Online Marketing : Media Creative

Connecting with Customers

Whether it's a quirky viral email campaign or an attention-grabbing expandable banner, it's our job to help you to find the best way to connect with your online audiences.

Much of our work involves the use of Rich Media; the term used for the bells and whistles (a range of digital media technology) used in internet advertising. Consumers enjoy a higher quality experience with Rich Media programs such as Flash and Shockwave when compared with the older mainstream formats.

Our teams work with a wide range of ad formats - each of which can be served from commonly-used platforms such as Doubleclick and Eyeblaster.

Ad size and placement can be tailored to suit different marketing objectives, and we generally advise clients to run any type of banner ads for a maximum of four weeks, as this is the optimum time to achieve click-throughs.

See some of our ads at:

• RAC (FADs)

• iiNet

• BankWest

• HBF

• Tourism WA

In terms of ad format, here's some come common options:

• Floating Ads

  Also known as Over the Page ads, Floating Ads (FAD) usually run for around 10 seconds above the main content of a page. The FAD can be used effectively both during the first phase of a branding campaign and as part of shorter term campaigns which need bursts of exposure.

• Interactive Banners

  Figures suggest that around 10% of users are likely to interact with a banner, so it's important to place the most interesting and relevant information in the unexpanded section.

  Where simple but effective interactions are needed, Expandable Banners are powerful for showing more information or allowing for small menus to form. For small sign-up competitions, or where menus need to feature high level information, an expandable banner could be just the ticket.

• Videostrip

  The popularity of Videostrips - which play video within the banner without user interaction - and rising awareness of Polite Banners - which allow for very large files to load in stages - has been helped along by the penetration of broadband. For maximum impact, the most effective applications tend to be those shot or cut specifically with the web in mind, rather than a TVC that is resized to fit a banner.

What about eDM?

Direct marketing is one of the foundation stones of the traditional marketing mix, so email marketing - now commonly known as eDM - has secured its place as a core component of online strategies.

Whether we're designing for a house list or third party HTML email, we routinely ensure that the creative assets meet email standards.

First of these is optimisation. Despite the fact that many web users now have broadband at their disposal, it shouldn't be assumed that the sky's the limit in terms of email file size. The last thing you need is to be branded an "inbox clogger".

Both Outlook and Lotus Notes allow users to see emails in a preview pane, and Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are expected to follow suit soon. This means that the email's most important messages should appear in the top part of the email to avoid it being skipped or deleted.

It's also worth bearing in mind that, to combat computer viruses, many email clients no longer download images automatically.

Needless to say, this restriction has severely restricted the use of images compared with HTML text in emails, and the latter should be considered more often if the primary goal is to get past a user's first email filter.

Before your eDM campaign is distributed, we will test it across all common email clients to ensure your email renders correctly. We'll also test different copy, imagery and layout formats to give your communication the best possible chance to make its mark and stimulate conversion.

Find some eDM examples at:

• BankWest

• RAC

• Transperth

• Howard Park

• PNCS