What I love most about digital communication is its constantly evolving nature and how it is becoming more sophisticated every day. My personal belief is, “anything is possible on the internet.” This is mainly due to the role that technology plays.

With today’s technology we can target consumers based on their geographical location and their behaviour. We can re-target ads to people that have visited our own site and the context in which the ad is placed, to name just a few possibilities.

With all these fantastic capabilities you would think that creative agencies would utilize these technologies as they are developing banners. Sadly, this is not the case.

Most banners that I come across have flash as their only link to technology. So it’s not a surprise that we find ourselves placing banners that are lacking even the most basic technological capabilities.

Great creative work requires time, talent, technical competence and clear objectives. Unfortunately, it is not often these conditions are met.

But what if the conditions were met? What could we accomplish? One of the best ads I have seen was for a company called Playground.

They created a database compiled of products that were linked to weather and location. They then used geo-targeting to locate where in Sweden the consumer was surfing and coupled the location to a database of local weather conditions. With this information they could then recommend a product relevant to that specific day all in the matter of a split second. If the weather were to go up or down the product would shift to something more appropriate. This is what we call Service Banners (see example).

Another example is the Swedish Postal Service’s banner on the popular buy/sell site Blocket. Within their banner, perspective consumers can easily calculate how much it will cost to ship the product they want to buy. (see example)

Another example on Blocket is Swedbank’s ingenious car loan banner. Their banner “reads” the price of the car being sold and automatically calculates, in the banner, the monthly cost of the car if the consumer were to take a loan with them. (see example)

With these examples we see that a little technology makes all the difference. However, these banners would probably not have been produced if Playground didn’t have the time needed to create a database of weather correlated products and Swedbank did not have great consumer insight.

The next time you have a campaign, set clear objectives not only for the campaign as a whole but for your banners as well. Hire a team that has shown they understand technology and give them time to create a strategy. Remember, one of the biggest contributors to a good CTR is the creative.

Av: Christian Ullmark, digital planner på Starcom