Display advertising is a growing area in Quirk’s portfolio and complements our range of engagement tactics. It is widely used to drive branding and awareness and consists of using ad space on websites to reach a desired audience. The most common type of display advertising is banner advertising, which may include static or animated images. I’m sure you will have seen one but let me just remind you:

Banners that incorporate rich media offer advertisers something much more exciting. Rich media banners can include interactive elements such as audio, video, banner expansion, data submission, gaming and site skins (wallpapers).

The Cape Town QuirkStation recently welcomed a presentation from Andre van Assche of MediaMind for our regular Friday afternoon University of Quirk session. MediaMind manage and serve digital campaigns solutions which include rich media, standard, search and mobile. The presentation focused on rich media as well as addressing the relationship between display and search. Andre supported his presentation with a number of awesome examples of display ads that I thought I would share with you.

According to Andre, rich media ads have a higher click-through than standard banners and “adding video to a rich media ad doubles the amount of time an average user spends with an ad”. Consumers are also more willing to engage and maintain interest in a brand’s message when ads contain video. So check out these rich media ads and hopefully you will be as inspired as the rest of the Quirk team was.

The Masterfoods Revel Eviction campaign offered users the opportunity to engage with the brand and vote to evict their least favourite flavour:

A simple yet effective anti-smoking ad by NHS in the UK, showing the places where it is against the law to smoke:

Screengrab Homepage Takeover for the O2 concert:

An interactive banner ad for Snickers featuring Mr T:

A really awesome Audi A8 ad:

and a BMW Z4 ad based on augmented reality:

Agencies are looking for new ways to grab the consumer’s attention and are getting very innovative in the process. I must agree with Joe that the Tostitos ad, “And then there was Salsa” is one of the all-time best. But maybe you have some fantastic ads to share, so please let me know. I am sure there are going to be some exciting developments in this area, and definitely in the mobile space, so hopefully there will be more where this came from. 

Also check out:

• Online Advertising and Behavioural Targeting