6 Ways To Overcome Banner Blindness

With only 1 in 1,000 people clicking through on display ads, it's no wonder that banner blindness is a serious uphill battle for advertisers.

The truth is that web users are jaded, frustrated, and downright annoyed with display ads that offer text, image, and maybe a Flash animation to attempt to grab attention.

So what does it take to overcome banner blindness? What kinds of ads do people pay attention to and  — dare we say — love?

Here are 5 aspects of successful display ads that overcome banner blindness.

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3 Lessons in Rapid Prototyping with Stanford d.school

How do you build a humane gopher trap?

What does a lawn chair designed for senior citizens look like?

How would you create a tool to teach kids algebra?

Stanford d.school professor Michael Dearing presented these questions to Flite when he visited our San Francisco office this week to talk about rapid prototyping.

This concept is one of the design philosophies of IDEO founder David Kelley and the renowned Stanford d.school.

The core idea is to "think with your hands" by building and testing ideas. Sometimes the planning phase of a project gets bogged down with long brainstorming session, meetings, and emails deliberating pros and cons.

By contrast, rapid prototyping focuses on action. Planning is important but planning by doing is even better. By building something concrete and putting perfection aside, you can iterate and keep improving with each revision.

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To Go Beyond Selling Audience, Sell it Yourself

It’s a sad but true fact: online publishers have been forced into a model of selling pure audience.

Okay, audience is a huge factor — no question there.

But frankly, some sites do a nicer job with their ads. The placement is smarter. The integration with the site is smoother. Advertisers are going to get more of a bang for their buck running ads on these sites.

And some publishers offer great content. They should have a market edge too. When content invigorates the mind, or opens up consumer’s interest in discovering new products and ideas, ads will do better as well.

Yet somehow, a 25-35 male is just a 25-35 male.

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Embedding Facebook in Display (Banner) and Mobile Ads

An expansion of a mobile ad banner that shows the most recent 20 Facebook posts.Facebook is the world's largest social network, with over a billion active users (and the only social network profiled in an award-winning blockbuster movie, released when its userbase was only half as large). And with over 50 million Pages, Facebook has also moved well past friend-to-friend interactions. Along with Twitter, Facebook has become one of the mission-critical social media platforms for brands to interact with fans, kick off promotions, and make announcements that have the potential to spread virally.

As I discussed in my blog post last week, embedding social media in display (banner) ads offers users the opportunity to do more than click and interrupt their site browsing experience. It also offers brands the opportunity to share the kind of content that was valuable enough to post on their Facebook Pages with a potentially much larger audience, one that is practically only limited by budget.

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They Weren’t Mistakes If You Learned From Them

Source: Miss Pupik (Flickr)Ever have a bad idea? In marketing, that’s pretty much an occupational hazard.

Maybe that’s why I sometimes hear stories of campaigns that perform just terribly. Every so often I’m the one telling those stories.

But if we listen and learn, every failed campaign should lead us closer to success. Of course, it’s always preferable to fail fast, or better yet, not fail at all.

That’s why watching campaigns launch in real-time is so effective. It shortens the feedback loop, creating more opportunities to learn and optimize, or pull the plug. Real-time monitoring also let’s you know if you’ve struck gold and it’s time to ramp up your campaign and bet big while it's hot.

I hear these stories too, of agile marketers with their real-time data. When a campaign isn’t going well, they go on a hunt for a solution. A content change here. A new message there.

And by introducing optimization early and often, agile marketers might double, triple, even decuple (x10 — I had to look that up) the results of their efforts. Or maybe they terminate the project early to save budget for better ideas.

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