Banner Blindness

We live in an extremely over marketed world... The only time we are not bombarded with ads is when we're asleep and even then (if you're a banner advertiser) you dream of ads... there is no escape. So how do you avoid falling into what I call banner blindness?

Most sites we visit have banners throughout... often times we don't even see them. They get more and more sophisticated with animations and catchy phrases yet they still seem to disappear. How can you create a banner that doesn't fade into the background like the rest of them?

I don't have the perfect answer, but I do have a good one. Most sites we visit tend to be well designed and the banners fit in nicely. Everything is nice. When you're looking at a sidewalk what do you notice? The cracks. So my suggestion to you is this: Create a crack in somebody's website. If the site that you want to advertise on is nice and pretty make something not so nice and pretty... give it hard edges and regular old arial text. Make it somewhat dull. It may not look great but it gets the attention and it's all about the CTR's isn't it? The same principle applies to ugly sites... make a banner that is beautiful... that cracks the sidewalk.