Rethinking Advertisement Banners - Animated & Static

Every place you visit on the web, you will see a variety of banner advertisements. Animated, flash, static, big and small, round, square, octagon, starry, etc etc. Internet users are so used to these. Which ones stick out better for the best and are not so annoying? Animated or static?

Animated flashy banners are long known to be able to "grab" a visitors attention better with its blinking or moving text and images. Maybe too long. It can also be annoying to the visitors. It might sound kind of outrageous to say that a standing still banner advertisement will return more clicks than an animated one.

A British guy once told me that Americans are so used to advertsements. How we live in such an ad-filled world with products thrown at us every single day. This results in ad blindness. I pretty much agree on this. I don't pay attention to hardly any adverts anymore. I can't even see them, whether it be online or offline. This article isn't telling you for sure what will be clicked more, but I will tell you what type of banners actually catch my eye better. And it is not animated ones.

Lets take for example something that you see almost anywhere you look. How about grass. you see that everyday if you live on Earth. How often do you take time to notice the grass? (I'm bad with giving examples) Another example would be your spouse of 50 years just starving to be noticed by you once again like in your teen love years.

When I'm on a web page and see something moving around in the corner of my eye, my brain automatically knows that it's an advertisement trying to sell me something. This is without me actually knowing. It's just an inner response not to even check it out. When I see a static banner standing still in the corner of my eye, my brain says "wow, it's not moving, check it out Brandon". So I guess I see it then.

Just as a test, tell me which one of these images you would be more likely to click and tell me below in a comment. Try to forget about this article and pretend your a visitor to some other site.

If you feel that this is worth testing out with your own banners in the future, then do so. Try using some static banners in place of animated ones to compare. You might find static banners to give you more click throughs. It's worth a shot :)