Aristotle And The Art Of The Banner Ad

I have spent a great many meetings and emails explaining to designers, copywriters, and creative directors what makes a good interactive (“rich media”) banner. My thesis can be pretty much boiled down to this:

a) The initial interactivity should not be a hard sell, i.e. it should not involve the user clicking through to another site, and it should not imply the user’s interest in purchasing the product (or service) being sold.

b) The interactivity should be a metaphor for the user’s presumed interest in the product. If the banner expands into a golf course for the user to play on, then it should turn out that the golf metaphor has been chosen for a reason that relates to the actual sale, even if it isn’t obvious at the time.

c) By the time the user is prompted to actually deliver the fatal click indicating that they might actually want the product, their state of mind has been changed to make them more receptive to the product than they were before. In corporate sales terminology, you might say that the purpose of the interactivity is to “socialize” the user on the idea of delivering the final click.

d) Interactive banners have an implicit three-act structure, like movies. The first act is a set-up. The second act is an adventure. The third act is a resolution.

When I was working at Fly Communications, I wrote a memo to the creative team attempting to explain this philosophy, in the hope that it would be put into play for a banner they were making for our client, Register.com, which was selling domain names. So I made up the most obvious example I could think of, just for reference:

The banner contains a castle. Marauders rush toward it. The user is empowered by mouse-over gestures to build a wall that keeps the marauders out. Text tells the user: “Secure your domain!” The user, concerned that his “domain” i.e. the castle will be conquered, makes the low-stakes decision to spend a couple of seconds saving it from destruction, just to see if he can do it, and because people have a built-in desire to see how stories end. However, I stipulated, winning the game turns out to be impossible. A very dextrous user can prolong defeat, but it still comes pretty quickly. After losing, the user sees more text: “There is a better way…” leading to a pitch for the user to register (secure) his domain at Register.com.

You see, the user first invests time in playing the game. But he ends up investing energy in the idea behind the game. In this case, it’s the securing of a “domain.” What’s important here is that the game leads the user to a moment when he’s thinking to himself “Shit, I wasn’t able to secure my domain!” And that’s when we swoop in and effectively say: “Not to worry, my friend. That domain you were trying to secure was imaginary, and nobody could have secured it. But let us make it up to you by helping you secure a domain that is real, and with considerably less difficulty! Considering that you’ve already invested time and energy in this struggle for domain security, doesnt it just make sense to let us lead you by the hand to an easy solution?”

Anyway…to my surprise, the creative director took my example literally, and ordered the creation of the whole castle scenario I just described. An excellent design by Christopher Pace makes use of the client’s colors and the look and feel of the best parts of their site.

Ultimately, the text was changed so that the metaphor is spelled out much more literally (“Protect your brand! Secure a free domain name”) which warns the user up front how they’re about to be manipulated, thus ruining everything I just explained. You can see it here.