Interactive ad in an interstitial?

No, it’s not an interstitial – but almost. Have you ever measured the dwell time on a social networking portal entry page? Not much, especially not if you are a frequent visitor. Your focus is on typing your password correctly – and after hitting enter that’s it, you are in and entry page is gone.

Now, you may play around with the message reflecting on the only activity you do on an entry page and that may grab the visitor’s attention but placing any contextless game there is a waste of money. Lot of money. Next time, don’t just buy a very remarkable and expensive ad space, take the time and think about what you are placing there.

 

Would you place an overlay for your own corporate/brandsite?

Because Vodafone Hungary did. Professional work, by the way. One thing you should know about layers: It is always a challenge – ok these days it’s just getting better – placing a layer properly on a site that contains other embed - or flash content running. For some online media it is still an impossible question. Anyway, see how smoothly it runs on Vodafone Hungary’s own portal:

 

watching in full size is recommended

 

• the dimensions of the flash are optimized for wide screens (that have lower heights) too
• links work beneath the flash animation
• the superbanner flash zone works together with the animation
• the animation works properly under IE and Firefox too
• the file size of the overlay is 62kb which is relatively small – runs weaker PCs too without problems.

This is a good example of banner combination and an overlay too. Well done!

The art of banner combination

Banner combinations are tricky ones. Mainly because of positioning, the coordination with the media and of course, the adserver hosting. Especially if you combine different creative formats. Today my example is a simple one (no format combination) with a sloppy execution.

 

Focus on the prizes flying from the left skyscraper to leaderboard and to the right skycraper.

 

You buy banner combinations based on time. That’s because media cannot rotate it with another banner combination so you cannot buy it based on ad views.

The moment of the shot is 8:30pm which means it has been running all day like this. One of the most important positive feature of online advertising is that you can edit your campaign in adserver whenever you want and it will go live in up to 30 minutes (depending adserver you use).

Again, I saw the creatives of this campaign on almost all major portals. It’s so sad that the agency didn’t pay attention for the details. I am pretty sure when they presented the plans, the transition between the ad units was perfect (not talking about the layout, online the animation). And you know, for these things primarily the agency is in charge, then the media and at last the advertiser.

Is that all you can make out of a blockbuster?

You buy (or arrange anyhow) one of the most expensive media space available online. You reach in one day 1/3rd of all local internet users. You have a superbanner plus a triplebanner at once that can be seen without rolling. What do you do?

 

 

CV Online has placed the same creative into the superbanner and the triplebanner. C’mon! They could have had a banner combination, they could have linked the two banners to each other. Once you have such a chance, you better think it twice how you use it!