Coda Ad on Daring Fireball
You have to be some level of design dork to appreciate this, but I noticed an ad for Coda on Daring Fireball today. I assume The Deck allows clients to serve whatever images they like within reason, but this one is a bit special.
Rather than a square, fully-opaque image, the ad for Coda is a PNG file with an 8-bit alpha channel which simply depicts the application icon. It's such a simple thing, but unbelievably effective at getting my attention. It's arguably a little mischievous because it looks like a design element, but kudos for knowing your audience.
The other take-away message here is that I could look at ads for Mac apps all day and not mind one bit. I'm potentially in the market for those things. The reason web ads are usually just noise to me is that they're not selling anything I'm even remotely interested in.
The Coda ad doesn't need to dance around on the screen because it's not demanding your attention. In most cases, if you read Daring Fireball, you probably already know what it is. This is just a little reminder.
So there's that.
Coda Ad on Daring Fireball
Posted May 2, 2007 — 2 comments below
Posted May 2, 2007 — 2 comments below
Ravi Khalsa — May 02, 07 4025
Marc Edwards — May 09, 07 4086
(Because I'd already bought Coda!)
Brilliant. Love it. Maybe there should be an indy ad syndicate that works like that... simple elegant icons as a reminder.