ANIMATED BANNER ADS

My client, Smart Destinations, wanted to do something different. They were looking for new ideas and a fresh look to help attract attention and increase the number of click throughs on their banner ads. They were interested in animation. To do something different than the usual stock photography I suggested creating illustrated animated banner ads of someone seeing the some of the sights. It interested them...

Working together with them, the concept evolved into representing four of the activities that the NYC Explorer Pass offers, and a fifth text only banner, in five sizes, and with a stick figure sightseer. Smart Destinations offers great discount passes for many other locations with many other activities too, so the idea was to design the ads with a process in mind that would make it possible to swap out the activities and background of the NYC Pass with illustrations of other activities offered in other locations, and that location's background image. They also requested that the banner ads be created in photoshop. Yes, you can create animated gifs in photoshop...

....but, creating five different sized animated banner ads (300x600, 728x90, 300x50, 250x300, and 160x600) with the same content, each with five scenes, that look and perform similarly with Google ad size and time limitations, is a challenge.

Google only allows up to 150KB/s and 30 seconds of time for an animated banner ad. These limitations affect the frame rate, the number of frames, the number of colors, and the content of an ad, based on it's footprint. The larger the ad the more space it takes, so the less space, time, colors, and frames of movement, you have to work with. The balance between time, space, colors and resolution is tight. This was a challenging and fun project!

Interested in creating custom designed animated, or static, banner ads for your business? Contact VisPer!