Even video has the challenge of breaking through the clutter. A Fifth Network marketing director offers best practice tips for getting noticed.

With so much web innovation happening in every corner of the screen, advertisers need to fight more than just ad clutter to get users' attention.

Even in the lean-forward experience, on the most uncluttered of websites, there is extreme competition for a user's attention. The ads on these pages, which belong to the good people we call clients, were designed, built, targeted and placed to strategically connect with the viewer and begin the dialogue that we call "interaction."

But with so much going on on-screen -- from opened Excel charts and Word documents to emails and web pages -- and knowing that physically blocking content or audibly yelling "look at me!" constitute online ad faux pas, how can advertisers better utilize video to lasso users' eyeballs and make an impression with their banner ads in the milliseconds of face time they might get?

They need to think about their ad design in terms of form and function when picking the best online video formats for their campaigns.

Go big
Auto-play video is one of the best attention-grabbing tools advertisers can use. This shouldn't be a revelation, but the only standard IAB ad units that can easily house video with a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio are the 300x250 and 336x280. These big box units often sit within articles as opposed to around them, but does that mean skyscrapers (160x600s and 120x600s) and leaderboards (728x90s and 468x60s) should be ignored or relegated to non-video? No!

When putting video into these long vertical or horizontal rectangles, the major design issue that comes up is how to best implement the video. Do you want to have a very small video screen that fits completely into the banner (and can grow on expansion), or have a large video screen that, while only showing a sliver of the video, takes up a large portion of the banner, invites more attention and can be fully viewable on mouse-over expansion?

Many of my clients initially insist that the video screen start small and grow because in any other media, the idea of only seeing a portion of the video seems ludicrous. A format where most of the video is "cut off" until user interaction is unfamiliar and often unpleasing to the marketer's eye.

From our experience, though, the web is not just any other medium. In-banner video starts off without sound in standard ad positions around the page. Given all that's going on around the screen, video isn't just a powerful and emotive means of conveying a message; it's often the key to getting noticed at all. This is where the form and majesty of the commercial spot gives way to the science and functionality of making your ads grab the attention of your target audience.

According to a recent Dynamic Logic study on the best performing video ads, some commonalities of the most noticed ad units are that they immediately break through the clutter and that the creative is intrinsically linked to the brand. By utilizing large video to capture attention and smart creative that spotlights the brand's logo or imagery, an ad unit can quickly establish itself in a user's field of attention.

Without using a single euphemism, my point is this: Bigger video gets better results.

Be in the right place
Another aspect of video creative to be cognizant of is this: Video that requires users to mouse-over to begin playing, or video that rests at the bottom of a skyscraper, below the fold, isn't as powerful as that which is front and center.

Video, for all of its emotive powers, is eye-grabbing, so downplaying it to make room for catchy taglines, or delaying it so the unit can start with a flash animation intro can be counter-productive.

Behold, a good ad-product has been given to you. Use it.

Design for accessibility and interaction
Treat your display ads like mini-websites and take advantage of the add-on functionalities the web offers. When you get a user's attention, don't just tell him or her to click through to your site; offer the person as much as possible from the ad and make expandable tabs easy to interact with. Mouse-overs beat clicks. Tabs that don't stop the video beat tabs that do stop the video. The goal is always to keep the user's attention, so if an add-on functionality is going to require a new window or added load time, be judicious in how you use it.

Conclusion
Multitasking is a way of life, and to circumvent the habits of users locked in this grind, advertisers need not only find their audience, but they also need to adapt their views in how they present and use video to attract the interested users in their midst.

Alexis Ames is a Media Manager at The Fifth Network. Read full bio.