Social banners

Banner adverts are annoying... fact. Yet many companies still make a lot of money out of them and the number of people who click through is still sufficient to make the placement of banner advertising on websites a lucrative business.

Banners are generally set dimensions and easy for advertisers to understand - they are, to many, considered analogous to print advertising. i.e. flat and boring.

There is of course so much more you can do with an advert online, be that to build it in flash and make it "whizzy" or do something more intelligent with multiple ad's working together, using clever campaigns, using expandable content, use video, introduce a game, make it an adventure, stick a chicken in a gimp suit on it and so fourth.

A new dimension advertisers are starting to, rightly, look at is introducing a social aspect. An advert suddenly becomes more interesting if you know your peers on Facebook "like" it, or it becomes less static if you can see in real-time what people are tweeting about the brand. At least that's the theory - read more about social banner advertising here.

This sort of advertising is nothing like traditional print - it's interactive, it is involving - it's fucking fantastic!

Social is the way forward - actually it's the way you should be already because social has been around for ages.

Content shouldn't be static, it shouldn't be boring, it should be intelligent, it should know who you are, where you are and what you want. It should be relevant and interesting. I don't want to enlarge my penis, I don't care about women's clothing, Jessica is not horny and online now - I want to know that that film I saw with my mates a few weeks ago is now available on DVD, that the bike I just tweeted about is now discounted at my local store, I want that job vacancy that has just come up in MY city doing what i ACTUALLY do.

I guess there are heaps of issues with privacy here. For advertising to really get to know you it has to get to know you, i.e. advertisers have access to information you might not want them to. Anyway - I'm rambling.

The more clever things you can do the better (as long as they are relevant to the brand of course ). But in a world of noise you should always strive to create something that you would click on, that you would enjoy, that offers value that isn't just more noise.