Creative advertisements

Understanding the value of offline advertising is messy. Billboards, for example, are priced based on how many cars drive past them. Compared with impressions or click-throughs, that sort of metric is a joke.

Not everything that counts can be counted

Earlier we discussed the jobs that advertising does, and not all of these jobs can be measured by clicks or conversions. In the case of trying to increase familiarity, or reminding customers about your product, the goal of the advert is to attract attention in a manner that re-enforces a brand value. Simply attracting attention isn’t enough; if it was, then every advert would just follow the “sex sells” mantra.

If you’re interested in advertising, Drayton Bird‘s daily mails are an essential read. Look beyond the sub-standard design… there is pure gold in his mailing list. In a recent mail, he highlighted some of the more remarkable ones he has seen. The goal of these ads isn’t click-throughs, it’s to create and re-enforce awareness that a particular brand does a great job. Let’s take a look:

Taking this online

It’s difficult to be remarkable, informative, and clickable in shape so horrible as a 728×90 leaderboard, so as a result online advertising tends towards the messy click me click me style, meaning that news sites and social networks can’t help but grow ugly as they chase revenue. The Ads of the world website showcases some of the nicer online adverts, but for as long as online ads are governed by CTR and CPC, we’ll be stuck with blinking banners rather than meaningful messages.