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

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
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

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
Quantcast Creative Offering

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

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

Mobile
Quantcast automatically blends mobile into your campaigns, tapping into increasingly cross-platform usage consumer behavior
We connect to the top native inventory sources


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.

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 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 Banners

Dynamic Creative
