Before you read this, open up a new tab in your browser. Enter the url for your favorite publisher and ask yourself this question: Who brought you the content?

No matter where you went, there’s a good chance you don’t have a single answer to that question. In all likelihood, no single brand brought you that experience because homepage takeovers -- while they are powerful tools -- are the exception to the rule. The tactic requires a relatively large budget, stellar coordination between brand, agency and publisher, and creative worth talking about. And those are just the standard barriers to entry when it comes to a takeover.

Once you’ve got the green light for a campaign that involves a takeover, there are dozens of issues to consider, which is why we’ve tapped some takeover veterans to give us the do’s and don’ts for a successful homepage takeover.

Do: Maintain control over media and creative
It's your campaign, and in a lot of ways, the weak economy makes it a buyer's world. So, whatever you do, you must maintain control of your creative vision, says Ross McNab, director of digital advertising solutions at Eyeblaster.

If you can't see your client's vision all the way through to the publisher's page, a takeover probably isn't worth the cost or the headache. While that may sound harsh, McNab explains that the point is to find a way to seamlessly integrate the brand's message with the publisher's style.

McNab points to FedEx's "Paper Crumple" as a good example of a creative strategy that gave the advertiser control of its message (for 15 seconds) before returning the user to the publisher's normal screen. In this case, The Economist's homepage "crumples" into a piece of digital "paper" shortly after the site loads. Click here to take a look.

Do: Swing for the fences
You're paying for the whole page, so it only makes sense to get your money's worth, says Dimitry Ioffe, CEO of The Visionaire Group. But that doesn't just mean doing a takeover that is big and intrusive, it means that the agency and the brand should push the creative envelope to come up with an ad that blurs the line between message and content to create a wholly unique creation.

Here's an example of what Ioffe means.

For this homepage takeover promoting "The Day The Earth Stood Still," FOX literally drove a digitized truck across the MySpace homepage, momentarily obliterating the site's familiar landing page. Even one of MySpace's icons got in on the act by tracking the truck with a spotlight projected out of the figure's head.

While the page quickly returned to normal, the impact was hard to miss. For a few seconds, one message was so big that it didn't just obscure MySpace, it essentially destroyed it (if only temporarily). Although that may sound like a bit much for a run-of-the-mill campaign, it's important to remember that a homepage takeover is anything but routine. In the final analysis, a takeover is an event, which means that the creative had better be out of the ordinary, and (ideally) worthy of a user hitting the refresh button to see it one more time.  

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