Second, have your logo on every frame of the banner, or risk the consumers never noticing who you are. Remember, they are not on that page for your ad but for the content, and in their brief glance at the ad space, they better know who you are.
Third, animate your logo. Companies often do it in TV. Stop adhering to logo guidelines set down by the logo cops. Those rules are holdovers from the print production world, but for some reason clients and agencies just keep following them as if they were rules, not guidelines. Don't go wild and wreck the logo's integrity, but keep to its spirit.
And finally, fix your process of producing online banners! Stop wasting money. No single banner is going to fundamentally change the client's business the way a single commercial can gain emotional resonance. The process makes sense for TV due to the high production costs associated with the end product, but for a banner? You're wasting valuable time and resources, repeatedly.
How do you fix it? Well, one way is to have the agency just do weekly concepts. Give them the uber brief of who you are as a brand and the themes they should be concentrating on. And then each week, choose the ones that will go into final production.
Also, cut down your approval process internally. If you have to go up and down three levels at the client side for each banner, you'll never get anything done. Oh yeah, that's what your stuck with now, isn't it? Look, unless you can throw enough stuff up at the wall, you'll never start to find that breakthrough creative. It should be your consumers who determine what resonates. As long as the creative is on message, let them do so.
A few things will happen with that process: You will get much more work out of your agency, in fewer hours and cost, and you will be able to improve your performance.
Why these suggestions? Well, they all point to the fundamental flaw in the format itself. It's not interuptive but peripheral, and it requires different techniques.
You all have to start looking at how the consumer interacts with the pages your advertising is on. Stop assuming you're smarter than your consumer, and for Pete's sake, stop treating this like offline.
None of these suggestions are magic pixie dust, but I think maybe you have all snorted the magic pixie dust of incompetence for too long and I'm sick of it. It's time to start understanding this medium.
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Sean X Cummings is director of marketing for Ask.com.
