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: Arthur learned the arts of recruiting from Peter Stamm of The Stamm Agency in NYC where he recruited talent for such companies as DoubleClick, Yahoo!, GS.com and Charles Schwab. Barbato's focus is to assist you in creating the best banner and classified advertising campaigns in the top online advertising space ADOTAS.com.

Want Your Ad to Rock n’ Roll? Apply Repetition to Entice Consumer Interaction

Written on: April 21st 2006
Author: by Arthur Barbato |
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Repetition is the baseline paradigm for success in advertising. Attracting new clients and retaining current clients is mission critical to all who seek to prosper in our interactive world. The best approach to defeating the daily assault of new challenges is to embrace marketing’s oldest golden rule — repetition, and applying it to entice interaction with new clients who only buy from brands they are familiar and comfortable with. That requires a campaign; no single ad will work–in my honest opinion–without sufficient repetition no matter the content.

Because of the power of repetition or as David Ogilvy and others have referred to it, the “anchoring” principle is still the golden rule. That is why SEO firms are doing such a strong business. You need a professional doing your search marketing or you can fail as easily as an amateur driver trying to qualify for a NASCAR race. It can be done-it just doesn’t make sense to waste your time and energy, does it? Yes, in search being first is better, even if being first is not at first blush important because you are already number one. Cyber squatting with your competition buying top bid with your brand name foils the search more often than most would like to admit. With respect to banners there are several augments worth considering and some innovations to keep you first.

One study on a gaming site suggests the 300×250 is the most effective ad size, but in my experience, 728×90 and 160×600 can keep pace with the 300×250. It all depends on being first, yes and on pleasing colors and limited text that entices interaction. “Join us”, “visit us” and other simple invites to interaction are winners and have little competition. Remember, people in the interactive advertising space are very quick scanners of ads-even as they read an article of choice they can be induced to click a banner that gently attracts their eye with pleasing colors and movement.

How is this possible? Well, on adotas.com, as an example, many of the click throughs come when a reader is exposed to the email updates and chooses a particular news item to read—they click on a news item— and they are brought to the article of their choosing and there’s your ad—first —among many, but most important— first for every reader that chose a link to follow from the email update!

How about the type of ad presented? DHTML ads that are viewed with dancing laptops and cars screaming across the page distract the reader—yes, they get your attention. Some actually intrude and interrupt the reader by covering the article they have chosen to read. But do they entice interaction? Only, in my opinion, when viewed repeatedly. No single expansion ad can compare with even a simple jpeg, animated GIF or Flash ad banner that is simple, elegant and repeated often.

Ads that flash in a strobe-like manner (three changes per second) are often ignored and feedback indicates they annoy far more often than they attract clicks. On adotas.com, the most effective ads are gently pleasing eye-candy with limited script and zero outlandish statements. Invites with the fewest words and pleasing colors are particularly well-received and —with sufficient repetition—- hugely successful.