The difference of course, is that material in the active window is being actively and consciously engaged and evaluated by the Web visitor, who can then slow down and read material that has proven itself relevant, which is obviously not the case for billboards.  This is where the analogy breaks down, and why most  copywriters will slap anyone clueless enough to vomit up the old “People don’t read online” mantra.

But as useful as the analogy is for web pages, it’s far more so for online ads:

• Both are on the periphery of your vision/attention, and therefore both have to present a reason to shift your attention from the task at hand to their message.
• Both want to leave you hungering for more information or more contact with the brand.

So when my recent post on Apple’s Banner Ad Innovation provoked some Ogilvy-inspired comments that compared banner ads to magazine ads, I thought It would be worthwhile to revisit that advertising giant’s advice on billboards (or what he refers to generally as posters).  So here it is:

• It Pays to make your poster a ‘visual scandal’”
• Your poster should deliver you selling promise not only in words, but also pictorially.
• Use the largest possible type
• Make your brand name visible at a long distance
• Use strong, pure colors
• Never use more than three elements in your design

Now, strong colors might be a toss-up, because while they can draw the eye, they also scream “I’m an ad, ignore me.”  And you can take or leave the other bottom four bullets, but the top two are pure gold for banner ads and are exactly what Apple was doing in it’s New York Times banner/skyscraper ad.

1.  A ‘Visual Scandal’ surprises and delights viewers

This surprise and delight factor causes a peripheral eye sweep to become a studied look, gaining you the web visitor’s/driver’s active attention and consideration.  And it does it while leaving those people with a positive emotional response to your brand (as apposed to gaining attention through an annoying, dancing stick figure).  Here’s an example of visual scandal that Ogilvy provided in Ogilvy on Advertising:

And here are some of my personal favorite examples:

Of course, the razor blade, kill bill, and Nike ads are probably better than the Makers Mark and Frozen Mars Bar ad because in those billboards the selling promise is implicit in the visual scandal, thereby following Ogilvy’s second point as well as the first.

Achieving Visual Scandal by Coloring Outside the Lines

Notice how often this idea of visual scandal requires the use of 3-D or “outside the lines” effects.  So how did Apple do this with a banner ad?  They had multiple space ads interacting with each other, extending the ad outside the lines/boundaries of what we are used to.  Take a look:

Achieving Visual Scandal by Visual Pun

Another technique for creating visual scandal is to make creative and unusual use of a boundary, line, or element that is already a part of the environment, creating a visual pun, as these examples do:

This techniques works for a lot more than posters, too:

Story Appeal

Humans use stories to explain deviations from the ordinary.  As Jerome Bruner writes in, Acts of Meaning:

“Stories seem to be designed to give the exceptional behavior meaning in a manner that implicates both an intentional state in the protagonist (a belief or desire) and some canonical element in the culture . . . The function of the story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern.”

So viewers create stories by speculating on the motives of the actors depicted (within a scene or picture); they use their imaginations to fill in the back-story.  Needless to say, you can’t have a story element to your picture/billboard/banner ad unless it contains people, or more precisely, characters.

Just look at the ad Ogilvy used as an example of “story element”:

And here’s what Ogilvy wrote about Story Appeal (and this ad):

“The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiousity.  He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on heres?’  Then he reads your copy to find out.  Harold Rudolph called this magic element ‘Story Appeal,’ and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.”

“The eyepatch [in the Hathaway ad] injects the magic element of ’story appeal.‘”

Do you see how the odd characteristic of the Baron Wrangell character made readers curious.  They speculated about his background, purpose in the ad, etc.  And so they read the ad.  In online terms, they’d click through to get the full story on your home page.

For most people this same story appeal now occurs whenever we see the Mac and PC characters – especially when we see them outside the confines of a TV ad.  Viewers know there’s a story to the ad somewhere, and so look closer to find out what it is.

So all you Internet Marketers yearning for a creative renaissance in online advertising, follow Apple’s lead and employ these techniques to their maximum.  Just try to remember that after you’ve surprised and delighted your audience, it will be relevance and scent that will determine whether your ad actually makes the client any money.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

Slashdot sums up the new tax law:

“…based on a novel definition of what constitutes a presence in the state: It includes any Web site based in the state that earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of affiliates–from big publishers to tiny blogs–that feature links to its products.”

We should all support Amazon in their fight. This could affect all of us who buy online in the future — at least in the United States. Let’s all buy something from Amazon today to show our support of their fight.

P.S. – If you need a suggestion on what to buy, you can always pre-order our next book, Always Be Testing.

According to Schwartz:

Google Pay Per Action will allow advertisers to create ads that cost only when a desired action is triggered. The advertiser sets the price per action; for example, an advertiser can decide to pay $5 per lead acquisition, as opposed to paying per click or per impression.

The New York Times ran an article on the subject entitled “Google Tests an Ad Idea: Pay Only for Results.”

Says Times reporter Miguel Helft:

Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

But many other companies are using cost-per-action ads in different ways. They include the search-engine start-up Snap, which displays cost-per-action ads next to search results, and Turn, a network that matches advertisers and publishers interested in cost-per-action ads.

We think it is a model that all the large players in search will be embracing over time,” said Tom McGovern, the chief executive of Snap.

For the time being, Google is not putting cost-per-action ads next to search results, limiting them to publishers’ Web sites and essentially creating its own affiliate marketing network. Industry insiders said Google’s entry into the market was likely to accelerate its growth.

Insightful as always, Scott Karp asks on his Publishing 2.0 blog “Can Google Transform The Entire Web Into A Direct Marketing Machine?”

Google’s contextual advertising revolution has already transformed the structure of the web, leading to the creation of millions of web pages with no other real purpose than to serve AdSense ads. The content on these pages is purely a vehicle for advertising — the traditional Chinese Wall between editorial and advertising has been obliterated. And it has force many publishers who follow a more traditional editorial path to start poking holes in the wall. Content has always been a marketing vehicle, but never at such a granular, easy-to-manipulate level.

With its CPA program,” Karp continues, “Google will drive this phenomenon to the next level. With cost-per-click ads, spammers create bogus pages where confused consumers click on ads in an effort to escape. But with CPA ads, clicking is not enough. The game is now to manipulate consumers not only to click, but to take some further action. And I don’t use the word “manipulate” arbitrarily. This is about turning the web into one big pile of junk mail, aimed at getting you to sign up, buy, or commit to something that you hadn’t necessarily wanted.

Google must know that most CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) deals waste publishers’ time because they aren’t very often effective and haven’t actually been optimized. Traditionally, instead of offering an optimized offer, people mash-up an ad and a landing page, then try to convince publishers to risk the deal. Publishers pay with their time and inventory. Since Google’s CPA deal is automated, it won’t waste time but could waste inventory.

I’ve always found that it’s more effective for an advertiser to spend the time developing an optimized offer–often using cheap CPA or very cheap CPM inventory–to maximize conversions. Once you establish your baseline cost-per-action, go ahead and buy CPM inventory at about 10-20% the cost of baseline. However, the optimization cycle must come first! Google offering CPA advertising will most likely bring around a new batch of lame and lazy advertisers, the mediocre ones that currently are avoiding their own risk by not even paying for traffic on a CPM basis today.

Will Google enforce a minimum conversion expectation? And, if so, how? What will the minimum be?

I started as any modern, connected man would; I searched on Google for “diamond earrings.” I then visited the big-brand diamond sites. After a handful of clicks, I didn’t find what I was looking for. But I did find something else: a diamond mine of e-tailing opportunities.

It should come as no surprise that I’m squarely in the uniformed category when it comes to diamond earrings. So I continued my search, clumsily clicking through category page after category page, site after site. Sooner or later I was bound to find the earrings I’d envisioned dangling from my wife’s ears. I felt trapped in my own ignorance.

I decided to expand my search with more descriptive terms. I began to lose patience. Just as I was losing hope, I found a site with the handle I needed. The style of earrings I was looking for are called drop earrings.

This cycle of ignorant buying repeats itself hundreds of thousands of times a day, in thousands of different product and service categories. Sometimes the e-tailer wins, sometimes the offline seller wins. Sometimes, nobody wins and credit cards remain sheathed in wallets. Just because prospects don’t know how to search the way you hope and expect them to doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified and ready to buy.

Continue reading my column on ClickZ…