Brand is a promise, an idea according to which no benefit could be gained by consumer from other products except for the brand he loves. A consumer falls in love with a certain brand, he trusts it and develops a long term loyalty.

Brand advertising is nothing but building trust! It is not the logo of your firm, it is not a slogan or special design of your product but a collection of associations the consumer feels for your brand. In other words, brand advertising builds an emotional connection between the brand and the consumers which later leads to loyalty.

How do you build brand loyalty?
After all, no matter how good your company is, there’s a competition in almost any field. So how could you make your brand to float above this competition, to make your brand the most visible one?

In one sentence – in order to gain brand prominence, you must differentiate your brand from others and this can be done quite easily through advertising .Advertising delivers your message to a wide range of potential customers the fastest way you ever know.

Successful advertisement means repetition and frequency, otherwise, you are quickly forgotten. Therefore, advertising is an investment in growth of your firm, growth of potential customers, growth of familiarity of your firm – until it turns into a brand!…

What are your brand advertising options?
A comprehensive branding campaign must be based upon a combination of several media channels such as print, television, adverts on subways and buses, radio, as well as online brand advertising such as banners, textual ads, blogs and videos – anything that has a great impact on consumers.

Last but not least is something quite new.
What I talk about is some sort of hidden brand advertising. The name is “Captcha advertising” and it is definitely the next big thing in the area of brand advertising…

It solves two of the biggest problems of commercial sites:
1) As a Captcha test it verifies the user as human (not machine), meaning it prevents spam and keeps websites secured.
2)  As an Ad Captcha it promotes sales by drawing user’s attention to the product which the captcha content talks about.

This idea is brilliant, indeed. Both the user and the owner of the site might gain advantage of this new innovation.
The user will not have to break his head and torture his eyes while deciphering distorted letters or words, while advertisers will increase impact on the user, promoting sale income, consequently.

Yet, I cannot bring myself not to think about the day when these robots will learn to crack Ad Captchas, as we know that ordinary captchas can be, in some cases, cracked by bots…
When that day arrives – commercial sites will be flooded by robots that will know how to answer the question about the product on the ad, identify it, and pass the Captcha test, but as robots, are far from being influenced by advertising whatsoever.
Let’s hold our fingers and hope that this day will never come.

Click here to read about brand advertising.

That’s why advertisements should be creative, whether amusing or shocking, original, funny or sad, the advertiser goal is by no doubt to draw the consumer’s attention. ‘Though this is not easy to achieve, there are plenty of advertisement that do this exactly.
Check the links below and you’ll see it for yourself (all are referring to interesting and creative advertisements):

Creative ads by Tutzone
This blog has collected 34 image advertising of well known brand name products such as Coca Cola and Pepsi. The image ads are pretty witty and amusing, arousing a smile on its beholder.
You can view the ads here.
My rating: 3.5 stars.

Big brands ads by Hongkiat
On Hongkiat you’ll find 12 creative advertisements of famous brand products (Heiniken, Sony, Forbes etc’). Some of them use sex to draw our attention, some use humor, but as we all know- sex wins it all!
Check ads here.
My rating: 5 stars.

Designbeep imaginary ads

Designbeep is a blog dedicated to graphic and web design. It aims to help the design community by supplying photographs and other resources. The ads shown in this post are full of fantasy, colorful and beyond imagination.
Click here to check their imaginary ads.
My rating: 4 stars.

Designswan with war ads

This post by designswan analyzes interesting advertisements.
On this example you’ll find “interesting War Ads”.
Mmmmm…
My rating: 3 stars
(=no ads war can get more than 3 stars and even that is a crime!)

Loqu ads in motion
This one shows great ads – all are bus advertisements (the ads are not about buses, they are presented on buses).
One must pray that no one will watch these creative ads for too long, as we talk on buses on move, on highways and local roads, and yet…
My rating: 4 stars.

Cashmenow condom ads
This post is my favorite one, and not because of my never ending desire for you-know-what. These condom advertisements were made by a Chinese advertising company and they are really good. The creativity and originality can be found on the fact that the ads are based upon well known ads from other fields (Mc’donalds, Nike and others) and still – I think they are creative enough to make me stare at them and smile for more than a second, and that’s a lot!!!
My rating: 5 stars.

Related posts:
Brand advertising
Advertising captcha
Advertising network
Effective ads

Do you know the difference between an ordinary captcha and captcha advertising?
The answer is simple – advertising captcha, just as the two words imply, is a combination of an ad and a captcha.

For those who are not familiar with the term, Captcha is a short test made of an image with distorted letters and / or numbers that has to be deciphered and than copied by the user before taking specific action, such as website registration, adding a comment and so on.
This is a popular way to detect spam bots and prevent them from abusing websites and online platforms.

Ad captcha is another way of using captcha for the same purpose, but instead of an image it uses an ad, by which 2 goals are achieved:
First, we have a captcha that filters and stops robots from abusing all kinds of online platforms.
Second, businesses get to advertise and brand their selves by using the captcha phrase and by that increasing their revenues or potential clients.

How does captcha advertising work?

A user starts some registration process. After filling out private details, instead of a captcha image – he sees an ad. The various of ads can be flash ads, banners, or video clips. The user gets a question that refers to the ad for which he has to figure out the correct answer (and type it, of course). The correct answer is used as a captcha verification.
The question might be something like: “what’s the name of the product in the ad”?

How do captcha ads promote sales?

While ordinary advertising might be ignored by innocent users, captcha advertising definitely could not be disregarded. Why? The user who reads the question related to the ad (the product / the business) must look at the ad in order to answer the question. He is obliged to think for some seconds about the answer (again – the product / business). He must type the answer (an additional step of referring to the product). And so, without further thinking, his attention is drawn to the product that appears in the ad…

What a psychological impact on the innocent user!!!

The forms of advertisements that could be exchanged through an “advertising network” are varied and include, among other, banners (or image ads), textual ads, landing pages and video advertisements.

The main types of online advertising networks are blind networks, targeted networks and representative networks.
Being a part of a Blind Network enables you to advertise your service or product for a low price, but with no control over location (you can’t choose where your ads will appear).
In a Targeted Network the advertiser’s ads appear in a highly relevant websites (this is why it is called a targeted network) from the same niche and context.
A Representative Network offers a revenue share model (payment = a certain percentage of sales revenues generated by clients who were referred via the advertiser’s ads). Contrary to the “blind network”, the representative network is completely transparent in regards to letting the advertiser know where his advertisements will run.

Other terms relevant to the field of online advertising network are first-tier and second-tier networks.
A first tier advertising network is a big network of advertisers and publishers (all are part of the network) with high quality traffic, which is usually used by second-tier networks.
The “big 3” (Yahoo! Google and MSN / Bing search engines) is an excellent example of first-tier networks

A second-tier advertising network is, comparing to the first-tier network,  a smaller network in which the main source of income comes from syndicating ads from other advertising networks.

The following online marketing solutions can be used for branding a new business as well as for promoting an old one. Most of these marketing channels are good for most of the markets / target audiences, and yet this is not an axiom.

My advice to you is to think thoroughly about your target market, what your potential clients are looking for and where (online) they might look for it and only after that take a step, choose your marketing sources and build your online marketing strategy.

What are the best online marketing sources out there?

Sponsored Links on Search Engines / Search Advertising

Sponsored links on search engines are textual paid ads that show up on search results pages. Since these textual ads are keywords related they are considered as ads of high relevance both for the user and the advertiser.

Two of the most popular search advertising services are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

Banner Ads

Banner is a clickable graphic image, used on websites, that attempts to promote a service or a product through catching the user’s attention. ‘Though banners ads come in many forms and sizes, the most common form is a rectangle image in one of the following sizes: 460 pixels wide by 60 pixels high, 460 x 55 or 392 x 72.

Textual Ads

Textual ads are online advertisements that use nothing but text based hyperlinks.
The advantages of the textual ads are:
1. They can be downloaded immediately (as opposed to banner ads).
2. They cannot be blocked by all kinds of ads blocking programs that usually block banner ads.
3. They are easy to assimilate within the text content and thus are considered less “pushy” in the eyes of the web user.

SEO / Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a method through which one can promote his site on search engines’ generic results to earn a better and highly targeted traffic.
Promoting a website through SEO is one of the best online marketing solutions, ‘though it is just as well very time consuming. One of the reasons for this is that search results can vary from websites to landing pages to images, documents and even videos. This leads to the fact that anyone who wants his website or service to be shown in most of the search results and at the top of them, must invest lots of time and creativity as well as money in creating an appealing website, video and so on.

SMO / Social Media Optimization
Social Media Optimization focuses on optimizing one’s online presence within online communities and social platforms, while aiming to get this “social presence” to the top of search results.
Facebook, for example, is a social website that can be used for business promotion through networking as well as by getting the business profile into the top of search results for a relevant term (keyword).
See for example - http://www.facebook.com/itsyourturn

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is an online marketing solution that increases brand awareness or product sales through creating a buzz on different platforms such as social platforms, emails and video websites.
This youtube video of bing.com is a great example for the power of viral marketing.
Since the video is funny there’s a big chance that people will forward it to their friends to watch (or link to it just like I did!) thus enhancing the awareness to bing as a new search engine and a brand. At the same time, since the video will get lots of views on youtube, there’s a high probability for it to be shown on relevant search results (see the video results at the top of the search results page for the term “bing”.