A typical popup on the Netscape home page garners a 3% clickthrough rate (of nearly 16 million daily page views). This popup for Netscape Radio was very successful, pulling well over 5% on its first run.
Read the process study of how it was created and see preliminary 'sketches' and sources of inspiration.
The muted blue tones in this popup was inspired by an issue of 'Martha Stewart Baby'. Although not a color typically associated with Netscape, I thought it worked perfectly well in the context of Mother's Day, and the success of the campaign bore that out.
Nothing like an unusual view of a familiar subject to attract the eye (and increase clickthrough rates!).
We conducted a round of testing and concluded that small popups perform just as well as the larger, 330 pixel ads that you see above. After trying a variety of sizes and shapes, we settled on this 200 pixel square.
I couldn't imagine a better solution for a Gateway product than the cow pattern. What I didn't realize is that Gateway is very particular about their cow pattern. My first version (with my own hand drawn cow spots) was rejected and I received an .eps file of official, Gateway-approved cow spots from their 'brand police'.
Following the 'wannabe Martha Stewart' popup for Mother's Day 2000, I had an opportunity to do an actual Martha Stewart popup for Mother's Day 2001. Assets were delivered from her marketing department, including an official color palette. This ad ran well, and led to a larger deal with the 'Queen of Homemaking'.
