great men of science give birth to new ideas and inventions that sweep the human race into golden eras of discovery and prosperity. You, dear reader, have the great fortune to be alive at just such a momentous point in history.
Apparently seeking to improve upon 19th century gym equipment, our head of product design Jeremy has built himself a fully-functional treadmill desk. The device allows Jeremy to walk at a modest pace and create fantastic banner building toolsat the same time! Now that the blood flowing to Jeremy’s brain will be consistently more oxygenated, who knows what he’ll come up with?
Below we offer a few videos and photos, which serve as definitive proof of what an absolutely brilliant, productive, and not-at-all-stupid idea this is.
First, indisputable video evidence that The Treadmill Desk really does inspire great ideas:
And now for a few photos:
Lastly, I think the following video offers the viewer a brief and precious glimpse into the brilliant mind that gave birth to The Treadmill Desk. It’s Jeremy’s tender rendition of everyone’s favorite meme-inspired song:
Oh happy day! There are two new banner ads available in the Canned Banners gallery of templates. Click the thumbnails to start customizing these banners.
The first ad for “Condominium Park” allows you to upload 5 images that the user can scroll through. This ad also doesn’t require that your business have a logo. You can upload a nice little JPEG into the lower left corner, type your business name to the right and you’re good to go.
The second ad for “Ranch Springs Winery & Resort” is simpler and more dramatic. This banner works well for businesses that don’t have a transparent PNG version of their logo. Because the logo sits on top of a solid color background, the image file doesn’t require transparency to look good.
A brief tale about the Condominium Park template:
We used the Condominium Park template for a banner ad campaign of our own on Google’s Display Ad network. The campaign was disappointing for a number of reasons. Our average cost-per-click was only $0.54, but for some reason Google chose to show our banner ad on extremely irrelevant websites like FlameWordMaker.com, a site that generates tacky “flaming” text for kids to use on MySpace pages. So it’s not surprising that the ad got a low clickthrough rate (0.13% to be exact). When we run this ad again in another campaign (not with Google…we like them for search but not for display), we’ll update you on how it performs.
The moral of the story is: pay attention and make sure your ads are running on high-quality websites. If your ads get shown on low-quality websites, you won’t get very many clicks, and the handful of clicks you do get are not likely to be qualified prospects.
AdRoll is an ad network that specializes in retargeting. Yesterday AdRoll added a Canned Banners button within their campaign building tool. This allows AdRoll customers to visit Canned Banners when they need banner ads and get a 20% discount!
Click the thumbnail below to see a screenshot showing how to access Canned Banners while you’re in AdRoll’s campaign bulder:
The 20% discount should be automatically applied by clicking through the Canned Banners button within AdRoll.com. If the 20% discount doesn’t show up, just apply the coupon code ADROLL20 on the same page where you’re asked to review your banners prior to final checkout.
Jeremy designed this doozy of an ad concept that communicates the ease and simpliciy of Canned Banners in a simple and fun little diagram (we at Canned Banners are big dorks…we like diagrams). We launched the ad on Facebook today and it’s getting almost DOUBLE our usual clickthrough rate! Maybe we can start selling tee-shirts with this design on Threadless.
Seems like if the ad networks relied on services like Canned Banners, they wouldn’t have to worry about malicious ad files, since every SWF file coming from Canned Banners would be completely standard and contain not a trace of malicious code. There’s no way to introduce malicious code via Canned Banners, so any SWF file coming from Canned Banners can be deemed completely “clean.” A few weeks ago I wrote a detailed post (with pictures!) explaining this.
We at Canned Banners are big fans of retargeting. It’s a great way to deliver relevant ads to people who are actually interested in your products and services. Read our illustrated guide below to learn how retargeting works.
Had another column published on adotas.com yesterday. This one’s kind of aspirational, mostly food for thought. Since agency staff expend so much time and energy on that last bit of the creative process (the bit where the client wastes everyone’s time making lots of small creative changes that will have NO measurable impact on campaign effectiveness), wouldn’t it be great if some of that tedious hand-holding could be offloaded onto software? I think everyone would be happier. Clients would get their stuff faster and agency people would have more time to focus on adding real value.
This kind of efficiency is what Canned Banners offers, albeit on a smaller scale. We provide high-quality creative ideas in the form of banner ad templates and then we let our customers apply the finishing touches with their own text, images, and logo. We also add another creative spark with our “wildcard” options that are different for every banner.
Anyhoo, this is the column:
June 30, 2010—Passing the Creative Baton to Clients
“If you’re on the agency side, it’s not your imagination; client attention spans really have shrunk to such minuscule proportions that they can now be measured only by subatomic particle research equipment.” visit adotas.com to read more
By working directly with website owners, you determine the website(s) where you want to run your ad and contact the website(s) directly. If you find a website that you want to advertise on, look for an “advertise with us” link. Each website will have their own way of working with advertisers either via email, the phone, or a web interface.
Working directly with website owners is often called working directly with “publisher sites.”
Working directly with website owners has both advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages
Very high degree of control over who sees your ad.
Negotiate special terms, such as special ad placements or custom ad formats.
Great for limited local ad campaigns.
Straightforward purchase process, since you will usually be working one on one with a real person.
Disadvantages
Typically higher cost than buying space through an ad network.
More time-consuming than working through an ad network.
Not a good option for large campaigns, since you’d have to contact each website owner one by one.
Can be difficult to track performance.
Here are some things to ask for when you contact a website about advertising:
“Rate sheet” or “media kit.” This is a brochure that lists advertising prices. It’s always best to try and negotiate a discount.
Ad specifications or “specs.” Every website will have certain requirements for ads. These are very similar across the majority of websites. Make sure the website accepts Flash (SWF) ads before you buy ad space!
Audience demographics—details on the people who visit the website. More details are better. Sometimes this information is included in the rate sheet or media kit. Good things to know are: how many visitors on a weekly/monthly basis, where do the visitors live, how long do they spend on the website, which pages/sections do they visit the most, average income of visitors, and so forth.
great men of science give birth to new ideas and inventions that sweep the human race into golden eras of discovery and prosperity. You, dear reader, have the great fortune to be alive at just such a momentous point in history.
Malicious SWF files still causing problems for ad networks and publisher websites
Just read this article on Online Media Daily: “Ad Nets Not Doing Enough To Stop Fake Ad Sales And Malware.” Apparently fake ad agencies are buying banner ad space through ad networks and then supplying the ad network with malicious ad files.
Seems like if the ad networks relied on services like Canned Banners, they wouldn’t have to worry about malicious ad files, since every SWF file coming from Canned Banners would be completely standard and contain not a trace of malicious code. There’s no way to introduce malicious code via Canned Banners, so any SWF file coming from Canned Banners can be deemed completely “clean.” A few weeks ago I wrote a detailed post (with pictures!) explaining this.
The New York Times might want to take note.