Ad Campaign for Maximum Brand Awareness.
See how we helped create a comprehensive ad campaign that spanned across digital and print.
Overview:
Billiards King is a top competitor in the cue retail and e-Commerce space. They were seeking to increase brand awareness by running ads with AZBilliards, a popular community hub for billiard fans.
To maximize exposure, they wanted to run ads on all of AZBilliard’s available website spots and their quarterly niche magazine about the world of billiards. We delivered a cohesive suite of ad creatives to accomplish that goal. The final deliverables consisted of a full-page magazine print ad and four different digital banner ads. Two of the banner ads were static skyscrapers of various sizes and the other two were landscape gifs.
Final deliverables included:
- Full-page 8” x 11” magazine ad prepped and ready for print.
- 970px x 546px forum landscape banner
- 468px x 264px standard landscape banner
- 160px x 320px mini skyscraper vertical banner
- 160px x 600px skyscraper vertical banner
Read on to see the final results — and how we can help you with your next ad campaign.
Issues:
AZBilliards had four different web banner styles and two different magazine options. There wasn’t any extra charge if you ran one banner ad the full time or switched out between all four options during your allotted time. With that in mind, Billiards King wanted to take full advantage and utilize all four spots. For the magazine, advertisers had the option of running a full-page or half-page ad at different costs. They decided to go with the full-page for maximum space.
With the placements decided, the next step was to start designing. Since the goal was to create a cohesive campaign, a theme had to be decided. Ultimately, Billiards King’s owner decided he wanted these ads to tie in with the insert cards he places in every order. This meant a more minimal design where the focus was on Billiard King’s brand and the top manufacturers they offer on site.
Each ad had their own unique challenges, with the digital sharing the most. Namely, each ad had to be under 1MB. For the static ads, this was easy. Between the small size and .jpeg file format, they didn’t come anywhere close to exceeding that limit. But, video codecs can increase file sizes quickly. Despite using the same assets, the standard banner met that goal, but the forum banner was just slightly over it at 1.1MB.
The next thing to take into consideration was the space constraints. Since these were smaller forum ads, some of the text would have to be cut in favor of other assets that would communicate what was needed. Of course, each banner presented their own unique challenges. The landscape banners specifically, there was a lot of dead space off to the side that the skyscrapers just didn’t have. At first we did double stack the logos since he wanted the banners to look as similar as possible. But, that resulted in a cluttered and hard to read blob.
Finally, the print ad had a slightly different direction. The owner wanted something even more minimal compared to the insert card, but still evoking a similar feeling. This meant ditching even more of the text to include only the bare minimal elements needed.
Solutions:
Design four web banner ads. This effort would be halved as we simply needed two different designs. One static and one animated gif and one of each size.
Two distinct looks across four different sizes. Two different skyscraper/vertical ads that would be static. On the landscape banners, the perfect solution was to add a cue. But, a static unmoving cue would be boring, so made them animated gifs to utilize product videos Billiards King already had. Given the smaller size, a bold and eye-catching cue was vital. That’s how we ended up on the CueTec Joker.
The gifs were easy to fix. Our video tool of choice, KdenLive, is already great at optimizing video files. It produces compact files without sacrificing quality. Industry standard tools, like Premier, produce stunning 4K videos, but when they’re under a minute and over 1GB, space becomes an issue; quickly. KdenLive will render 4K videos that appear visually the same and use the same industry norm codecs but half the size. To further compact we would run ffmpeg to generate the final .gif which compacted it further and kept us well below our 1MB limit.
Results:
Billiards King was now set up for success with a complete and unified advertising campaign across different mediums to strengthening brand recognition messaging among billiards enthusiasts. The comprehensive ad suite enabled them to reach their audience when they were actively engaged with the subject material be that browsing AZBilliard’s forums and discussing new cues with other fans or shuffling through their quarterly magazine. They would encounter Billiards King’s brand front and center and know they can buy genuine cues from their favorite manufacturers with peace of mind.
