Despite the rise of social media and mobile marketing as new ways for users to stay in touch, e-mail still remains as vibrant and as popular as ever.  Popular among users and marketers alike, the use of e-mail remains one of the top marketing strategies any brand should consider adding to its arsenal.

Virtually any brand can benefit from effective use of e-mail campaigns.  There are several questions you can ask to determine if e-mail is a marketing strategy your brand should be using.  Here are just a few of them:

• Do you already have access to a list of e-mail contact information from current or prospective clients/consumers?
• Do you have marketing messages that you could be sending out to your clients on a regular basis (weekly, quarterly, etc.)?
• Is building a base of loyal customers a significant goal for your brand?
• Do you need to drive traffic to your interactive assets, like a new social site or website?

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When your brand decides to launch a media campaign, before you buy your first spot, remember there are a few things to keep in mind to help your efforts make a marketing splash instead of capsizing.

Plan: Set a single goal for the campaign and clearly define it.  This goal needs to be grounded in realistic expectations.  Once you’ve done this, you should define how you are going to measure the campaign’s performance in order to determine whether or not your goal is being met.  Your key success metric must be appropriate to the goal you are aiming for.  So if you’re going to drive sales, your metric should not be e-mail collection rates.  Part of having realistic expectations is making sure your budget fits your goal.  Try to determine where your breakeven point is and then work backward from there to determine the right budget for what you want to accomplish.  Don’t be overzealous with your campaign goals.  Keep them realistic and in tune with the amount of money you can invest in your campaign. (more…)

With the fifteenth anniversary of the banner ad’s debut occurring last month, we thought it would be a good time to ask our art director, Jeremy Williams, for some quick thoughts on the past and future of the display ad.  We asked the same from our creative director, Jeremy Pope.  You can check out his responses here.

My general take on the first 15 years of banner ads is the very first banner ads were pretty crummy.  Animated gifs are the first banner ads I remember having to build, consisting of 8 to 10 different frames, to be used to build these really underwhelming little banners.  That was the worst part of those early banners—they were so archaic.  No one really put a lot of design into them.

Going forward, the biggest thing with them now, I think, is that they are more cross-sell.  Obviously more flash is available for browsers.  You’re going to be getting a lot more creative with banner ads.  A lot more banners, for example, are using takeover, where they grow and fill up more of the page.  The banners are now and will continue to have more creativity driving them, although there are still a lot of crummy banner ads out there.

They are probably not as widely popular as they used to be because back when they first started, banners were all the rage because there really wasn’t anything else.  Now with Google Analytics and the like, advertisers don’t necessarily need them as much as they did when they first debuted.  Done right, however, they can still be effective.

The fifteenth anniversary of the banner ad’s debut took place last month so we thought we’d ask our creative director, Jeremy Pope, for a quick take on the past and future of the display ad.  We also tapped our art director, Jeremy Williams, for his views as well.  You can check them out here.

The first 15 years of the banner ad has shown us that it’s another great medium for communicating to the world.  The next 15, however, will feature changes that will expand how banners can attract the attention of a brand’s target audience, connect with them, and better spread a brand’s marketing message.

The future of banner ads will involve a lot more straight-up video.  Banners will feature video snippets.  I think there will be all kinds of different sizes of video content.  As everything gets rearranged on users’ screens, video content will come to the forefront and will by far be ahead of the other forms of content.  Video will be more than just another online advertising element—all of the available space will be populated and dominated by video.  So a banner ad will need to deliver more than just a simple billboard or some flash.  It will need video to make an impact.

The cost for the production of these next generation banner ads will have an incremental increase based on all the factors that surround the video medium.  But in terms of delivering content to a brand’s target audience, especially with everything now starting to make a rush toward video, I think that the banner ad will become an ideal means of placing video content in front of consumers.