Banner ads - current best practices?

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Hi. Probably a decade ago or more I used to create banner ads for my employer. At the time I used PhotoShop and Illustrator for animated gifs and Flash for something a little more ambitious.

I haven’t done much by way of banner ads since then, but I recently got asked to create some new ads for a client.

What is the current best practice for creating a banner ad? I know a lot of it depends on the specs, the site, and the message, so let’s say an informational 670x335.

I would like it to be eye-catching, load quickly, and use the latest technology, which I guess is the part I need advice on.

Thanks in advance.

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Well, as few years back the trend was to create complicate, 3D like, elaborated stuff, now the key word is simple. Just plain, and take advantage of color combinations and symbolism.

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Thanks. Are the tools and formats the same? Are GIFs and SWFs still the preferred methods of delivering animated banners, or has JS or HTML5 stolen some of that thunder?

After so long I feel like I am starting over with banners and don’t want to use something that will give that away.

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People still use banner ads? Haven’t seen one of those for a while because like many people I have ad blocking enabled in my web browsers.

Flash is old hat now so animated instrusions ads can be done as GIF’s, text+image+CSS , video or even with JS

It’s also worth considering the myriad of devices that are in use nowadays, your 720 leaderboad image will look tiny on a phone.