Selling Spuds through Flash Banner Ads

Sierra Bravo and Gabriel deGrood Bendt Make Banner Ads for Simply Potatoes

Partner/Client Profile

Our partner: Gabriel deGrood Bendt is an independently owned Minneapolis-based marketing services agency offering expertise in brand strategy and communications — including advertising, interactive, and PR.

Our partner’s end client: Northern Star Co., a division of Michael Foods, makes Simply Potatoes Products. Michael Foods is a diversified food processor and distributor with net sales exceeding $1 billion.

Objectives

Gabriel deGrood Bendt was seeking a technical partner to bring their creative design concepts to life online in the form of banner ads for Simply Potatoes. Michael Foods wanted a fun and visually engaging online ad campaign. In deploying banner ads to three different food websites, care had to be taken to not create large, bulky files that would slow the page-loading speed of each site.

Each ad would be created in three sizes to give Simply Potatoes’ parent company Michael Foods ample options for ad placement based on site layout and ad rates. File size, page-loading speed, and ad site requirements would each play into the creation of each size of every banner ad. They also had to be attractive to the potato-hungry eye.

Solutions

“The challenge in creating a banner ad is in making people notice it and then want to click it,” said Sierra Bravo’s Matt Tonak. “I worked at drawing the eye to our ads however we could — sometimes it’s a bouncy graphic or anything to get and keep attention. Some of the ads move without being clicked so that even the passive viewer will get the message. And because every advertising-site had different specs, every size was a new canvas — with challenges and possibilities for layout and look.”

Although getting the files to fit the specifications of various ad sites was a key concern, the primary concern was creating original and engaging ads by adding Flash animation to the designs drawn up by Gabriel deGrood Bendt.

Sierra Bravo developed multiple banners to be posted on three separate websites, including Foodnetwork.com and Allrecipes.com.

Results

Gabriel deGrood Bendt and their client are pleased with the end results of our collaboration. All creative layouts were provided by Gabriel deGrood Bendt in all various sizes. The Ultimate Potato recipe point-roll banners link and expand-out on their last page into a recipe card. The point-roll banner for The Ultimate Mashed Potato Recipe is expandable in all three sizes and the recipe card expands into the same format for all sizes.

As designed by our Partner, a recipe appears when users click or roll over each ad. One of the ads asks people how they like their hash browns, and lets them then watch them crisp to their taste before their eyes in a virtual frying pan. The Po-tay-toe vs. Po-tah-toe ad used clever animation to add a new wrinkle to an old argument, complete with colliding cartoon-dialog balloons. We used more Flash to add fun functionality to a Hot-Potato version of Pong — one of the all-time videogame classics.

Sierra Bravo worked closely with Gabriel deGrood Bendt to make sure the flash animation behaved exactly as designed, with just the right rollover timing and movement.

Back to Case Studies

Downloadable Product e-Commerce

Our client, a tech-savvy education publisher, wanted to put on-demand supplies at teachers’ fingertips along with downloadable products. We built a custom online store based on Bravo Store that allows real-time integration between their online store and their backend business system. Customers can purchase physical goods through their website, and can add downloadable products to their shopping cart — with immediate access to their downloaded products. Read the whole case study.