Zman said:
Ads need eye appeal, take it from someone who's been in retail sales for many years.
The google ads are boring - no colors, no highlights, no dancing chickens.
No one is going to click on them until you make them sufficiently interesting enough to distract people from the forum.
actually the flashy dancing ads are soo 1990's, they just dont work anymore. text ad's are actually the wave of the future and out-do flashy ads.
Text-only ads continue to work better than traditional graphics-based ads for some time to come. Web users have long exhibited strong banner blindness and avoid anything that looks like an advertisement. Text-only ads don't resemble the designs that people have trained themselves to screen out, and the resulting visibility surely contributes to the success of text-only ads.
Also, text-only ads benefit from a temporary novelty effect, as does any new advertising format that people have not yet learned to ignore.
Over the long term, however, the novelty effect will obviously fade. Users might also develop box blindness, ignoring little text boxes just as they've long ignored banner-shaped areas of the screen. Thus, text-only ads are not guaranteed a bright future outside their native search engine habitat.
Text-only ads might have one durable advantage: because they're a low-end media format, users might take them more seriously. Being forced to express a message in a few words concentrates the advertiser's mind, and probably leads to more communicative ads that are better focused on explaining how users will benefit from the product or service.
Although there is no inherent reason that you can't use text for mindless chatter -- like "where do you want to go today?" -- there is no way users will click on such ads. Ignoring users' immediate needs is certain death on the Web.
Companies that run rich-media ads that ignore user needs can delude themselves into thinking that they're "promoting the brand"; in reality, they're simply being ignored because they don't connect with people's needs. The text-only format more clearly exposes content-free messages as useless, however, and thus might save advertisers from the bad instincts they honed on old media.
