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Bad Advertising: TrailFire and Compete.com

I’ve run across two leaderboard banners over the last few days that are so bad as to justify a post.

1. Trailfire.com

Trailfire is apparently some sort of discovery service like StumbleUpon that requires a browser plugin. I didn’t find that out from the banner though. All that does is create vague associations with fire departments (hydrant and dalmation) and urine (the dalmation is about to pee). So - it looks like trailfire is inviting user to leave a trail of pee all over the web. Or something. Who knows? This banner communicates nothing good, doesn’t have enough interest to drive a mystery-click, and creates bad brand associations.

2. Compete.com

Ok. Can this banner be any more annoying and visually alienating? Blending statistics (the tail), marketing buzz (the long tail), prurient frat-boy innuendo (getting some tail tonite?), and awful, awful 1996 cliched nerd-imagery, this ad does everything it can to sabotage Compete’s messaging: that Compete offers a lot of deep statistics.

Banner Basics

I’m not a designer or a communications person - but there’s still a few basic guidelines that I use to inform design descisions for communication of any format:

Familiarity: Is my service new, or do people know about it? If its new, people have no idea what it is, and there’s no brand-equity, which means that I need to communicate my core value proposition in the ad. Trailfire missed the boat on this one.
Action Orientation & Goals: What are my campaign’s goals? How will I measure success - signups? Traffic? With that in mind what does my messaging need to accomplish? Make sure your communication is not an FYI, but something with a call to action - that drives recall and awareness. Compete dropped the ball here.
Key Message: Beyond communicating my core value proposition (if req’d) or action-oriented messages, what overall branding messages am I trying to convey? How does everything in the ad directly contribute to communicating that messaging?
Consistency: Is my imagery and messaging consistent with that on my site? Is it consistent with other ad units? Is it consistent within any given ad unit? For instance, how does Compete’s sneering nerd reinforce their messaging about superiour breadth and depth of data?

In a nutshell: Common sense. Put yourself in the position of someone seeing an ad somewhere and ask yourself how it would be percieved.

The Mystery-Click

Just a final aside: you can disregard all of the above if you’re going for “the Mystery-Click.” That’s an enigmatic message or image so interesting or compelling that the very absence of messaging is enough to drive a click-through - to solve the mystery. Off the top of my head I can’t even think of a well executed/successful mystery click campaign. But I’m sure they exist.

banners, compete trailfire

4 Responses to “Bad Advertising: TrailFire and Compete.com”

Janet Johnson | June 27th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

Hey Rod, this couldn’t come at a better time for me to read, as I’m preparing to create some banner ads for a client, and these are excellent reminders that creative executions are critical. You can spend tons of upfront time, energy and money on the media placement of online ads, but if the message and creative aren’t on the mark, you’re wasting your money. I’ll wager more people are paying attention to these ads on your blog than in the web in general.

Thanks for the common sense.
Rod | June 28th, 2007 at 4:21 pm

Janet - thanks for popping by! Exactly what you’ve said is what I was thinking - these two services are throwing money out the door; even on CPC, ad management, creative, etc. still costs.

As of today, both of these are still out & about - sigh.
Emma Lombardo | July 2nd, 2007 at 1:26 pm

Protonotes.com, a competitor to Trailfire, has a nice contrasting banner ad on the Digital Web Magazine website. It’s visual, direct, and clear:
http://www.digital-web.com/adserver/adimage.php?filename=banner_mini_protonotes.gif&contenttype=gif
Rod | July 12th, 2007 at 11:17 am

Thanks for the link Emma! Agreed, the protonotes ad unit is a lot better, though the need to wait for an animation to really grasp the value proposition does (in my mind anyway) make it a bit cumbersome.

In any case - thanks for stopping by!