Looking for display advertising inspiration?

The links below are a good selection of advertising showcases, giving you good creative and strategic examples in a variety of different formats. Credit to Jack Walkington at Brand Republic for compiling the original list, to which I have added a few:

• Bannerblog

• Collective Video Ad Creative Gallery
  
  
• EyeWonder Online Ad Showcase
  
  
• Flashtalking Showcase
  
  
• Google DoubleClick Rich Media Gallery
  
  
• IAB US Rising Stars
  
  
• MediaMind's Creative Zone
  
  
• Microsoft Advertising
  
  
• Mojiva Mobile Creative
  
  
• Unanimis Campaign Gallery
  
  
• Yahoo! Rich Media Gallery
  

For more links like these follow What Works Online on Twitter @WhatWorksOnline

Google has recently been looking to make display advertising more accessible and inclusive. This activity is presented in a series of colourful videos on a new microsite elusively entitled Watch This Space. If you look around this site you can get some great ideas about how you can make your online advertising space work best for you. These include:

Targeting
The more relevant your advertising, the better the response will be. This is even the case on B2B sites where positioning your ad in the right channel can be far more effective than merely being on the right site.

Creativity
We have moved beyond just banner ads. There is now a trend amongst publishers towards bigger, but fewer, ad formats on the page. This not only means that the advertiser has a greater presence but you can also do so much more within the space. There are virtually no restrictions.

Measurement
There is more to an advertisement than a click. You have to consider interactions and also conversion rates. A click is only useful in the context of what the user does once they visit your site (acquisitions/ actions).

Click the image below to launch Watch This Space.

Deciding which approach is best means checking your campaign objectives and choosing the right approach for achieving your goal. And this also means being strict with yourself about what you want to achieve, as trying to achieve brand awareness, traffic generation, orders and thought-leadership all in the same campaign is probably asking a bit too much.

Branding campaigns

Generally, CPM (cost per mille) works best for branding campaigns where you're looking to place your business in front of your target audience but where you're not dependent on that audience acting upon your message there and then. CPM rates are usually the cheapest ways to buy advertising inventory and if you're happy to allow the website publisher to run your ads wherever they choose on their site, you'll get the lowest rates available. If you want to target particular channels or pages on a website, you'll find the CPM rate increases - sometimes substantially.

Lead generation campaigns

CPA (cost per acquisition) and CPC/PPC (cost per click/pay per click) are ideal ways to run lead-generation campaigns. These models incentivise the website publisher to deliver instant results for your advertising, whether it's a confirmed order, in the case of CPA, or a direct click through to your website where you can continue the interaction with the user.

With CPA and CPC/PPC, you as the advertiser will pay an agreed fee based on every transaction or click. So, you'll want to consider how much you're prepared to pay for each instance. If your website's average order value is higher than the CPA rate, it's a good deal. If not, it's going to cost you more to win the business than the revenue you secure from the customer.

Traffic generation campaigns

CPC/PPC is a popular route for traffic generation and underpins Google's advertising offer, Adwords, so it's a tried and tested model. One of the advantages of CPC/PPC is the ability for you to specify the most you're prepared to pay for each click and the total investment you're happy to make on the overall campaign. So, if you wanted to spend no more than £1,000, for example, you simply specify that when you book your campaign and when you've received a thousand pounds worth of clicks, your advertising is withdrawn automatically.

For many, the measure of success of an online advertising

Is it all about clicks?

campaign is
simply the number of clicks through to a website. If these results are low
it is seen to have failed but no account is taken of how many people were exposed to the brand or if the user finished their session and visited the website directly at a later date.

Most media either performs one function, lead generation or brand awareness, but online advertising can do both in the one place.
The value of a 'clicked' online advertisement can be determined by a
couple of factors:

What website is this being served on?
If your message is seen by the right target audience the value is far higher than a click on another site by a user not fitting this profile.

Are you actually asking for a click?
If everything you want to say is contained within the advertisement or if there is no call to action then you would come to expect fewer clicks.

If the user clicks through to your site is it giving them what they expect?
The user will want to find out more about the product or service they have seen advertised so make sure not only that they are taken directly to it but also that you can track what they do once they land there. If the experience on your site is not a good one, that click has no value.

With more Rich Media advertisements these days you can make them expand and let the user do multiple things within the one space. For example, in this Uncle Ben's rice MPU it not only gets the message across but lets the user do more within the ad itself. The first action is to rollover (hover the mouse over the space and it expands) - this does not require a click but it opens up to reveal a recipe, the option to print it out, send to a friend or visit the Uncle Ben's site.

This demonstrates that the user is engaging with the brand without clicking through to the website. More and more we see interaction rates as a form of measurement rather than the click through to another website.

Clicks are great, as there is interest in your product or service, but they are only an indicator and the real value lies beyond this.

A stylish and well-researched presentation from Hubspot. Covering inboud/outbound marketing, SEO, social media, blogging, Facebook and Twitter the Slideshare raises some important questions as to what is 'optional' and what is now 'critical' in the B2B digital marketing mix...

Picture the scene -

Five people in a room trying to figure out how we can use the resources at our disposal to measure more precisely the flow of leads from channel right through to customer. We're all looking at an interesting chart with a range of boxes, describing the journey our prospective customers travel from first engaging with a brand to becoming a customer. I'm sure many of you have been in similar meetings many times before. This isn't a new problem. Marketers have always wanted to understand how they can acquire more opportunities cheaper and have invested in technologies in an attempt to make it easier. The whole process is dependent on sales and marketing teams working together with technology as an important resource in the team.

Hubsport recently highlighted five tips that can help sales and marketing teams work better together. The points cover initatives such as 'communicate campaigns'; 'share results' and 'ask for feedback', most of which could be achieved without clever technology. Our question now though is how can we 'optimise' the technology we have invested in to increase the visibility of the sales and marketing pipeline and the volume of outcomes that we're all focused on?

There isn't a simple answer. It's a given fact that sales and marketing teams need to work closely together to fill the pipeline of prospective customers. However, as well as marketing and sales needing each other, both also need technology and people who understand systems and data. These people can help make this whole complex process work well so that we can answer important questions such as

What is your cost per opportunity?
How does it compare per channel?
What is your cost per sale?

These are simple questions to ask, but in large, complex business environments with multiple teams and sophisticated technologies, they may not always be as easy to answer as we'd like. When it comes to metrics, the easiest to do are very rarely the most valuable.

New Media Age this week reports on new moves from the advertising industry to introduce self-regulation around the subject of behavioural advertising.  This is being seen as a pre-emptive strike before the EU enforces laws which could have a major impact on what is a £4bn online ad market.

The latest data published by Neilsen tells us which brands are estimated to have spent the most on display advertising during 2010.

Below is a fantastic tool we use at RBI to help keep consistency when there are a number of people communicating as a brand.

In each column mark where is most appropriate for your brand and audience and see if it corresponds to your current messages.

At the recent Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, Dr Flint McGlaughlin of MECLABs ran through 14 useful tips for optimising the marketing conversion process. Tiny changes have an enormous effect and can substantially alter the ROI:

1.    Remember people don't buy from websites, they buy from people.
2.    Use quantitative statements to support your claims, rather than vague qualitative
       language that anyone can say.
3.    Keep paragraphs short, supported with quantitative evidence.
4.    People naturally read from top to bottom, so don't put obstacles in the way of the
       natural flow of the eye.
5.    Reserve the right-hand page for supporting information.
6.    If you make a claim in an ad (eg award winning), substantiate the claim on the
       landing page to follow the natural thought sequence.
7.    Forms that are separate from a landing page should emphasise the value
       proposition much as the landing page.
8.    Some landing pages need so much work that it's more efficient to just scrap it and
       start again.
9.    Remember the job of a headline is to engage someone sufficiently to read the first
       paragraph.
10.  The role of first paragraph is to answer the key questions in visitors' minds - Where a
       am I? What can I do here? Why should I do it?
11.  Keep the number of clicks that a user is required to do to a minimum - research
       indicates that every time you ask someone to click, you potentially lose 50% of 
       audience.
12.  Become a master at using the elements of the page that control eye
       movement: shape, position, size, colour.
13.  Remember to test variables such as the use of different words (eg does the word
       'Trial' convert better than 'Demo?)

The challenge for marketers is to guide users through a process, helping them overcome the 'FRICTION' that they meet along the way:

Tool	What you'd like a user to do	What often happens
Search ad	Read the ad and click	Ad isn't relevant so clicks back
Landing page:  headline	Read the headline	Not engaging, so hits the back button
Landing page:  first paragraph	Read the first paragraph	Not specific or relevant, so clicks 'back'
Call to Action (CTA)	See the 'CTA', clicks, reviews the form and completes it	Starts the process, but abandons it part of the way through

Further References
Slides from the B2B Marketing Sherpa Event

Article by Lawrence Mitchell (RBI-UK)