At the recent iMedia Brand Summit in Las Vegas, we announced our newest ad family: Freedom Ads.

Freedom Ads offer Kontera’s large brand advertisers a unique way of capturing the consumers’ eye and imagination, while delivering record-high engagement, brand response rates, and CTRs.

Freedom Ad units are highly-relevant rich-media in-text ads that appear in the actual form of the product they advertise – thus bringing these products to life through an engaging out-of-the-box experience.

For example, when advertising its newest mobile phone and its video capabilities, Samsung chose to have the ad itself shaped like the actual mobile device, simulating its capability to stream live video coverage of the Winter Olympics. Consumers immediately experience the Samsung phone, its unique product design and video capabilities. The ad also conveys the Olympic experience and associates the Samsung brand with the Olympic spirit.

There are two types of Freedom Ads; the Product Freedom Unit, and the Brand Freedom Unit.

The Product Freedom Unit delivers an elegant, instantly recognizable visual depiction of the advertiser’s product, directly from within a highly relevant key phrase. Product Freedom units employ a clean design, and are ideal for product focused advertisers like Consumer Packaged Goods, Automotive, Apparel, Beauty, Consumer Electronics, and Retail.

The Brand Freedom Unit brings to life elements of the brand that are instantly recognizable, and it delivers a unique and holistic brand experience through tasteful interaction that engages, educates, and delights the consumer.

In a survey conducted among 15 brands and agency teams who launched campaigns using the new Freedom Ads, all of them replied that they would use the Freedom Unit again! This great advertiser reception is indicative of positive consumer results, and it is translating into a positive financial impact for Kontera’s publishers.

Other advertisers that have used the new Freedom Ads include FedEx, Adobe, the Republic of Ireland and Curel. See these campaigns and experience the Freedom Ads for yourself on our demonstration page.

You can also check out some of our additional Freedom Ads resources:

• The Official Kontera Press Release
• Freedom Ads Covered on MediaPost
• Download the PowerPoint presentation presented at iMedia Brand Summit
• See this and other Ad types in The Kontera Ad Gallery
• Watch the short video interview with Ammiel Kamon, Kontera’s EVP marketing, given at the iMedia Brand Summit about the future of in-text advertising

Today, we stray away from the usual talk of optimizing your Kontera In-Text ads, behind the scenes interviews, and publisher promotions to bring it “back to basics”.  We wanted to include our design experts in an effort to provide some words of wisdom about basic design elements that contribute to good site layout.  We hope you’ll enjoy the tips, and find them useful in your own site design efforts.

1)  Navigation, navigation, navigation - Menu buttons should be one of the most visible parts of any page—anyone that surfs the web knows that there’s nothing worse than a site with no “home link” or access to move on in their browsing.  After all, surfing the web should be a natural experience with smooth transitions.

2)  Functional Focal Points - Be aware of placement of the elements of each page that initially catch your readers’ eyes.  These elements; photos, videos, ads, and other elements that stand out are affectionately known as focal points.

3)  Follow Suit - Consistency is key when deciding on a design.  The best sites have “template” formats which mean that they have the same basic design elements carrying over to every page.

4)  Include Winning Text - Text can be considered just as an important “design” element as any, because it is generally what your users actually came for.  They are looking for fresh, informative, and accurate content, plus it goes without saying that Kontera pay per click ads work best on text-rich pages.

5)  Know Your Audience- A page is only as readable as the type of audience it’s geared towards.   Our creative team recommends thinking this through carefully so that you don’t lose visitors right away just because of a tasteless layout or difficult navigation.

We hope that these tips come in handy and will bring you continued web publishing success