Marvel’s Create Your Own Comic microsite recently picked up a Best in Class Award in the Entertainment category at the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition. The IMAs honor excellence in web design and development.

The Best in Class Award is the highest honor granted by the IMAs, with winners representing “the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism.” The Create Your Own Comic microsite earned 492 points out of a possible 500, making it eligible for inclusion in the IMA’s Top 10 Websites of the Year list.

Marvel Entertainment partnered with 360i’s Creative & Technology group to create a fully interactive destination within the Marvel.com family, fostering creativity and imagination among kids and parents. The action-packed microsite allows visitors to fully customize their own comic strip or book from start to finish, empowering them to create their own layout/design, choose backgrounds and settings – and even add fully editable characters from Marvel’s Superhero Squad.

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Last week 360i attended a Dynamic Logic and 4A’s webinar during which they presented best practices for display banners based on analysis of best- and worst-performing campaigns (you can access the press release about the study on Dynamic Logic’s Web site).

One key insight, which we have espoused for years, is that taking the time to develop strong online creative is critical. So much so that poor-performing banners don’t merely perform worse than better creative, they actually can negatively impact brand metrics such as awareness, favorability and intent.

Here are some key design and messaging recommendations from Dynamic Logic’s analysis and some of 360i’s thoughts based on our display creative experience:

1. Brand impact is only as strong as brand presence.
Specifically keep your logo on every frame. Intrigue rarely drives awareness and response. The longer the logo appears, the higher the lift in aided awareness. And consumers most likely will not see the logo if it only appears on the product and not prominently within the ad. For example, here is one of the ads we developed for a recent Panasonic campaign. Note that the logo is persistent throughout the interactive animations.

Click image to play ad:

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Yesterday the New York Times visited 360i’s New York office. The folks at nytimes.com met with agency creative directors to discuss fresh approaches to display advertising. They shared with us some new integration opportunities for advertising and editorial, including the newest Apple homepage roadblock ad.

By now everyone who has visited the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired or NYT online (or read the trades) in the last few months has seen one or more of these placements. The most recent Apple ads featured the Mac and PC characters discussing how PC is as easy to use as 1 through 23 steps, mostly involving restarts. Another ad showed hundreds of iPhone app icons flying over the publisher masthead, across the page and into a waiting iPhone. The payoff: “Thanks a billion. One billion downloads. Only on the App Store.”

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