Online Ad Strategy for Busy Creative Pros: 3 Sites To Know

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I don't know about your experience and process, but for me, the art of making online ads has always been something of a rush -- literally.

Other disciplines may have time to come up with unique concepts, cast for models, select a director, check out different locales and photographers and the like.

In online, what usually happens is that you need to have this art by that date, or something bad is going to happen. (By the way, that date? Really would be better if it were three days sooner.) And with the explosion of formats for mobile and audience splits for behavioral targeting, the time to turn something new and distinct in creative isn't getting any slower.

But just because you are going fast and hoping to skip the usual and correct steps of branding and background documents, client meetings, demographic analysis, storyboard and mocks... doesn't mean you have to just take one blind shot and hope. Here are some shortcuts and moves that could make your next rush job a winner.

1) Learn more with Moat.

Moat.com is a bunch of different things. A New York City based start up, a purveyor of online research via the use of graphic "heat maps", and some really brilliant folks that I was fortunate enough to meet a long time ago. But what they really are, at least for online advertising creatives, is an absolute godsend for ideas in your category, and a massive time savings over less exact tools like Bing and Google Image.

What you'll find at Moat is a search engine based entirely around online ads. Type in a brand or company, and you will see ads in a chronologically based order, with forwardable URLs, with date and publisher site information for last impression seen. In a matter of minutes, you could be seeing what your competitors are doing with their online ads, on what publisher sites they have been running, and if the back history goes back some time, what they tried and are not trying any more. (That is a big clue, by the way. Right up there with checking out competitors in the same space, or brands and services that play to your client's demographics, but in another category.)

Is Moat perfect? Of course not. You can still find stray ads that they do not pick up on Bing or Google Image (especially with affiliate providers), and you will not see creative with personalized and dynamic elements. There is also nothing for email pros, which would be a real help, and you cannot click on the ads to see what a brand might have done on the landing page, either.

But for what Moat delivers and how much it costs to use (nada!), it just rocks. Every designer and sales pro that I've ever shown this site to have thanked me for it. Make it a routine part of your research.

2) Get competitive with Retail Me Not.

If you are working in an affiliate space or just curious to see if the offer terms you are getting as part of your campaign are truly the best, do a little digging on Retail Me Not. It's a consumer engine of offer codes, promo copy and sales information that's very extensive, and based on the URLs of the vendors.

When you use RMN in advance of a client call or as research for a placeholder offer, you are working with an offer that the client has approved and ran in the past. So there is no guesswork that the offer will seem out of left field, or seem overly generous or dangerous to margins. (You should still, of course, check it against the client's site, especially in case of holiday seasonality.) This also lets you get a sense of how aggressive the client has been in the past, and if different kinds of offers have been more commonly used.

By the way, there are plenty of other sites than RMN in the comparison shopping space. I just like it because it is very comprehensive, and has been doing this work for a long time. Nice way to save a few bucks when you are the actual consumer, too.

3) Dig into the demos with Quantcast.

This seems to work less than it used to, but you can frequently get an idea of the demographics of a web site by checking it out on Quantcast, an audience measurement tech company that's been around since 2006. Clues like the average age of the audience and the household income may help to influence decisions on font size, kerning, image choices and more... and there is also the increasing importance of mobile usage, which is another set of considerations.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.