Interactive Ad Campaigns

The Problem

A network banner gets a few seconds to pull someone out of a news story and into a premiere. A static 300x250 rarely does it. We needed ad units that behaved like a piece of the show, opened on their own, and still respected the page they were borrowing so the reader kept their place.

The Work

I designed and built rich-media units that ran in-context on the sites people actually read.

• A Gold Rush "Strike Gold" takeover on FoxNews.com: a 970-wide pushdown paired with a 300x250 in the rail, both keyed to the same sweepstakes.
• A Finding Bigfoot pushdown on Yahoo omg! that expanded into a night-vision "Bigfoot DNA testing" panel.
• A Frozen Planet pushdown on The Huffington Post that opened into a full-width "watch the killer icicle" video, from the makers of Planet Earth.
• Expanding and in-banner units for Fringe on Science and Shark Week on Discovery, each collapsing back cleanly so the article stayed where the reader left it.
• A River Monsters roadblock built around the YouTube masthead, so the takeover met the audience where they were already watching clips.

The craft was in the transitions and the restraint: expand fast, hold attention with real footage, then get out of the way. Several of these were recognized at the 2013 American Advertising Awards (the ADDYs).

Impact

These units ran across FoxNews, Yahoo, and The Huffington Post during launch windows, in front of large national audiences, and the work earned recognition at the 2013 ADDYs. Past the placements, they set a bar for what a Discovery ad could be: not a static tune-in card, but a few seconds of the show itself, dropped into the middle of someone's day and then folded back up.