iPhone App Interactive Ad Banner

I was sitting on the sofa the other night watching the Tigers suck and I came across an interesting ad served up within TwitterFon on the iPhone. Leaving aside the fact that I still use TwitterFon over the much lauded Tweetdeck (it scrolls down to your oldest new tweet which is a truly priceless feature), I noticed the following ad banner:

Apart from it being an automotive ad which is the industry I have been involved in now for a number of years, the peel-behind icon in the top right corner really stuck out. It represents ads by VideoEgg who coincidentally we’d just had in the office a month or so ago giving us a presentation. I was impressed with the company’s ad model and portfolio, and found Mark Spates, their Director of Social Media Strategy, quite an exceptional guy. But this post isn’t about VideoEgg even though I realize now thinking back that I have a lot to say about them, so maybe I’ll do that another time. Anyways, I knew from their ad model that they don’t charge per impression or click-through, but for the time spent actually interacting with the ad, which leads them to produce some really interesting and engaging content, so whilst I am not in the market for a Prius I clicked through to see what it was all about.

And I was really wowed. Twitterfon peeled back to reveal behind it what I came to realize was a full-blown microsite, shit this thing was as good as some of the lower budget reveal sites we’d put out on the web two or three years ago. But this was in an ad, in an app, in my cellphone, in my hand, while I sat on the sofa watching the Tigers suck. Of course it wasn’t really as good as any microsite we’d put out two years ago, but for the reasons I just mentioned it felt like it was. And also up until now all the iPhone App banner ads I’d seen have been tasteless unsightly garbage, offering me something along the lines of a free Katie Perry song if I download some dodgy app, reminding me of the exact same problem we had on the web when ad banners first came about, the horrible junk that they were, and the iPhone is meant to be a mobile platform that isn’t a throwback to the nineties.

Okay so you click the VideoEgg symbol to launch the interactive experience:

And revealed behind the App is the microsite:

This homepage loads instantly, and as you see it’s pretty simple stuff, which is what I like. In fact it’s what most of us like, as this article which is a little dated but still stands true points out – web users are getting more ruthless – if you’ve got a gallery to show me, some videos, or any other interesting piece of content then sweet, I dig it, bring it on. But don’t dick me around and waste my time with your bloated over-designed over-engineered Flash (or whatever technology) app that takes forever to load, and then every time I interact with it starts with its bullshit animations and transitions, which appear to only exist to cover up the fact that it provides absolutely nothing of worth or value to me, only to discover that you need a PhD in rocket science, be a level 60 sorcerer in world of warcraft, and quite possibly even be slightly retarded to boot, just to figure out how to interact with it.

Well that’s not this, this is simple. And my time is precious, and me is ruthless, and me like it lots.


There’s a gallery with about a dozen interesting shots:

There’s a vehicle colorizer:




And finally you can watch some of their tv spots:

As this ad was served up with TwitterFon it would be an obvious move to improve upon it by having some kind of Twitter tie-in, but only if it improves upon the experience and not just so it can claim to incorporate the latest fad of the week, and lets not forget that this ad is likely served up into a wide assortment of apps belonging to the VideoEgg network so the experience needs to be generic to all of them.

Look I’m not saying this ad was some truly amazing experience, really my only point is that it reminded me that this is how all iPhone ads should already be, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see that some of them already are.