Fun with AdWords and ASCII
Clients love display ads. Fun animations, colour and plenty of room for branding. What’s not to like? Well, for starters, these are exactly the elements that users have learned to ignore. Particularly when the ads are placed based on demographics rather than contextually.
Then along came Google AdWords, which allows advertisers serve their ads based on user behaviour (search queries) or contextually (pages where the adjacent content is relevant). These text-based ads typically generate better click-through rates because the ads are presented at precisely the time when users are actively searching for information on that topic. A big coup advertisers and consumers alike.
So what happens when advertisers combine the sexiness of display ads with the utilitarian nature of text? ASCII art! SIXT, a German car rental company, was seeking a way to break through the clutter. Their fun ads, pictured below, quickly communicate the nature of their service and help them stand out against the list of sponsored links.
Of course, Google will need to limit these executions lest AdWords become an ASCII art competition and lose its efficacy. Nonetheless, the company won Grand Prix at the eurobest awards in 2007 for its innovative thinking.
Check out the video case study on Banner Blog.
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Tags: ASCII art, banner advertising, Google AdWords, internet, search marketing
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