I have just recently undertaken my first project that involves full page take over advertising for Not Going To Uni, an online advice and jobs portal for school leavers around the country. NGTU were after revenue generating ideas that would allow them to bring sponsors on board in a meaningful way and the obvious choice for this was to allow for page takeovers.
The good thing about this idea was that it arrived before the website even existed. From looking around the web for examples of small/medium sized companies undertaking this approach I found a few that simply didn’t work. The overall aesthetic of these sites was just too overbearing. An already powerful design will just be cluttered and bogged down by more attention grabbing graphics. How we approached the design of the NGTU website was to create a portal of information that spoke in the right tone of voice for the target audience, but keeping a little back. This not only allowed for a clean canvas for sponsors, but it was key to not talking down to our audience as well. We could have easily created something that replicated the ‘noise’ of Topshop or Myspace, but this site was about making a choice, choosing the right path to a successful career and that is serious business no matter how young you are.
The real task of a background takeover
What I did learn while working on this project was that most advertisers will try to push a message to its fullest, using every possible pixel to sell, sell, sell.
This isn’t really the job of a background takeover as it should never really appear on its own. Banner ads should really work with the takeover, filling the role of salesman while the background takeover adds that certain ambience and atmosphere to the overall online campaign that is being presented.
Striking a balance with the design
The initial takeover design we created was accompanied by a specifications doc for al future designers of sponsors adverts. This document explained how we, the designers of the website believed the takeover design should be approached. With certain width areas designated for key messages and the rest of the space being allocated for ‘ambient design’. Lucky for us, after presenting the initial takeover we have now been employed as permanent ‘takeover designers’, which for us is the perfect situation; allowing an in-house ‘approach’ to find a common ground between sponsor and website will surely create a measured commercial experience for the user.
One example that I have included a screenshot of below just seems to be a little overbearing and repetitive. Instead of using the main space of the website background to set a tone for the campaign, the Bride Wars example recycles the same iconic campaign image until it becomes a bit of a pattern of airbrushed heads.
I use last.fm a lot, and any takeover campaign I’ve come across on this platform has been pretty strong. The current example that I came across for Blackberry does exactly what it should be doing. The atmosphere of the page is set by a clever use of the latest Blackberry iconic graphics while key messages are left to appear in the banner ads.
