Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs. Steve Jobs: 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business. The Future of Advertising will be Integrated. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch.
Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)! I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down. Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. Holy Shiitake! Despite its creation more than 15 years ago, banner ads have been surprisingly resilient despite their lack of efficacy. The fundamental problem with banner ads is a condition called “banner blindness” meaning that our eyes are really quickly trained to look at what is most relevant on the page – the content we want to see.
I’m sure it probably resonants with how most of you read the web. So I’ve spent the last few years checking out companies that are trying to solve for this problem. You’ll see a clear problem here. But even for the consumer reality sets in. In Image Ads. 20 creative guerilla marketing campaigns. We are so overwhelmed with advertising everywhere that it becomes hard for creative agencies to make ads that stand out.
Guerilla advertising is a great way to make unusual, surrealistic visuals and situations that passers by will remember. Here is a selection. 1. Superette – Short shorts The bench that turns you into a walking advertisement if you are wearing short shorts. 2. Pretty clever, the urinal that stands out. 3. Seen in New York, how would you not go grab a coffee there? 4. I would be curious to know how many people actually notice this ad. 5. Enter the shark, a cool optical illusion for this National Geographic ad on a bus. 6. Cool idea to promote the movie “The day after tomorrow”, it gives the illusion that NYC has been submerged by the waters. Start Your Free Account. Use Buttons Instead of Links and Increase Your Clicks. There has been some research around whether using “buttons” on your website and in your email marketing campaigns as a call-to-action instead of words with links drives more clicks.
It’s one of those things that every company really has to test for themselves. For businesses that market to consumers, you’ll probably find buttons like “Sign Up Now” or “Buy Now.” If you’re marketing to businesses and you offer a white paper you might use the text “Download Now” or if you’ve got a tutorial for your viewers to watch it might be “View the Demo.”
At any rate, an “actionable” word will usually work better than a passive one on your button. Instead of saying “Free Trial” you might try something like “Start Your Free Trial.” Our marketing team developed a few buttons for us to use internally. In the end, it’s all pretty scientific, so as always we suggest you test both and see what works for your own audience! Some great resources I found for creating buttons: Best Practices for Using Buttons. An innovation-focused digital creative agency. 11 Email Marketing Terms You Need to Know. Leo Burnett.