There has been a lot of talk about going beyond the banner in online advertising this year—and our Top Ten ads for 2010 show that not only are we moving beyond the banner, we’re also leaving behind the constraints of the Web page itself.
In our team’s picks for the best ads on Yahoo! this year, ads exploded from their niche on the side of the page. Bugs walked on to the Yahoo! front page, and the pages themselves folded, tore and crumpled. Banners turned into magazines and catalogs where people could buy stuff.
Entertainment ads made the best use of our canvas this year, but more traditional brands did great stuff, too.
Below are our top ten ads for 2010, in no particular order. (They’re all first place in awesomeness, though.)
Alice in Wonderland
This is the ad Carol Bartz mentions when she talks about the potential of advertising on the Web, and for good reason: People liked how the page opened up and pulled them down the rabbit hole so much that lots of them clicked on the ad four or five times. Is it advertisement or entertainment?
Nissan Qashqai
My wife literally gasped when I played this ad for her. The Nissan crossover dodging paintballs on the front page of Yahoo! France is cool enough. But press the play button marked “Voir la Suite” and the car seems to leap out of two-dimensional space, the front page transforms into something out of “Inception,” and the Qashqai zooms between buildings that used to be columns of text. My French is rusty, but I’m guessing “Voir la Suite” stands for “Blow your mind.”
Discovery: LIFE
Discovery wanted an online campaign as epic as its new series LIFE, and it got it with a front-page ad that had customizable wallpaper, video footage from the series, and a green bug that scurries around the “back” of the home page and into the ad. The results? People who saw the ads were 28% more likely to see the series than those who didn’t.
Drew Brees in Dove Men+Care
Not everyone loves Drew, but you had to love the way the Yahoo! Sports page opened like a shower curtain to see the New Orleans Saints quarterback singing the William Tell Overture (OK, the Lone Ranger theme in our house) at the top of his lungs. And other people loved it, too—the ad won the IAB Mixx Bronze Award for Rich Media Execution.
You Again
Not surprisingly, the new “mosaic” ad format we created for omg seems tailor-made for movies, and You Again is one of the best examples of it. Flashbulb pops replace celebrity photos with images from the ad. When the actresses tear pictures of each other in half, the ad tears itself in half, too. If that’s not enough, there’s a great faux behind-the-scenes catfight where Sigourney Weaver taunts Kristen Bell by saying “Avatar!”
Toyota Avalon
How do you reintroduce your luxury car model online? It helps to have a well-groomed man walk across the Yahoo! News page and invite viewers behind a curtain to look at it. Toyota piqued curiosity for its redesigned Avalon by showing that luxury awaited—if they only pulled the golden cord. In another example of great branding, Avalon also helped launch our new video series, Who Knew?
Discovery Shark Week
Discovery’s ad for Shark Week may have taken advantage the visual space of our Log-in Page ads just a little too well, judging by a handful of user complaints about the image of a soaked geek with shark teeth. But it also showed the cult appeal of Shark Week, and the lengths to which its fans will go to watch it.
TRON
TRON just managed to zip in before the end of the year—and we mean that literally. When the famous TRON lightcycle zooms out of the video screen on Yahoo! Movies and everything goes neon blue, you know you’re in the world of TRON. For another bonus, check out our video about the TRONification of Yahoo! Search.
Macy’s Memorial Day Circular
Advertising isn’t always for flash—sometimes, just sometimes, you want to sell stuff, too. Macy’s used our new pullover ad format in Yahoo! Mail to create a Web version of its Memorial Day circular that customers could flip through and use to order the items they wanted. And our Smart Ads technology helped serve up custom versions of the ads to people based on location, demographics and interest. The result was an ad that kept users around and engaged for a lot longer than a normal display ad.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
I’ve always had a thing for movie storybooks, which is why I loved the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 ad that seemed to have everything, including a book that lets you flip through images from the film. If they’d one of those when Star Wars came out, I could have saved my parents $4.95.
Are there any other ads that you liked this year? Let us know in the comments. And if you want to try something like this yourself, contact us. See you on the Top Ten in 2011!
By Jeff Sweat
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