The first Binary Clock ad created in-house by me was met with mixed reactions(and didn’t really boost sales much). You can look at it and the reasoning behind it here.
In retrospective, the reasons why it burned IMHO were:
- Too little “attractive capability”
- Too much animation
- Bad visuals(hey, shooting the photos at a McDonalds can’t work)
So, much so good – here is the new Tamoggemon ad:
The core ideas behind this(third) revision are:
Make it stand out
When the idea for this banner was born, most banners at the target site were full of animation and media. I wanted to work anticyclic, creating a thin whitespace-loaded banner that sort-of merged into the news service’s content. In fact, if an article would be around it, spotting this for an ad wouldn’t be soo simple.
Have a strong catch phrase
In fact, many people at my school saw this ad as it was my desktop background – the reactions to it were so strong that one idiot actually attempted to destroy my notebook’s LAN port by ramming an USB connector up it. Tick Tock is a little bit crazy and very very uncommon – it makes you look in order to figure out what its all about!
Have a clear visual hierarchy
When a person looks at this ad, he will usually look at Tick Tock first, then go on to the explaining bit of ‘copy’ and then to the icon, on which he will (hopefully) click. Every user who looks at the Tamoggemon ad space will follow exactly this pattern – unlike the animated ad, which only made sense if you started looking at it in the first frame!
Do something unusual
This banner probably never was seen before from any other company in the Palm OS sector. Its new, its interesting, and it should stand out as no one knows the concept yet.
Please tell me what you think about it.
Related posts:
IMHO the ad is not the problem, the problem is the binary clock concept itself which is very far to be popular, even among geeks.
Even internet time by swatch was not a success…
Hi,
I know that Binary Clock has rather limited appeal. Well have new banners soon – but nevertheless, I felt like sharing the idea!
Best regards
Tam Hanna
Typo:
It’s time for a new kind of clock
But I have unfortunately to agree with LTH on the limited usefulness of this kind of program. When I want to read the time, it has to be quick. I don’t want to have to do binary conversions in my head (OK, I guess this improves over time, but it’s still something to learn).
Speaking as someone who has a binary clock sitting on top of his monitor, it seems to me the biggest problem with both ads is that you don’t see the clock working. If you didn’t already know how they work, neither ad does anything to show you how nifty they are.
Seems to me that in the ideal world, a good ad would be one like the second one, but with a working binary clock giving you the correct time in the lower right corner….