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Sunday, 18th February 2007, No Comments »

Banner Ads 2.0

Based on some comments by Juha a while back, I’ve been thinking about if I had free rein on an ad campaign, what kind of online ads would I create? I ended up with the idea of user contextual ads.

User Contextual Ads

Instead of contextual ads that are usually determined by page content or search terms, you could create ads that are based your users context.

• Time/date sensitive ads
  A TV channel advertising primetime shows. A web based ad could act as a lead-up to the show during the day, ‘Tonight, a very special episode of Y’, when the show is on it would ‘alert’ the viewer they’re missing it ‘Dude! You’re missing Y!?’, after the episode has finished the ad lead into next week ‘Next time on Y’ and/or direct users to the official community site.
• Location based ads.
  While determining exact location is not fool proof, even with some sneaky tools, it is a way on connecting with users on a local level. If you were a news organisation, for example, you could have the top regional story of the user.
• Ad web mash-ups
  Say Spac could create a series of ads using geolocation and weather data (Similar to weathr). The ads could display activities based on the weather, so if it’s raining then suggest kids do a Dance Demo

I’m not really interested in getting into the ‘debate’ of marketing being broken. Like almost every industry it’s still exploring what ads can do.