The Best Display Ad Ever?

There’s a reason that display ads (formerly known as banner ads) often leave a bad taste in consumers’ mouths: so many of them are just outright terrible. Cluttering up a user’s screen with dancing babies hocking insurance or flashing banners claiming we’ve won an iPod devalue the medium as a whole, which is a shame, since this format has the potential to be remarkably engaging.

Maybe Uniqlo can save us all.

The video above (rife with “Engrish”) provides the backstory to a recent Uniqlo campaign that has to be in the running for the best display ad ever (granted, the aforementioned slop set the bar a little low). In late 2009, Uniqlo had been running a sweepstakes where visitors to their brick-and-mortar stores would receive tickets as part of a lottery sweepstakes. To bring this to the web, Uniqlo could have simply emailed/tweeted/Facebooked users with a coupon code or a link to a microsite. How exciting.

Instead, Uniqlo created a display ad/widget/bookmark hybrid called the Lucky Switch. When activated, all of the images on a given site would be swapped out for virtual (functioning!) lottery tickets for the aforementioned sweepstakes.

Better yet, any blogger who enabled the widget on their site could get their own perks. Essentially, the blogger would also be rewarded with the prize from any winning ticket displayed on their site. Now there’s an incentive for a blogger outreach campaign! Uniqlo claims that these ads were featured on over 4,000 blogs, generating about 2.8 million clicks and driving up retail sales by 120% in-store and 150% online. Oh, and that’s during a one-month campaign, and all of that without a free* iPod offer!

So, really, it’s time to aim higher than dancing babies.