Have you noticed that most online ads look like they've been made by the same person? A good 90% of ads that are programmed in Flash use the same art direction and the same style of animation. It's unexciting, bland and very tired.
I'll give you some examples: Freeserve was a serial offender, with Wanadoo picking up where its finished with its 2D characters pointing at big prices in the sky. Online marketers at Ford and Renault seem to tolerate a limited range of art directional styles that their above-the-line colleagues would be hung out to dry for. Even Camelot has fallen prey to the Flash family of characters that would be happier in the clip art folder.
It's not to say that these ads aren't good -- they're not actually, but I'm not to say it -- it's more to do with a qualitative depth interview the other day with my brother-in-law, when he asked me the simplest of questions -- "why do all ads on the internet try to look like each other?"
The easiest and most inexpensive way to develop online advertising is to have a single Flash designer making everything, but mass adoption of these techniques has resulted in a situation where everyone's ads look like everyone else's ads. If I think this and I work in the industry, Lord knows what the humble punter thinks?
People like looking at interesting and different things: that's why people visit Paris for the weekend, queue up for exhibitions, wear nice clothes and have a preferred album cover. It's an inalienable truth about people and a much better way to engage someone in your brand than flashing prices at it.
Of course, it doesn't help that the industry rule about production budgets being 10% or 15% of the media budget still exists. A rule that is rolled out by agencies to set production budgets if the spend exceeds 拢100,000, but used by advertisers to set budget if spend is below 拢50,000. The point that we're missing is that production costs should be negotiated in tandem with the development of the creative idea.
We've been fortunate enough to recently work on an online advertising campaign for an airline that understood this. It gave its approval to the costs required to work with an acclaimed Californian artist and have been rewarded with the standard of work.
Arise agency people and sell ideas to your clients with some oomph. After years of complaining about file size and that banners are difficult shapes to work with, we now have scope for big bad ads with file sizes to match. Next time you put the creative brief in make sure your creatives know this and then wow your client with something special.
It's very easy to make average online advertising, but incredibly difficult to make good online advertising. Let's unshackle ourselves from the rigidity of the 10% to 15% rule and let advertisers; agencies and my brother-in-law reap the benefits.
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