Recently, I was visiting one of my favorite blogs, lifehacker.com, and while I was reading one of the articles I ran across the ad pictured below. The first thing you notice about the flash banner ad is that it immediately grabs your attention with the yellow cooking area. If Lifehacker’s site wasn’t yellow it would probably grab you that much more and I assume Gawker Media is running these ads throughout their network of blogs which have a primarily white background. When you hit ‘play’ a chef begins going through a quick lesson on how to make an easy but intriguing recipe. I’ve seen several but the coolest one was a bacon and maple ice cream over Cinnamon sour dough bread pieces. Yes, you read that correctly. Bacon ice cream. Amazing.
So, throughout the demonstration you can mouse over the various products and in this example the ice cream maker could be clicked and take you straight to ebay. A fantastic banner. It was informative, enticing, and wasn’t pushy in the slightest. What a fantastic concept! Being a developer I never rarely click on a banner ad but by giving me something fun to learn about I got hooked. We will definitely be taking a page from ebay’s book. We were unable to track down what agency worked on these but they are getting two thumbs up from Mauro and I.
