1. When should I use a transparent banner?

If you promote internal links/pages through your banners, it could be a good way to have a better effectiveness. But it can be also used if the website where you insert your banner ad has the same domain of activity. For e.g, you are selling TVs products and the website where your banner is displayed is a Hi-Fi buying guide.

2. How does it work?

Below you can see the banner Ad takes the same color than the background website color (blue and then orange). The banner is fully integrated to the website design. Visitors think banner is a part of the website content and so they don’t think this is a real Ad. When someone is interested in content, he wants to know more and he doesn’t hesitate to click. Therefore generally in this case the CTR is higher.

3. How can I create this kind of banner?

In three simple steps and in just minutes thanks to the Abracadaban Ad Builder / Banner Maker.

• Just select a banner template from our galleries or through our search engine
• Click on “Create you Ad” button
• When you are on the generator page, just select the transparent option in “General” tab like the below screenshot

The Nine Gates

This is an old Ad campaign (2007) but very interesting. Focused on basketball and the 9 gates of « Old » Beijing, we can see the fusing of western american hip hop culture and the ancestral and traditional Chinese culture of martial arts to create a real new mixed culture. And it worked! The Chinese youth completely adhered to the idea and I can understand it because the result is just awesome!

We can see here a real good adaptation of Nike’s promotion to win this huge new market.

Advertising Agency: DMG, Beijing

Chief Creative Officer: Dan Mintz

Creative Directors: Kelvin Mak & Weibing Xu

Art Directors: Weber Zhang, Alan Guo, Ben Dong, Leo Sui, Hui Wang & Yeesin Heng

Copywriter: Ray Yuan

Photographer: Alan Guo

Designers: Zhenyu Zhao, Yuanyuan Ni, Sinel Luo & Zuoxiao Yang

The Advertisments

This new feature seems to be interesting, but Yahoo Right Media Exchange is already making this…

The main goal of the shockvertising is to startle and offend,  deliberately, rather than inadvertently, its audience by violating norms universally recognized. This form of advertising may not only offend but can also frighten as well, using scare tactics and elements of fear to sell a product or deliver a public service message, making a « high impact ».

Benetton is a pioneer in this domain. They made a lot of shocking Ad campaigns and they succeeded! Indeed today you can ask whoever, they all remember at least one Ad campaign from Benetton. They like or not but they remember!

Since few years we get an overdose of shocking advertisings. Actually this is counterproductive. These type of Ads are displayed to very young people through many medias like magazines, TV or even on the web. What are the consequences? Their brains are numb with boredom and the gore stuffs become the normal way of thinking and personally I don’t agree with that.

For my part, I think Shocking Advertising has to be used mildly and only in certain cases very definite (for e.g, like I said above, for health / public policy issues). Indeed our consumer society doesn’t need this to work well. However we are more and more individualistic and we don’t pay attention to some kinds of topics like home-less people issue or global warming that are mostly considered as boring things.

I tried to regroup the most shocking Ads I’ve seen during the last months and that worked for me.

1. Organ donation

2. Cancer patients and association: Cigarettes smoke people

3. Calle 13: The action and suspens chanel

4. Rasayana anti-stress tea: Make peace with the world

5. Marie Claire campaigns: Don’t let someone else speak for you

6. Montana Meth Project: Meth not even once

7. “The Longest Night”: Help homeless children escape a life on the street

8. AIDES: Without a condom you’re sleeping with aids. Protect yourself.

9. APAV: Silence hurts.

10. WWF: Imagine this is yours

11. WWF: You can afford to be slow in an emergency. Act now for the planet.

12. WWF: Stop climate change before it changes you.

13. WWF: Don’t buy exotic animal souvenirs.

14. France’s road safety: In towns car accidents don’t just happen to cars

15. Jessica Alba and Declare Yourself: Only you can silence yourself

16. Bad Charity Challenge

17. ADESF: Stop consuming your body

18. DASL: If you drink like a man, you might end up looking like one.

19. Lung Cancer Fundation: Second hand smoke in the home

20. Museo Tamayo

21. UNICEF: Every child needs a family

22. UNICEF: Bad water kills more children than war.

23. Australia’s road safety: One click could change your future. Belt up.

24. McAllister Project: every 48 seconds a drunk driver makes another person eligible to park here

25. Smoking Prevention for pregnant women

26. Dead corps on a pedestrianized passage

27. Use Your Head and Wear a Condom

28. Reporters without frontiers: Start fighting for press freedom before you lose it.

29. Anti-Drink Campaign

30. Concordia Children Services

1. Whose hand are you holding?

2. If you really want to touch someone, send them a letter.

3. Relax. if you can.

4. Coolpix 2100 VS Coolpix 3100. What’s the difference?

5. Mc Donald Ad Magazine.

6. Post it. Don’t forget anything.

7. Hard Rock Café: Baby rocks.

8. Eat more chicken…

9. Fedex VS UPS.

10. Harry’s: Too comfortable.

11. Words create Worlds.

12. How are you planning to back up your company’s most valuable data?

13. I want Perrier.

14. Wash your hands.

15. Samsung: 360° wide angle.

16. Had enough bad news? STIHL can change that.

17. Nikon can capture Ghosts?

18. Nivea: Hair Care.

19. Target maternity bras. With built in support.

20. Bic: Permanent Marker.

1. Give the good link to the good Ad

The page that the banner Ad links to has to be where it says that is going to go. If you redirect them to another unrelated page, you will lose them and they won’t probably come back on your site. Moreover your brand will be associated to a bad experience and I don’t need to tell you this is not good for you.

2. Try to find a good eye-catching punch line

The only thing that will entice the viewers to click on the banner is the catchy phrase you’ll find to sum up what you offer. An attractive headline gets results. You have to select few words only for each phrase, keep it simple and have a clear offer.

3. Be relevant with content in banner

The most important thing is to be sure that the content displayed in the banner, such as pictures, is relevant to your products/services you are offering on your site. Obviously a naked woman would attract a lot of guys in « lack of love » directly to your website but if you sell something different like TV/Hifi products, these kind of visitors will surely leave your site after few seconds only.

4. Include logo in  banners

In order to promote your brand name, you can include your logo on your banners. However make sure your logo don’t spoil your headline ! It’s better to make two differents banners, the first one in order to promote your brand and the other one to promote your products/services.

5. Add “Click here” text

According to statistics, you can expect a significant increase in your Click Through Ratio (CTR) by simply adding « Click here » or « free » phrase in the last frame.

6. Blue instead of Red

Again according to statisitics, it would seem that blue color is more clicked than red color. It doesn’t mean that you have to use blue color each time and anyhow. It should be used with parsimony and in complementarity of your headline.

7. Create several banners for a single ad campaign

You have to be aware that a single banner won’t be sufficient for your ad campaigns. You should have at the very least 6 banners in differents sizes (125×125, 300×250, 468×60, 728×90, 120×600 and 160×600). Why? Because you have to check their performances and know which banners are generating higher CTR. Then you will be able to change texts, colors, or anything else to optimize the banner and make the CTR higher. Also each time you will launch a new campaign you should create new banners. Indeed when a banner is too seen, it’s less clicked.

8. Make it quick!

Your message has to be displayed and understood within 10 seconds, after this time, you will lose users.