728x90 - My View About The Leaderboard
The web banner and tips on design and creation of your visual.
Hello,
Today, I’m introducing you to the Leaderboard, a term that all image and marketing professionals are common with, which isn’t the name of a new music band!
I’m talking about the horizontal digital advertising banners, the size of a bookmark, format of 728 pixels by 90 pixels, or 19,261 cm by 2.38 cm, one of the oldest digital advertising formats I can remember.
Here is my post about it and tips for creating your digital promotion banners.
In this report:
Find out why the leaderboard is one of the most effective formats to grab attention online.
Learn how and where to use it to maximize your brand’s visibility.
Understand how this format impacts click-through rates and ad campaign performance.
MusicScore: This leaderboard banner first appeared in 1994, as this great interpretation from John Mellencamp of Wild Night feat. Me’Shell Ndegeocello. What a baseline! Listen to it while reading.
Listen to the MusicScores complete list on YouTube! Enjoy the Music at Work!
This article is about the digital web banner advertising format for article pages, blog posts, and usual email campaigns: the leaderboard. Thank you for reading.
Advertising
Displaying with the Leaderboard web banner
It would have been interesting to compile the number of times I produced this advertising format since the beginning of my career. The use of the leaderboard image size is widespread, both in Google's advertising tools or the email signature of employees. The creation of this image format in the production of corporate and promotional campaigns is worth it.
Don’t hesitate to ask your graphic designer to ad this format to your usual visual production and promotional documents. When the time comes, you can easily distribute the newest campaign and the link to you team. This process has been around and planned annually in commun corporate businesses for years. The study of analytics shown me for more than two decades these links are the most used ones coming from internal communications. Try it and look at your stats at the end of the month, you will be surprised!
The Leaderboard banners on W+M
Here on this site, you typically see three leaderboard-style banner ads in every article over 2000 words. One banner per 800 words which is equivalent to one physical page in a printed magazine.
Banners are included in the content of the page with a mention of advertising. Advertisements are sold by the W+M Services sales department.
Advertisements in an article make the hours of producing and writing the article profitable. This principle is the same as for written media sites, newspapers and magazines, and for web pages which generally have text, news, blog posts, etc.
Isn't the leaderboard, placed at the top of the pages or inserted in the texts, the perfect name for this format of advertising, don’t you agree?
Example of a digital leaderboard banner of 728 pixels by 90 pixels, or 19.261 cm by 2.38 cm. Advertising a musical project from audio partner JM Musique. Visit the JM Musique about page.
728x90 Origin and History
Digital marketing could be such in 2024, an online communication brining influence (often from social media) and an optimization of digital sales tools to create traffic and purchases. The digital possibilities to advertise on the e-market are vast and for many devices and screen format.
A great element, when come the time to determine the size of images needed for promotion campaigns, is to use formats suiting many devices; so, reducing your production time and cost. This is the perfect reason why the leaderboard advertising size has been so popular, and for so many years, fitting mostly on every device, web pages or applications. So the possibilities to use it for advertising are great for us, marketers of the virtual market.
I can hit an image? Click an image? Oh! Click on the image!
The concept of uploading an image with a link dates back to 1993, by IBM for Sears (I sometimes miss their catalogue; great times! ). The term Ad Banner and the first ad that went online with a link to direct the visitor to an external site was the following year, in 1994.
The First Standards, Finally
You will also often see, when reading about the leaderboard, it respects the standards set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (or IAB), i.e., the group of Internet advertising players that develops standards based on research and serves as legal support. Wiki tells us about all the branches of the IAB in the world now and the famous legal battles they did for us, the advertising users and especially the creators, who may remember the time before the standardization of advertising formats, who needed to produce hundreds of different formats for a single campaign. That’s how I learned to use Photoshop for the first time for the Admission Network Co, in the ’90s.
The Leaderboard, a Marketing Friend in 2024
In recent years, several customizable templates are now available in most design software and apps, such as Canva, or the free mobile app Photoshop Express to create images. It’s getting easier and easier to advertise yourself digitally and create a respectable promotional campaign at few costs.
Not to mention email distribution tools, such as Mailchimp, and its template to create your banner for your email subscribers, make this task easier. By the way, the leaderboard format is listed in the most successful popular banners on the chimp resources pages, which also advise this:
Banner ads in “leaderboard” format measure 728 x 90 pixels and are usually placed at the top of web pages. Because they’re long and thin, it can be difficult to include all the graphic design elements you need to encourage users to click on your ad. Mailchimp.
Advertising in the Media
It’s also possible to book digital leaderboard ads yourself on media, newspaper, magazine and ad sites of all kinds. Locate the media section on these sites and do your homework to make sure readers are your target audience. Search or ask for press materials, media kits, and readers location information + statistics.
I must admit in my everyday webmaster marketer life, my favourite calls are the ones I do with the representatives of these display media. These are the people who, once they have targeted your business and know you well enough, will offer you great targeted opportunities, always interesting. You can trust their instincts; they know their market. You may also discuss about reports, interviews, and other advertising mediums, such as radio, TV, etc. Ask for it, you never know. Remember, we never lose in marketing; we marketers only adjust for the next time;). Jeff
Digital Advertising in 2024
In the following section of this post, I’m talking about media and digital content to reach customers and prospects, a movement to follow already in 2024 in the digital trends. Bellow, advice for the young at heart in doing your first leaderboard.
Advertising
My opinion on the design of a 728x90 ad
In order to finish this post on advertising, I'm going to summarize what I do when I create a 728 x 90 visual banner, or what I get from graphic designers and clients to put online that have the same characteristics:
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when there is limited space like the leaderboard. Restricted text also means to use a button rather than a sentence. I often see, in 728x90 images, only an effective image, a slogan of 4 words maximum, the logo of the company and a button click here.
The redirect link should be as simple as possible. For example, if the link to your blog post is ... com/blog/i-think-the-title-of-my-article-might-be-too long, ... well remember to visit the settings of your post before publication to shorten it to 4 or 5 words.
Think about a reduced image size, so not slowing down the downloading time of you web page. You know, when you're publishing on the web, in general, it's usually not necessary to put images of excessive sizes in high dimension. It's not the same image format as when printing a physical advertising for a magazine. A Google search or a graphic designer will advise you the right formats to use for the images, gifs or videos for website usage. You might check before starting your own production, Picasso, and bog down your server with images the size of a movie theater screen!
Keep it simple. Avoid complicated design and image concepts. The reactive time for readers is less than 2 seconds, even closer to 1 second.
I try to avoid stagnation, meaning like an armchair always in the same place for so long, you end up not noticing it anymore. The same goes for campaigns and web banners, email ads, and cover banners. Sometimes, replacing a regular image for a week or two will not hurt, in addition to helping your SEO. If you only knew how many people notice these kinds of little details. Every visual professional does, so it’s already a great amount of the population who will appreciate the effort, like decoration a boutique.
Other articles and tips for web design and promotional creation
Conclusion
When writing magazine articles, we don't always choose editorial topics. Thus, it’s possible to make a lot of discoveries on subjects related to our profession.
Web graphics and articles about W+M design are among these discovery reports. They encourage us to learn other aspects of our marketing profession to develop our skills.
Multifunctionality in a company can often allow us to save on a few projects, especially in launch mode. However, you also have to learn to delegate afterwards, it’s difficult to do everything in the long term!
Thank you for your time.
Jeff
Sources:
IAB via Wiki
Intuit Mailchimp: banner ressources
Archive billets de 1997: Archives numérique, research 514 790-1245 Réseau Admission
Cr images: Services W+M
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