Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers hun­gry for inno­v­a­tive ways of engag­ing con­sumers and boost­ing online adver­tis­ing sales might wish to take a look at the offer­ings of Adni­ma­tion, a start­up based in Deer­field, Illi­nois that thinks it has a cure for the grow­ing phe­nom­e­non of ban­ner blind­ness amongst web surfers.

New life for unseen, unclicked, unloved banners

It’s just launched a new ad net­work that uses humor­ous and engag­ing media ani­ma­tions to breathe new life into stan­dard ban­ner ads. The more informed busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er will be aware that recent research has high­light­ed a spread­ing prob­lem with ban­ners: just one in every 1,000 web surfers actu­al­ly click on online ads, while the rest have become effec­tive­ly blind to them.

But Adni­ma­tion has come up with a poten­tial­ly promis­ing solu­tion. It’s not cre­at­ing new ani­mat­ed ads, it’s over­lay­ing exist­ing, stan­dard ban­ners with clever ani­ma­tions, so they burst into unex­pect­ed life (and maybe raise a smile or three in the process).

Tomer Treeves, the startup’s founder and CEO, explains:

“The moti­va­tion for cre­at­ing Adni­ma­tion is the lack of clicks in a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar mar­ket. Most ad net­works report hav­ing more ads sold than placed, and most web­sites report a dwin­dling vol­ume of clicks and earn­ings. Adni­ma­tion want­ed an adver­tis­ing method that solves both prob­lems with added val­ue to users who pre­fer the fun ads and give them real atten­tion before click­ing. With Adni­ma­tion, adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers of all sizes can tap into our rich media capabilities.”

A lit­tle idea with big prospects?

Talk­ing to TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Antho­ny Ha, Treeves explained that Adni­ma­tion could trans­form a stan­dard ban­ner for, say, cat food by show­ing an ani­mat­ed cat jump­ing over the page, where­upon it uses vision-guid­ing tech­niques to draw the visitor’s eyes back to the ban­ner mes­sage. Adver­tis­ers them­selves don’t have to cre­ate the ani­ma­tion; that comes from Adnimation’s own expand­ing library of ani­ma­tions. And as any can­ny busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er can see, that means there’s no extra expense for adver­tis­ers in time or mon­ey – they just sup­ply the ban­ner and Adni­ma­tion does the rest.

The ani­ma­tions work on both desk­tops and mobile devices, and the start­up ensures that very big brands get excep­tion­al­ly high-end ani­ma­tions from the company.

At this stage, the start­up has raised what Treeves described as a “very small pre-seed invest­ment” from unnamed Israeli investors.