What thing that has often occurred to me is just how boring most of the banner ads are that are supplied to affiliates by merchants. Very often, you will just a selection of banners in some standard formats and the most imaginative they get is to have some animation.

But if you're a broadband merchant, why wouldn't you just supply a banner form that provides a postcode lookup function which takes the user to an availability page?

If you're a web registrar, why wouldn't you provide a domain search box for affiliates to put on their sites?

If you're the National Lottery, why don't you have banners that display results or are an entry form? Or maybe a number generator?

And if you sell books, how about a RSS feeds of your best sellers in various categories that could be integrated into affiliate sites?

It just seems to me that most merchants just come up with some boring ads for you to plonk on your page when they would be better off by using their imagination to come up with ways in which they can be seamlessly integrated to become part of the content.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, ideas