Your Guide to Creating Animated Ads

In the dynamic digital marketing landscape, standing out from the crowd has become a little difficult, which is why advertisers are continuously seeking innovative ways to reach their audience, capture their attention, and leave a lasting impression. Users are bombarded with advertising messages at every turn, and static ads can easily get lost in the noise. That is why animated ads have been gaining a lot of traction recently, offering the ability to engage audiences and convey messages in a memorable way through charming characters and captivating visuals. They are a powerful marketing tool that can drive strong results for digital marketing campaigns.

Integrating animation in advertising helps brands create ad experiences that are visually more appealing than their static counterparts and offer more flexibility and creativity in reaching target audiences. Animated advertisements can tell a story, evoke emotions, and explain complex concepts in a clear and concise manner. Animated ads allow advertisers to break the mold and create a truly memorable experience that helps build meaningful connections with audiences.

The Power of Using Animations in Digital Ads

Here are some of the top reasons why you should consider adding animation to your advertising campaigns:

• Increased Engagement: Animated ads allow advertisers to build storylines that showcase products in new and imaginative ways, engaging audiences for longer times. The creative freedom offered by animated ads creates multiple opportunities for advertisers to captivate their audience. The combination of transitions, colors, sounds, and storytelling make animated advertisements inherently more captivating than static ads, leading to higher click-through rates and better brand recall as well.

• An Emotional Connection: Animation allows you to tap into a viewer's emotions, creating a stronger connection between your brand and the audience. Animated ads can forge deep emotional connections that resonate with the audience. Whether through a compelling storyline or a relatable or heartfelt character, animations can evoke strong emotions and drive attachment to the brand.

• Cost-effective: Whether it is stop motion advertising or creating animated web banner ads, using animation helps cut significant costs associated with creating in-person video ads, eliminating the costs of actors, booking venues, film crew, editing, etc. Even if you want to change some part of the ad later, you won’t need to reshoot the entire ad, as you can simply edit the existing animation ad file.

• Simplicity: It has become increasingly important for advertisers to present products and services in a short time, using the right words. With animations, advertisers can avoid using large pieces of text, and convey the same message in just a few scenes, in a much more engaging manner. As can be seen in the best examples of animated banner ads or stop motion ads, broad ideas, and complex information can be conveyed to the audience in a straightforward yet memorable way.

How to Create an Animated Ad

Integrating animation in advertising first requires a well-written script, which forms the basic skeleton of the ad, making execution easier and increasing the chances of success of the ad. Other key considerations to keep in mind include:

• Keep It Short: Most users today have an attention span that only accommodates quick bits of engaging content and disengages from prolonged narrations. That is why it has become essential for animated ads to convey essential information within 5-15 seconds. If you are designing animated banner ads try to make it even shorter.

• Weave a Story: One of the best ways to get your audience to resonate with your content is to craft a relatable story with compelling characters. Not only does this build on the emotional connection but also keeps the audience engaged. For that, it is important to understand the audience, their needs, and pain points, so you can tailor your ad to resonate with them on an emotional level. Humor, inspiration, or a sense of wonder can all be powerful tools for creating a successful animated ad. Consider the emotions that you want to evoke in your audience and tailor your script accordingly.

• Clear Call to Action: Whether it's visiting your website, downloading an app, making a purchase, or filling out a form, a clear and strong call to action is a crucial element that logically ties the entire ad together. Make sure that the call to action is clear and easy to understand.

Building Animated Ads Using an Ad Platform

Creating animated ads from scratch might sound daunting at first. However, you can find several online ad platforms offering dynamic creative solutions that can help you create these ads faster and more effectively, without any need for technical know-how. These platforms come with built-in ad builders that are equipped with user-friendly tools that allow you to build engaging animated web banner ads, cartoon ads, or video ads without needing coding or design expertise.

Choose a Template or Create One Using a Drag and Drop Builder

The first thing you need to do is finalize the platforms you want to target for your ad campaign. Every platform has its own specifications for sizes and dimensions for different ad placements, based on which you will have to start designing your animated ad units. Once that has been finalized, you can begin creating the ad. Online ad platforms offer a wide inventory of readymade ad templates that you can choose from for creating animated banner ads. You can choose a template that aligns with your brand aesthetics, or you can start with a blank canvas with the drag-and-drop builder offered by an ad platform. Drag-and-drop ad builders allow you to start from scratch, and you can ‘drag’ various elements and ‘drop’ them onto the builder to create your ad.

Add or Edit the Elements

The best part about using a dynamic creative optimization platform is that it allows you to personalize your ads in real-time based on who the ad is being served to. Whether you are creating animated web banner ads, elaborate stop motion advertising, or interesting short cartoon ads, all you need to do is create the basic design of the ad with placeholders for the elements that you would like to personalize for different users. You can then set the parameters and different variations of the elements on the ad builder, and you are done. The ad will choose the elements to use in real-time, as it is being served, based on the user information received from the publisher’s server.

Generate the Ad Tag

Once the animated ad has been created, you can use the ad builder platform to generate universally compatible ad tags. An ad tag is a universal code that allows you to place your ad on different websites, platforms, ad exchanges, and ad networks, and even use the ad tag for programmatic ad placements.

Tracking

Ad builder platforms also offer access to a personalized dashboard, which you can use to launch and manage multiple ad campaigns with ease. The dashboard also offers access to detailed performance metrics and analytics in real-time, so you can see how well an ad is performing. These platforms also allow you to make changes to live campaigns in real-time, based on their performance, to ensure success.

Animated ads have emerged as a powerful tool in digital marketing, helping brands cut through the noise and capture audience attention. With the help of the right ad platform, you can produce dynamic banner ads at scale, which not only grab attention but also improve conversion rates.