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Through our partnership with Source Communications, we recently completed a project for Amtrak and Subway that showcases just how far we can take our new media development. For the first time ever we had to develop banners that spanned an entire baseball stadium.

During Gameplay

In Between Innings

These LED stadium banners ran during last week’s grand opening of the new Yankees stadium and the Mets brand new Citi Field. One of the major challenges we had to meet was creating a banner that covered 14,000+ pixels. In dealing with most interactive projects the resolution rarely goes beyond the industry norm of 1,024 pixels wide, so we saw this as an opportunity to shine.

Another challenge was testing the videos we had created once they were finished. Without control of the venue, it gets a little difficult to make sure everything looks exactly right. With that, we compiled the videos into pieces using Adobe Flash and then composited them together in Adobe After Effects. After a few quick test renders to make sure the process was running smoothly, we finished it up and delivered the uncompressed video files to the client without issue.

In total, we completed the banners in about a week while under tight time constraints.  When the client ran the banners on location they were said to have been some of the best motion graphics banners the stadium operators had seen in a long time. Mission accomplished.

Posted in Cool Banners, Media, SiteLab Clients, SiteLab Creative, SiteLab News & Events | No Comments »

These days, agencies and advertisers are faced with the challenge of having to continue to improve their paid search campaigns. It is inevitable that if you aren’t moving forward these days, your competitors are. When your weekly trend reports are looking the same as they did 6 months ago, you know its time for a change. So how do you give your campaign a kick start and start moving it in the right direction? Run display advertising.

Over the past few years, several studies have indicated there is a synergy between search and display advertising. The Atlas Institute, for one, published numerous insight papers outlining how the presence of display advertising influences user search activity. The key takeaway here is the 22% lift in conversion rate when a user is exposed to both a display ad and a search ad by the same advertiser. Another study published by comScore illustrated the fact that running search and display simultaneously will increase search activity by an average of 155% (comScore Brand Metrix, Norms Database, November 2008). comScore also writes that search and display together provide the greatest boost to offline sales (+119%) when compared to either tactic alone (+82% search only, +16% display only). Now these are pretty staggering numbers if you think about it, but why do some advertisers insist on dumping all marketing dollars in search and leave out display when it comes to planning a campaign? Easy – search is generally more profitable from an ROI standpoint. It’s also generally easier to trace performance. But to truly maximize the chances of a successful search campaign, you need to run both search and display in conjunction.

Think about it this way. How many times have you seen something either on TV or on the internet and subsequently performed a search? Now imagine if you never saw that ad on TV or anywhere on the internet. Would you still be curious or want to know more about that particular brand, advertisement or company? You can see why it makes sense to keep those display spots. It increases awareness, peaks curiosity, and motivates users to search.

So next time you are faced with the challenge of how to boost your search campaign’s performance and spend your marketing budget profitably, look beyond the bottom line numbers to make sure your campaign is well rounded.

Posted in Industry News, Media, Search Marketing Today | No Comments »