Let’s just get it out on the table. Contextual advertising outperform display advertising. Okay, I said it. It’s true. Everyone will agree on that, so let’s move past that. The important thing for us to remember is that display ads are far from dead or obsolete. In fact I believe there is a resurgence on the horizon as we begin to learn more and more about the unknown power of display ads.

In May, iProspect published a study outlining the effectiveness of display ads with some surprising results. What they found was that 31% of those polled clicked on banner ads when displayed. Not exactly groundbreaking but the interesting part of the study is that they found an additional 27% don’t click on the ad, but instead perform a search for the company or product on a search engine. The study goes on to state the number grows to 49% who will eventually perform a search for the product, service, or company originally seen in the display ad. That’s impressive for an ad that a lot of us thought was on its way out.

I’ve had a lot of success with display ads. Again, it doesn’t compare to the success of contextual ads but enough success to not completely give up on display ads.

We had real success with display ads in a campaign for one of our clients: Dukky. What we did was first create contextual ad campaigns in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Once we had those going strong we moved on to display ads.

The following is what you need to know to create an effective display advertising campaign. Some of these are obvious and some you’ll learn along the way:

1. Research, research, research. You have to know where to sell your ad. The content networks of Google and Yahoo are great at placing your ads on a million websites but your product may be better suited for 200 of those sites or really just 30. Once you know your product and you know your ideal customer, you’ll know the sites you need to place ads.

With Dukky we researched mostly marketing sites. We looked at sites whose core audience was company decision makers. This is an important step to get the client involved because they know their industry better than we ever will.

2. Create site tailored designs. It is important to get noticed but we’ve found that it is just as effective to blend in. Create ads that fit into web pages. You should study the website that you want to place your ad. Then base your ad concept on the concept of the site. For example, we ran an ad on Guy Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World. We decided to run our ad with copy based on the concept of How to Change the World.

Here’s the ad:

We used the same colors that Guy Kawasaki uses on his website. It looked like it belonged on the site. The ad turned out to be very effective. We did the same thing with each ad we created. This can be time consuming when it is so much easier to create one or two great ads and run them over a gamut of websites but it’s worth it to write site specific copy and create site specific designs.

Here’s how the ad looked on the page:

3. Write short, to the point copy. Internet banner ads are like TV ads, they only have a second or two to catch the viewer’s attention. After that you’ve lost them. So your ads have to be able to sell your product in a few words or with great graphics.

Like this ad we ran for Dukky on TechCrunch:

This banner has a very strong image. It is also pretty clear and to the point but it doesn’t give away too much. You know that direct marketing is on its last leg and you know that Dukky has the solution. So click on the ad if you want to improve your direct marketing efforts. This little ad says all of that and it was catered to a tech audience who has become numb to display advertising.

4. Have a strong call-to-action. When someone sees your ad they need to know what to do. So say: click, buy, download, request, and sign up. Whatever. Just make it clear and strong. Or use “kill it.” That was our call-to-action in the ad above. It works well, I’ll vouch for that.

5. Be able to let an ad die. I know that every word of copy I submit to clients is priceless. Sure a lot of copy dies a brutal and painful death on my computer but the things I ultimately decide to pass along are like the Dead Sea Scrolls but sometimes the clients don’t like them. Sometimes my boss doesn’t like them and I’m afraid he’s going to fire me. It’s tough but you have to learn to let it go. Same goes for ads that have made it from the drawing board to realization and are online. If they aren’t performing well then you have to take them out. You can’t waste the time and the money on an ad that isn’t performing, no matter how clever you think the line or the graphic is.

6. Be open to client feedback. It is important again to recognize that your client knows his product better than you do and they can give you great insight. So bounce a lot of ideas off of them and sometimes their responses will be frustrating and you’ll be dismissive but sometimes they’ll be great ideas. Again take the bloody cleaver ad. As much as I want to take credit for that copy, I can’t. That came from a long collaboration with the client. I rambled on about how I’d been exploring a more apocalyptic idea and the client came back with that copy. We ran with it and our creative director came back with this kick-ass design. We posted it and it’s doing well. But remember to listen to the clients. I’m saying that for the record because I know some of our clients are reading this and we want them to think we always listen to them.

7. Lastly, and most importantly, you have to have a solid site and product to back up effective ads. We could work for weeks designing the perfect combination of display ads and contextual ads to drive thousands of consumers to a client’s website but if they arrive on the site and it’s impossible to navigate or the product is crap, then there’s nothing we can do to sell it. So if you are trying to start your own campaign for your business then first you need to look at your product and you need to look at your website. Once those are perfected you can focus on creating ads. If you’re having trouble getting that done, that’s when you call someone like us.

Some of the other ads we created for this campaign: