How To Make Great Online Display Advertising: Establish Your Creative Model First

What is exciting about being in the online display industry at this time is to see it growing again, and to see a lot of talk in the press about it. No wonder, since Google and Yahoo both think this is a growth area.

So you have decided: let’s try display (or, let’s give display another shot).  But where and how do you start?

There is a ton of excellent new technology that makes display advertising the most unique and advanced advertising channel on the planet. Sorry if that sounds too dramatic, but it's true! Technologies including behavioral targeting, contextural targeting retargeting and geolocation are ready for prime time, all fantastic ways to help you deliver the right message to the right person.

All that power, all those options.  But what's step one?  What do you do before you add tehnological targeting firepower?

You have to establish your creative model first.

Effective Display Advertising Starts With An Effective Creative Model

Despite all of that fantastic targeting technology, your creative execution and message still play an overwhelming important part to the success of your campaign. Either you have an effective ad or you don’t.  Targeting and placement technology will not turn your bad ad into a good ad.

All effective ads are composed of parts that lock together yet are flexibly changed within a concept called the creative model.

The creative model made up of  two parts:  creative and message.

Creative is the visual elements that make up your ad; the backgrounds, logo, product pictures, "eye candy" (that's our term for anything flashy to get a reader’s attention) and buttons.

Message is the written word.  What is your headline? What is your call to action? What are your offers? What is going to compel someone to take the action you want?

So why set the creative model first?

An effective ad has more than one variable that dictates success. What looks aesthetically pleasing might not be an effective ad.  The only way to know if your ad is effective is to get some feedback from it.  You need a test campaign, called a media test.

Setting the creative model does the work of defining the variables in an ad, so that when you get feedback on your design, you can begin manipulating one variable at a time - maybe two variables depending on the subtlety. In some cases something as small as border color can make a difference in ad performance.  Or adjusting the message.

If you don’t approach building and testing your ads in a methodical way using a creative model, you make it nearly impossible to isolate factors that matter and make your ads more effective by applying what the feedback is telling you.

So if you don't approach building and testing your ads in a methodical way, using a creative model, you make it nearly impossible to isolate factors that matter - that speak the most to effectiveness.

Before you “go live” and apply targeting (i.e. – start spending a premium budget on such techniques as contextual taregting, behavioral, remarketing, and/or campaign “optimization” -  moving your creative from one publisher to another in search of a tick upwards on clicks – you've got to figure out what creative works.

The number one reason is to save money. Take advantage of the special nature of the medium.  This is digital display advertising using AdBean. There’s no need to beat up your budget while you zero in on what works. AdBean makes all these little adjustments easy without having to be a Photoshop expert and produce dozens of ads to test all these variables.

AdBean saves time and money in the making of effective display advertising.  Really.

Comments

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