Today’s ad was created by NOTHING TO WEAR, based out of Australia. They sell party dresses, skirts, short shorts, skimpy tops…generally any kind of ladies’ outfits that can’t be worn but two or three days out of the year here in San Francisco (except perhaps by misguided Australian tourists who packed this outfit and then spend their entire vacation in a state of mild hypothermia).
Great photo in this banner. (I assume that) when ladies are buying cocktail dresses, they want to look like this model. I mean, you don’t even notice that it looks like she’s sitting in a furniture shop. And even when you do, it looks like the kind of furniture shop I’d like to hang out and have a drink in.
Original template is here
“Really liked using your service – it’s so simple & easy to use!”
—NOTHING TO WEAR
There are a few more design subtleties worth pointing out:
- The color palette used in the ad matches the striking color palette of the NOTHING TO WEAR website: black background/white text, plus lots of highly saturated pinks, blues, and yellows (a color palette that basically screams “party”)
- Note how the accent colors in the logo (pink, blue, burnt yellow) match the colors in the photo (pink dress, burnt yellow chairs). This kind of color coordination really tightens up the overall design without the viewer even consciously realizing it.
- When a person clicks on any banner ad, they’re being taken from some random web page into your website. This is a jarring experience, and most customers will abandon your website very quickly. So you want to make this transition (external website > banner ad click > your website) as smooth as possible. So it helps if the ad looks like your website. It makes the transition go smoother and should help keep customers on your website a little longer.
- The fact that the text stripe is sitting over the center of the ad creates some nice visual tension.
And in case any of you e-commerce advertisers are wondering, NOTHING TO WEAR runs on the Big Cartel e-commerce platform.
B2B display ad spotted in the wild
Just ran across a great example of B2B display advertising. It’s an ad from Acquisio promoting a webinar. The ad appeared alongside a very relevant article on SearchEngineLand.
This is a great example of top-of-funnel marketing and is totally in line with what we’ve been saying about B2B display advertising. If I’m reading a trade journal article about display advertising, I might very well be interested in watching a webinar on retargeting.
And contrary to what many Display Ad Nay-sayers (we’ve all met them and suffered their withering, narrow-minded criticisms) might think, the ad itself is tasteful and unobtrusive. It serves as a supplement to the article, instead of trying to distract the reader from the content. That’s a key idea to keep in mind when running B2B display ads: don’t expect to “wow” the viewer into clicking your ad or absorbing your message. Offer a meaningful message in a professional context; offer something that a B2B buyer might actually find valuable in their search for products and services. Remember, the average B2B buyer is spending at least several thousand dollars, so they probably won’t be enticed in the same simplistic ways that Groupon entices you with cheeseburger & sushi ads.
I dug into the page code, and it looks like this ad was running on the Google Display Ad Network, perhaps on a straightforward contextual basis, meaning that it might show up when the page content includes very industry-specific terms like “display advertising” or “display ecosystem.”