover, the social advertising can use profile data for targeting ads and may enable users to interact within the ad itself or in the landing page.

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There are a lot of customers asking for tips on how to make their BannerSnack banner ads smaller in file size (Exported SWF only). But firstly, before throwing some advanced tips, we need to understand how BannerSnack banners are built and how their file size is actually build-up.

1. Base engine

An empty banner will always include the main BannerSnack engine. The one that controls the slides, the objects and the animations.
This can’t be avoided (6KB charge)

2. FlashEff engine

When you add an effect (Build In/Build Out/Filter), BannerSnack will automatically include the FlashEff base engine (optimized for BannerSnack), which weights 16 KB. It sounds a lot, but it is an unbreakable piece of code that needs to be there for each of those cool effects to take place. This base engine is optimized byte by byte and includes over 10,000 lines of code that will make your effects become eye-catching. FlashEff base engine will be included ONLY ONCE per banner and ONLY if you have at least an effect within the banner.
This is the piece of resistance, the most impressive part of BannerSnack banner ads. To avoid using the FlashEff effects you have to make sure that you’re NOT using any effects/transitions at all. (save about 16KB) – NOT RECOMMENDED

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Marketers nowadays will tell you to use a lot of images because they draw attention and as little copy as possible because nobody reads it. Moreover, odds are that you’ll meet ad guys that will tell you that copy is boring, uninteresting and that it doesn’t significantly influence the click-through rate. In other words, text is a necessary bad.

Needless to say there’s an endless war between designers and copywriters, each taking side of their own… let’s call it specialty.

But how true is this claim? Maybe you can clarify that for me.

However, look at the following banner:

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