728x90 - My view about the Leaderboard web banner
Hello
Today, I'm introducing you to the Leaderboard, a term that all image and advertising professionals are very familiar with, which is not the name of a new music band!
I’m talking about the horizontal digital advertising banners, the size of a bookmark, format of 728 pixels by 90 pixels, or 19.261 cm by 2.38 cm, one of the oldest digital advertising format I can remember. Here's my post about it, a little édito.
MusicScore: This leaderboard banner first appeared in 1994, as this great interpretation from John Mellencamp of Wild Night feat. Me'Shell Ndegeocello. What a baseline! Listen to it while reading.
This article is about the digital web banner advertising format for article pages, blog posts, and usual email campaigns: the Leaderboard. Thank you for reading.
Displaying with the Leaderboard web banner
It would have been interesting to compile the number of times I produced this advertising format since the beginning of my career. The use of the leaderboard image size is widespread, both in Google's advertising tools or the email signature of employees. The creation of this image format in the production of corporate and promotional campaigns is worth it.
Don’t hesitate to ask your graphic designer to ad this format to your usual visual production and promotional documents. When the time comes, you can easily distribute the newest campaign and the link to you team. This process has been around and planned annually in commun corporate businesses for years. The study of analytics shown me for more than two decades these links are the most used ones coming from internal communications. Try it and look at your stats at the end of the month, you will be surprised!
Here on this blog, you usually see two leaderboard banners per professional article (Marketing Blog category) with an advertising mention, sold by Services W+M. The link sends the visitor to the customer’s website who purchased the ad time. This principle is the same as print media sites, newspapers and magazines, and for web pages that usually have text, news, blog posts, etc. Isn't the leaderboard, placed at the top of the pages or inserted in the texts, the perfect name for this format of advertising, don’t you agree?
Origin and history
Digital marketing could be defined as such in 2024, an online communication brining influence (often from social medias) and an optimization of digital sales tools to create traffic and purchases. The digital possibilities to advertise on the e-market are vast and for many devices and screen format.
A great element, when come the time to determine the size of images needed for promotion campaigns, is to use formats suiting many devices; so, reducing your production time and cost. This is the perfect reason why the leaderboard advertising size has been so popular, and for so many years, fitting mostly on every devices, web pages or applications. So the possibilities to use it for advertising are great us, marketers of the virtual market.
The concept of uploading an image with a link date back to 1993, by IBM for Sears, (I sometime miss their catalogue; great times!). The term Ad Banner and the first ad that went online with a link to direct the visitor to an external site was the following year, in 1994.
You will also often see, when reading about the leaderboard, it respects the standards set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (or IAB), i.e. the group of Internet advertising players that develops standards based on research and serves as legal support. Wiki tells us about all the branches of the IAB in the wordl now and the famous legal battles they did for us, the advertising users and especially the creators, who may remember the time before the standardization of advertising formats, who needed to produce hundreds of different formats for a single campaign. That's how I learned to use Photoshop for the first time for the Admission Network Co, in the 90’s.
The leaderboard, a marketing friend in 2024
In recent years, several customizable templates are now available in most design softwares and apps, such as Canva, or the free mobile app Photoshop Express to create images. It's getting easier and easier to advertise yourself digitally and create a respectable promotional campaign at few cost.
Not to mention email distribution tools, such as Mailchimp, and its template to create your banner for your email subscribers, make this task easier. By the way, the leaderboard format is listed in the most successful popular banners on the chimp ressources pages, which also advise this:
Banner ads in "leaderboard" format measure 728 x 90 pixels and are usually placed at the top of web pages. Because they're long and thin, it can be difficult to include all the graphic design elements you need to encourage users to click on your ad. Mailchimp.
Advertising in the media
It is also possible to book digital leaderboard ads yourself on media, newspaper, magazine and ad sites of all kinds. Locate the media section on these sites and do your homework to make sure readers are your target audience. Search or ask for press materials, media kits, and readers location information + statistics.
I must admit in my everyday webmaster marketer life, my favorite calls are the ones I do with the representatives of these display medias. These are the people who, once they have targeted your business and know you well enough, will offer you great targeted opportunities, always interesting. You can trust their instincts; they know their market. You may also discuss about reports, interviews, and other advertising mediums, such as radio, TV, etc. Ask for it, you never know. Remember, we never loose in marketing; we marketers only ajust for the next time;). Jeff
In the following section of this post, I am talking about media and digital content to reach customers and prospects, a movement to follow already in 2024 in the digital trends. Bellow, advices for the young at heart in doing your first Leaderboard.
Advertising
About the Marketing Blog Leaderboard Advertising service
Perfectly associated with the readers of blog posts in the news articles of digital sales, the banner for sale in the articles is visible due to its size and catches the reader's attention quickly between the texts and the white wallpaper.
The pricing of the W+M Services sales service is advantageous and depends on the subject and production of the article whose topic resonates with your target audience. Banners can be purchased weekly, 13-week seasons with a 5% discount on the weekly price, and 52-week annual banners can be purchased with a 10% discount on weekly prices.
In addition, the monthly box set of more than 12 revised popular posts is also offered, an interesting display for big announcements.
My opinion on the design of a 728x90 ad
In order to finish this post on advertising, I'm going to summarize what I do when I create a 728 x 90 visual banner, or what I get from graphic designers and clients to put online that have the same characteristics:
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when there is limited space like the leaderboard. Restricted text also means to use a button rather than a sentence. I often see, in 728x90 images, only an effective image, a slogan of 4 words maximum, the logo of the company and a button click here.
The redirect link should be as simple as possible. For example, if the link to your blog post is ... com/blog/i-think-the-title-of-my-article-might-be-too long, ... well remember to visit the settings of your post before publication to shorten it to 4 or 5 words
Think about a reduced image size, so not slowing down the downloading time of you web page. You know, when you're publishing on the web, in general, it's usually not necessary to put images of excessive sizes in high dimension. It's not the same image format as when printing a physical advertising for a magazine. A Google search or a graphic designer will advise you the right formats to use for the images, gifs or videos for website usage. You might check before starting your own production, Picasso, and bog down your server with images the size of a movie theater screen!
Keep it simple. Avoid complicated design and image concepts. The reactive time for readers is less than 2 seconds, even closer to 1 second.
I try to avoid stagnation, meaning like an armchair always in the same place for so long, you end up not noticing it anymore. The same goes for campaigns and web banners, email ads, and cover banners. Sometimes, replacing a regular image for a week or two will not hurt, in addition to helping your SEO. If you only knew how many people notice these kinds of little details. Every visual professional does, so it’s already a great amount of the population who will appreciate the effort, like decoration a boutique.
Advertising
Conclusion
In here, the Services W+M beginning of 2024 was carried out by the rhythm of the musical project #demoTalkMusicArt, while studying the 2023 statistics from the blog and doing the final touches of the content direction of 2024. I had fun choosing themes that I found inspiring throughout the year. Check it out!
Do you have an idea for an article on digital marketing? Would you like to place a 728x90 in this article? Here are the banner prices available starting at $62.00 per week at cost on an annual basis, plus taxes. Launch of the article promotion: March 15, 2024, for a period of 13 weeks.
Thank you for your time.
Jeff
Sources:
IAB via Wiki
Intuit Mailchimp: banner ressources
Archive billets de 1997: Archives numérique, research 514 790-1245 Réseau Admission
Cr images: Services W+M
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