Google is pushing responsive design hard, arguing that ‘optimized’ sites will serve readers better by offering a uniform content experience. (Cynically, one might argue that Google has a strong interest in pushing publishers to push the same content out across multiple devices in various formats so the task of processing and presenting this information is simpler for Google if it’s not different across multiple devices.) The responsive design approach is cheaper for everyone too, since it means publishers don’t have to rethink their content strategies for each new device, just the formatting.

Now advertisers are beginning to explore ways to make their ads responsive. Build one ad, then tweak it automatically so it can run on a half-dozen form factors — desktop, iPad, mini, iPhone, XX and other tablets. You can see an example of one such solution here:

The idea of responsive ads seems silly to me. Imagine trying to build an ad that would “resize” automatically to run on TV, radio, glossy magazines and newspapers. In theory, this might be possible. But this strategy would result in least-common-denominator content, probably just chunks of black and white text. Though even this dumbed down ad wouldn’t work on radio, so maybe a transmitter could be constructed that would turn “responsively” this text into morse code.

Trying to resize both editorial and advertising reflects a giant failure of imagination. Just as the best web sites live and breath in the many dimensions that were unimaginable in the monochrome and two dimensional world of newsprint publishing, the best tablet and mobile sites someday will embody dimensions and colors and experiential textures that aren’t imagined in today’s world of desktop publishing and reading.

By definition, the best ads won’t be responsive; the best content and ads will be unfungible across devices because they’ll embody features that are unique to each tier of device. With this philosophy in mind, Blogads teams are busy working on new ad units that will be uniquely effective on tablets, rather than just resizing versions of desktop ad units. Watch this ever-mutating space to see what we come up with.

Can a few friends move an election?

Yes, according to a recent study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. During the Congressional Election of 2010, Fowler’s study split 61 million Facebook users into three groups: 98% saw an ad saying “I voted” along with pictures of friends who had clicked the “I Voted” button, 1% saw the ad with no pictures of friends, and the final 1% weren’t shown the ad at all.

20% of those who saw pictures of friends responded to the ad, compared to 18% of the “friendless” users who responded. The study also discovered that the first group was 0.39% more likely to vote than the others.

Not much, say you? In total, out of 61 million users to see the ad, approximately 238,000 extra votes were cast, estimates Fowler. Considering Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio (swing states in 2008) were all won by a margin of less than 300,000 votes, that number could mean the difference between winning and losing a Presidential election.

The real-world impact is undeniable, and according to NPR’s Shankar Vedantam, campaigns are already using followers and subscribers to impact the 2012 elections:

“…[E]very time you get a message on Facebook from the Obama or Romney campaigns, or every time you get a tweet from them, saying please like this message or please retweet this, what they’re doing is taking advantage of the fact that when you amplify a message from the campaign, it’s much more effective than the campaign sending out messages directly.”

Maybe General Motors, which caused a stir back in May by pulling its entire Facebook ad budget due to a “lack of impact on consumers,” should take this as a friendly hint to reconsider.

Photo by Flickr user Justin Grimes

Here’s yet another wonderful example of this reality principle at work. Dude posted two ads, one highly engineered, the other a VERY sketchy Microsoft paint experiment. Which one do you think outperformed by 2.8X?

For the last 10 years, we’ve worked tirelessly to make buying online ads as painless as possible for do-it-yourself advertisers. Today we announce three more updates to our DIY system that make buying and uploading your own ads even easier.

1. We now accept PNG images for ad creative! Previously, our system only accepted JPG and GIF images. Today we now accept PNG, which is the default image format for Apple screen grabs, and an increasingly popular format for web designers.

2. Maximum image size increased! Not every advertiser has her own design staff, let alone a professional photo-editing suite. Sometimes it’s hard to shrink an image’s size without compromising its quality. For these reasons and more, we’ve increased the maximum file size for each of our self-service ad choices. For instance, the standard Blogad unit can now be 40kb, up over 150% from the old limit of 15kb.

3. Blogads units are 10 pixels wider! Our standard, hi-rise and mini Blogad units now support images up to 160 pixels wide. Previously, the ads were limited to 150px. You can pack almost 7% more creative in every standard Blogad!

For a complete guide to all of our do-it-yourself advertising options, check out Blogads’ guide to effective blog advertising.

Fortunately, this is a golden age for custom art. Thanks to Etsy, it’s easier than ever to commission a painting of your dog, or your car, or whatever else you can imagine.

And you can also commission custom ads. Here are 11 Etsy shops that can help the create your first ad without putting the hurt on your wallet.

1. Bears Graphics

What you pay: $10

What you get: Custom image (up to 300px), and 3 free revisions.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “I love it! good communicator, understood what I desired in an ad and ran with it.”

2. grain

What you pay: $8

What you get: Custom ad (up to 250×250 px) made from your photos

Customer feedback (100% positive): “So much better than awesome!!!!!!”

3. Fly Bird Fly Designs

What you pay: $15

What you get: A custom set of 3 125×125 px ads. (She can do other sizes, too, but these are perfect for our affordable square button ads!)

Customer feedback (100% positive): “Renee is the absolute best!!! Thank you as always … LOVE my new Ads! :)”

4. Yesi Yesi

What you pay: $10

What you get: Custom ads based on customer questionnaire. Three design options are presented, from which one is chosen for revised final design.

Customer feedback (97% positive): “Prompt, courteous service. Love the final banner logo, which she tweaked according to my specs. Easy to work with, professional and great.”

5. Jack and Molly

What you pay: $24.50

What you get: Any ad 300×300 px or smaller, featuring your product images.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “AWESOME!! Words cannot describe the wonderful creations Meredith comes up with! Thank you!”

6. thegirlmakesbanners

What you pay: $10

What you get: Custom ad of any size, based on image of your product or stock photo you provide.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “Perfect! I love the graphics so much that I returned:) I will be back in the future!”

7. UmlautGraphics

What you pay: $25

What you get: One web ad, based on your custom specs and design direction. Designer has an MFA in Graphic Design.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “Best graphic shop on Etsy. Owner is excellent in communication. You can’t go wrong with this choice. Tell her Funky Chunkies sent you! ; )”

8. MediaMOVE

What you pay: $15

What you get: Custom ad made to any specs. Will design to suit your color/font/image preference, or create custom design based on your general vision.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “Maia is an excellent seller. She answered all of my questions very quickly and got me EXACTLY what I wanted, no matter the numerous ideas I came up with.”

9. Swieky Siggies

What you pay: $20

What you get: Two ad sizes, customized to your liking, with unlimited revisions.

Customer feedback (100% positive): “What a great experience!! Erin is a top notch etsy seller, she provided fabulous customer service, as well as making all of the changes I requested, beautiful work too!! thanks so much!!”

10. Custom Graphics

What you pay: $12

What you get: A custom web ad based on any specification, proofs within 24 hours (Another great option for square button ads!).

Customer feedback (100% positive): “A pleasure to work with. Very gracious and patient with me and my requests.Everything came out just as I had hoped. Reasonable pricing as well. Thanks again!”

11. Resident Geek

What you pay: $15

What you get: One ad of any size, with a discount for multiple ads.

This print ad for the National Zoo of Brazil says “We can only fit this much ZEBRA on this page… Come see the rest at the National Zoo.”

How can you use the dimensions of your media to inspire great ads? Blogads.com offers 10 ad units in various shapes and sizes. Imagine this ad in a 125×125 button, or a standard Blogad, or a Mini. Is it still effective?

Don’t be limited by limitations. Be inspired. Without landing yourself in the Copycat Hall-of-Shame, that is.

(original ad via homadge.com, example image via mdpettitt)

image via studiohansa.com

CBS Action is airing Star Trek: The Next Generation in the UK this summer, and wanted to let fans know that they are *the* home of TNG in the UK. London’s Studio Hansa created a campaign that spoke directly to the show’s core audience, and gave a 20+ year-old franchise a bold new look. Here’s how they did it, and what you can do to reach super-fans.

1. Don’t make fun.
Star Trek‘s ardent fans have been the butt of TV and movie jokes for years. To many of them, the word “Trekkie” is derogatory. This campaign avoids the “T-word” altogether, and all other cliches associated with Star Trek loyalists. If this billboard featured a line of convention-goers in Spock ears, the general non-Star Trek-watching public may have gotten a laugh, but would fans tune in?

2. Get the details right.
Studio Hansa know that Star Trek fans are “truly passionate, knowledgeable, fervent collectors of all things to do with the show,” and that the campaign had to get everything right. The doctor above is half-dressed as LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge. If the model’s Geordi side didn’t have a flat top, or a yellow shirt, fans would have noticed. The Picard model is a spitting-image of Patrick Stewart, even down to the hairline:

image via studiohansa.com

If you want a super-fan to take you and your ads seriously, you need to take their passion seriously. Get it right.

3. Make fans look cool.
Forget the pocket-protectors and taped-up glasses of yore. Today’s fans aren’t yesterday’s geeks. Less Revenge of the Nerds and more Chris Hardwick.

Don’t portray super-fans out the way Hollywood sees them, but how they see themselves. What they like is really, really cool, and they’re cool for liking it.

4. Speak the right language.
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” “I’ve looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw was beautiful.” “Reducto!” These quotes may sound like gibberish to you, but to fans of Star Wars, LOST, and Harry Potter, these lines are loaded with meaning. Use that to your advantage when writing copy. Don’t use tired language like “tune in for the premiere” when the show you’re promoting has its own lingo. “Tune in” becomes “Go Boldly.” “Premiere” becomes “Launch Date.” Studio Hansa could have probably gotten away with adding a line or two of Klingon, too.

5. Embrace the fandom.
A die-hard fan is one of the best marketers your brand can have. Don’t stigmatize the fandom, embrace it. Love your brand’s fans and encourage them to love their “fan side.”

Wanna see more of this TNG campaign? Check out Studio Hansa’s site for more posters and behind-the-scenes making-of video.

Yesterday, AdFreak posted the 15 greatest commercials of the last year, as chosen by the Film Lions jury and the Film Craft Lions jury at Cannes. The first video that caught my attention was the “Dead Island” trailer by Axis Animation.

The 3 minutes of video that followed were creepy, provocative, and full of lessons for advertisers targeting blog readers.

SHOW DON’T TELL

It’s a classic rule of good writing and it applies to all forms of story telling, from video to advertising. In this video, no one needs to tell us that a nice family is being attacked by a hoard of zombies in a tropical paradise. It’s all there in front of us.

Same goes for good online ads. Don’t tell with words what you can show with imagery. In the classic Blogad below, NBC could have cluttered the image with logos and slogans, and used the text below to tell us what’s going on. Instead, they went for a simple text and evocative image, and what they produced was an ad that got blog readers to click:

USE PROVOCATIVE CREATIVE

I took a good look at the screenshot AdFreak had grabbed and had no idea what the hell was going on:

OK, there is clearly at least one zombie. Is the little girl a zombie, too? Or the man whose back she’s on? From this shot, we can hardly even tell if the people are CGI or real. I needed to know the answers to these questions, so I clicked.

When choosing an image for an online ad, look for something that provokes questions. If you’re dropping video into your Blogad, make sure you’ve chosen the best thumbnail to get a reaction.

MORE LESSONS FROM THE UNDEAD

If you’re twisted enough to watch it repeatedly, there are many more lessons to glean from this award-winning commercial. For instance, people like to look at other people, alive or undead. Use people in your ad.

Try irony. The soundtrack to the “Dead Island” trailer doesn’t exactly match the imagery you’re seeing. It lulls you into a false sense of peace while scaring the bejeezus out of you. While irony isn’t the best approach for all ads, it can be used to stir the reader’s curiosity, as irony masters PETA show us in this great ad:

Finally, a little ambiguity never hurt anyone. Are we watching a trailer for a short film or movie? We can assume it’s a game, but nowhere in this ad does a narrator blurt out “This is an exciting game!” Great ads don’t blurt.

Need more inspiration? Take a look at these classic Blogads, and breath new life into your ads.