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Creative Best Practice Toolkit Guide to impactful creative & messaging for your brand

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Let’s talk creatively

The creative assets you build and use in your marketing campaigns should stand out, target your customer along their brand journey, and consider the device they are on. To help you navigate these challenges, we have put together the following guide, which will allow you to understand how key design, audience, and format choices impact results.

Creative Design Best Practices Overview

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Color & Contrast

Consider using colorful, eye-catching background colors to draw in consumer attention.

Distinct Borders

Ads with a white background must include a distinct border to clearly identify where the page ends, and advertisement begins.

Logo Prominence

Ensure your company’s logo is prominent and consistent in terms of location and dimension across the different banner sizes within each creative set.

Images

Play the Odds: 3’s & 5’s are more attractive & eye catching than 2’s or 4’s of something

Spacing

Give your layout balance, flow & focus

Fonts

Choose typeface & styles carefully

Sizes

Use image & text size as a visual cue for importance, enhancing or reducing visibility.

Positioning

The value proposition should be easy to read and simple. It should take up most of the space in your ad and be the first thing that your viewer’s eyes are attracted to.

Clear CTA

The call to action should be prominent and clear, being the focal point of the ad. Contrasting colors typically help the button stand out from the background.

 
 Best Practices Deep Dive

Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement or presentation of elements in a way that implies importance.

Visual hierarchy influences the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees. This order is created by the visual contrast between forms in a field of perception.

Key visual elements include:

  • Color & Contrast
  • Logo Placement
  • Distinct Borders, Spacing, Fonts, & Sizes
  • Eye catching images
  • Clear CTA button

The Squint Test

If you’re unsure about your designs and if they have good visual hierarchy there is a very easy way to test it – it’s called the squint test. It’s a quick test that anyone can do. Sit at least 2 feet from the screen, squint your eyes until things blur and see which elements jump out of the page/ ad. Are these the elements that you want the user to see first?

Color and Contrast

Colors not only help your brand stand out, but also act as emotional cues.

Understanding color psychology ensures your brand is associated with the right feelings, values, and actions you want to convey.

Green

Balance
Growth
Restorative
Clarity
Safety
Nature
Positivity

Purple

Creative
Royal
Original
Compassion
Distinguished
Unconventional
Technology

Orange

Optimism
Clarity
Warmth
Social
Motivational
Impulsive
New Ideas

Red

Hungry
Excited
Youthful
Bold
Passionate
Energetic
Ambitious

Blue

Introspective
Contented
Controlled
Rescue
Open
Goals
Aware

Yellow

Caution
Cheerful
Joyous
Curious
Playful
Positive
Warm

Customer Journey Creative messaging should align with the relevant stage of the journey

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Awareness

Your
Customer

  • Doesn’t know your brand
  • Hasn’t experienced your website
  • Doesn’t know what service you offer
  • Might use a competitor

Your
Creative

  • Soft CTA (View, Discover, Learn More)
  • Brand ethos communicated
  • Awareness messaging
  • Images that represent the brand
  • Drive interest and capture attention
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Prospecting

Your
Customer

  • Doesn’t know your brand
  • Hasn’t experienced your website
  • Doesn’t know what service you offer
  • Might use a competitor
  • Fits the profile of your customer

Your
Creative

  • Soft CTA (View, Discover, Learn More)
  • USP communicated
  • Consideration messaging
  • Images that represent the brand
  • Drive interest and capture attention
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Retargeting

Your
Customer

  • Knows your brand
  • Been to your website
  • Shown interest in products you offer
  • Still in consideration stage

Your
Creative

  • Strong CTA (Shop, Buy, Register)
  • USP communicated in more depth
  • Value driver messaging
  • Images that represent the brand
  • Drive interest and capture attention based on action-oriented content

Formats

Rich media ads

Rich Media

Maximize brand awareness with beautiful large format creatives that drive user engagement and interaction.
Video advertising

Video

Amplify campaign impact with pre-roll and outstream formats that help you capitalize on sight, sound and motion.
Quantcast native advertising

Native

Influence your consumer across the buyer journey with seamless formats that adapt to the look and feel of surrounding content.
Quantcast display advertising

Display

Supercharge outcomes with banners that maximize reach and power conversions.

Ad Sizes

Creative Sizes are needed to fill bid opportunities. By having all needed sizes, we can get in front of the right peoplewherever they may be on the internet.

Bolded ad sizes are the ones we recommend always including for scale.

Desktop Sizes

160×600   120×600
300×250   468×60
728×90    336×280
300×600   970×90
970×250

Mobile Sizes

300×250   300×50
320×50   728×90

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Designing for Devices

It’s important to remember that we use our devices differently – how we search, what we look at, and of course how we engage with the ads all should be taken into consideration when designing creatives.

A few simple tweaks to mobile creative can mean the difference between blending in with the background and being noticed.

Designing for Devices

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CTA Shape

When we are on our desktops, we can point and click to the area of the screen we want to with incredible accuracy. However when we change to our tablet or mobile we use our thumbs and fingers to direct and navigate around the smaller screen. The accuracy of our clicks decreases based which finger we use and the size of the screen.

We have seen positive results from changing our mobile CTA to a circle instead of a square to accommodate this.

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Animation Length

When we are on mobile and tablet, our attention span is a little shorter than when we are on desktops. Brand should cater to this change in behaviour by shortening the animations or rotations on the Mobile ads and deliverer the message in a slightly different way.

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Research Starts Here

Lots of people use their mobile as the first step to purchase or a stepping stone to it. This would suggest that more informative but relevant information about the product works better on mobile as users are very much in the interest and consideration stage of the funnel.

Quantcast Creative Offering

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Rich Media

Maximize brand awareness with beautiful large format creatives that drive user engagement and interaction.

6%
interaction rate

15s
dwell time

1.4%
ctr

What makes Quantcast Rich Media unique?

+ Impactful Formats. Drive interaction and engagement with high-quality custom rich media.

+ Delivered to the Right Audience. Reach the audiences that matter most using Quantcast’s real time data and machine learning.

+ For Better Brand Results. Create richer, interactive experiences that drive brand outcomes.

Formats include…

+ The expanding Lightbox launches into the center of the screen and lets audiences interact directly with elements of your brand.

+ The Parascroll parallaxes as the user scrolls, creating an eye-catching movement.

+ The 3D Prism displays videos and images that appear to rotate on the page, allowing you to show multiple faces of content

+ The Interactive+ Banner lets you include customizable interactive elements like video and 360° product views.

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Dynamic Creative Optimization

Deliver personalized ad experiences. Set up custom ad variations that trigger dynamic creative.

Quantcast combines Native formats with:

+ Dynamic Retargeting. Re-engage site visitors, reminding users of products they’ve previously viewed or abandoned in their carts, driving purchase intent & conversions.

+ Dynamic Prospecting. Target key prospecting audience buckets with a predetermined carousel of products, prospecting new customers with product categories most likely to resonate.

+ Dynamic Environment. Personalize and localize creative based on location, time of day, language, and weather.

Why should I use dynamic creative?

+ Use Data to Inform Creative. Leverage products browsed or aspects of the user’s environment to deliver the right ad.

+ Better Tailor your Message. Make your ads more personalized by dynamically serving the ad best-suited for your customer.

+ Reduce your Workload. Use the power & automation of dynamic technology to eliminate the need for numerous static ads.

+ Always made-to-order. We recognize that one size certainly does not fit all advertisers, which is why our in-house team of creative experts works with brands each step of the way.

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Mobile

Quantcast automatically blends mobile into your campaigns, tapping into increasingly cross-platform usage consumer behavior

We connect to the top native inventory sources

Quantcast mobile is blended in, allowing for:

+ Right Place. With time spent on mobile devices now outstripping desktop, mobile has become a key touchpoint in the conversion funnel.

+ Right Time. Increase the number of opportunities available to you to communicate with customers browsing the mobile web who are in market and receptive to your brand or message.

+ Right Audience. The breadth of behaviors on mobile devices create a compelling way to access customers from multiple angles.

Use mobile at any stage of the customer journey:

+ Mobile for Branding. With product research often occurring on mobile and tablet, it’s important that your brand is front and center when consumers are in the consideration phase.

+ Mobile for Performance. We recommend a blended set-up to improve performance, nurturing customers from consideration to purchase.

63%

US consumers use their mobile device for in-store product research*

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Video

Since its launch in 2015, Quantcast Video has delivered brand results for advertisers including KFC, Sky, Microsoft, and more.

A single consumer has multiple devices, platforms, and channels to choose from when consuming content and media. Attracting and holding consumers’ attention is a top challenge for marketers. Video has the power to activate the senses, evoke emotion, and leave a lasting memory.

What makes Quantcast Video unique?

+ Insights: Who did your ad get served to? What were their online habits? What do they purchase offline?

+ Targeting: We work with you across your entire Audience Journey with our Brand and DR targeting solutions.

+ Accuracy: Plan and Measure in-target accuracy

+ Data: Everything powered by our live first party dataset

+ Frequency Management Optimization: Don’t let frequency capping lead you to over or under exposed audiences. Let us optimize your video delivery to the ideal brand outcomes.

We offer:

+ Large & Medium Player Sizes for more brand visibility

+ Flexibility in video length with :06, :08, :15 and :30 second assets

+ Three video creative options:

1. Overlay
2. Video Wrap
3. End Card
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Native

Native ads adapt to the look and feel of the content and create a seamless experience for users.

We connect to the top native inventory sources

Quantcast combines Native formats with:

+ Exclusive 1st Party Data. Leads to insights you can’t get anywhere else

+ Custom Live Audiences. Unique prospects and in-market customers based on 50,000 distinct features

+ Optimize to Any Outcome Self-adapting models, updated up to 1,500 times per day, to reach your campaign objective

Use Native at any stage of the customer journey:

+ Influence Direct Response Outcome. Prime in-market audiences by communicating the value of your product or service, and drive prospects further down the path to conversion.

+ Drive Site Visits & Engagement. Native formats act as a content preview, compelling users to want to learn more. This makes Native uniquely suited for driving traffic and engagement with your content.


+ Increase Brand Awareness.Place your brand within publisher content for greater visibility, creating a positive brand experience.

Quantcast Creative Services Build creative to match your goals

Develop ad units to influence your audience no matter where they are in the buyer journey.

Standard Banner

Standard Banners

Deploy custom, high quality creative to influence customer behavior when it matters most.
Dynamic Creative

Dynamic Creative

Engage the right users with an ad that is personalized to their unique environment.
Rich Media Long

Rich Media

Grow your brand with engaging and interactive creative.

Interested in hearing more?

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