Recently, we’ve been working on a little presentation that’s proven to be quite interesting. At ElegantBanners, we’re tired of banner ads that furiously flash in your face, and use hype tactics to get you to click. Usually, they entail promising ridiculous things like being able to make thousands of dollars for virtually nothing, or selling you on ways to lose weight.

Banner ads need to shift, and fast. They need to become less about brute clicks and more of a branding tool essentially. The simple fact is, that banner ads that are designed well, and show strong branding do get noticed and clicked on. You don’t need to fool people into clicking. Yes, you may have slightly lower CTRs in comparison, but you’re sending people to your site that actually want to see what you have to offer, or are interested in finding out more about your product or service.

We also need to take a more creative route when it comes to our ads. With dwindling CTRs, in order to really catch attention, you have to be authentically different. That doesn’t just mean that your product/service offering is unique and interesting, but the ad creative itself needs to have some quirk to it as well.

As an example, I created this ad which was placed on DesignBump (a popular Digg style site but for designers) for a PSD to XHTML coding service. Here’s a preview of how it looked on the website:

As you can tell, the ad ties in well with the site and its content, and is very targeted to the audience and the site itself. There are a lot of designers who focus on UI only, or don’t want to do the HTML/CSS coding for a website, and hence DesignBump was a perfect spot to advertise such as service in a very creative way. The ad worked very well.

So, we need to encourage the industry to move into a more creative and targeted form of banner ad marketing – and that will drastically help the right businesses grow tremendously.

Please do check out the presentation mentioned earlier in the post, and do help us out by retweeting it!

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About ElegantBanners: ElegantBanners.com is a service that designs high quality custom creatives for your ad marketing campaigns online. We create display ads for Google Adwords and all other major ad networks and our ultimate aim is beautiful, yet effective banner ads for all.

Taiyab Raja is an avid blogger, freelancer and banner designer for ElegantBanners. His passions lie in creating stunning visuals for the web, and developing great online businesses. Want to get in touch with @taiyab? Use the contact form.