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How is the job market for banner animation these days?

ohem test
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This thread was started before GSAP 3 was released. Some information, especially the syntax, may be out of date for GSAP 3. Please see the GSAP 3 migration guide and release notes for more information about how to update the code to GSAP 3's syntax. 

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Hey everyone!  I was in a longterm (several years) contract role which recently ended.  I haven't been job hunting or freelancing for a while, and I was just curious what the market has been like for other banner animators/developers lately?  Are you still seeing a lot of demand for this type of work, or have you felt the need to branch out into other mediums?

 

Banners are such a fun niche, but I'm debating whether it's too limiting (career-wise) to be too specialized in one thing. 

 

Just thought I'd see how the past couple of years have been treating everyone here... I'd love to hear your stories!  (It's been a bit quiet in this forum now that the initial chaos of the 2015 flashpocalypse died down.)

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[crickets chirping...]

 

Nice to see you back around the neighborhood, @ohem. Yeah, the main GSAP forum is pretty active but there never was a ton of activity in the banner-specific one but I don't think that's any indication that the industry isn't thriving. I find that banner folks tend to be pretty locked into their own process and not terribly eager to expose their methods to others. And if they have a question, they may just post in the main forums. 

 

I don't do banner work, so I'm the wrong guy to ask. Maybe someone else will chime in. 

 

I suspect there's plenty of banner work going on out there, though. Good luck with your next endeavor! Hope to see you chiming in regularly here too. You're up to 321 likes which is pretty respectable! :)

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I do mostly banner for the financial sector and for that clientele i can say that business is not as good as it used to be. The good old flash days are long over.  Often clients ask for responsive ads (so they can use the same ad for many placements) but only offer small budgets.  But when you tell them that by setting up the ad to be responsive you have to develop multiple views (e.g. via mediaqueries) and that this development requires its time. They're not always happy about the cost estimate at all. This is something i have to fight against. Maybe other ad-developers have similar or - i hope - way better experiences.  

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Hello!

 

There's still some of us around, trying to make a living.

 

From what I've seen, and as @leolo69 has alluded to is that production budgets for display banners has dramatically been cut. A few years ago I was at a DoubleClick event where we talked about budgets, and 85% went to media, and only 15% for creative and production, my current estimates puts that figure at 6%. This leaves a lot of work being out sourced to cheaper labour markets. (I may or may not have had a hand in this, I hear a lot of cheap production houses are using Bannertime to scale up. Oops)

 

I've seen more traction with dynamic banners, or data-driven creatives, with programmatic being the buzz word for the media side for a while now, clients are more interested in the cost savings that can be had by developing a set of banners once, and re-using them for several seasons.

 

That being said there's always those gem contracts where there is loads of budget and a real desire to get creative! They're few and far between these days but  here's hoping the market will shift back to creative!

 

EDIT: I also haven't done a decent interactive/rich-media creative in ages!

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/7/2019 at 1:41 PM, leolo69 said:

I do mostly banner for the financial sector and for that clientele i can say that business is not as good as it used to be. The good old flash days are long over.  Often clients ask for responsive ads (so they can use the same ad for many placements) but only offer small budgets.  But when you tell them that by setting up the ad to be responsive you have to develop multiple views (e.g. via mediaqueries) and that this development requires its time. They're not always happy about the cost estimate at all. This is something i have to fight against. Maybe other ad-developers have similar or - i hope - way better experiences.  

I was wondering about responsive too, then one of the companies that I applied for (didn't get the job, btw) said they were using Flexitive.

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5 hours ago, Marlon said:

I was wondering about responsive too, then one of the companies that I applied for (didn't get the job, btw) said they were using Flexitive.

It's the first time i see Flexitive. By the look of it (e.g. interstitial ) responsive resize can be handled. But to be honest, 30 EUR a month on top of everything (Adobe, Provider ...) would be way too much for my kind of banner business. I like to code (wanna-be)responsive ads by hand so if something goes wrong i usually know where to find the culprit. 

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I had a pretty steep downturn in mid-2017 to mid-2018 where I was doing 1 banner campaign per quarter and switched gears to focus on After Effects and social content.

After that year my banner work has come back to make up 40-50% of my work, that's held pretty steady. I notice a trend where tech/product companies have embraced banners and are really doing nice, aesthetic pieces.

I do find institutional knowledge is being lost in other departments - creative, producers, account. I have to do a lot more hand holding to sell through or produce a banner. I am a semi producer these days int hat regard. Surprisingly too I don't get asked to do much programmatic or responsive, I mean responsive takes as much time to execute as making 4 separate sizes anyway.

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6 hours ago, Matthew Severin said:

Surprisingly too I don't get asked to do much programmatic or responsive, I mean responsive takes as much time to execute as making 4 separate sizes anyway.

 

This always gets me. Someone always believes they need dynamic or responsive banners to fulfil a media request, but there's always an intersection point of the time it takes to build dynamic vs building separate banners by volume.

 

Half the time the request is small enough that its probably faster for me to create 10 sizes separately than coming up with a whole dynamic build.

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5 hours ago, joe_midi said:

 

 

This always gets me. Someone always believes they need dynamic or responsive banners to fulfil a media request, but there's always an intersection point of the time it takes to build dynamic vs building separate banners by volume.

 

Half the time the request is small enough that its probably faster for me to create 10 sizes separately than coming up with a whole dynamic build.

 

And it's not only faster but more accurate. Right now i'm working on a responsive sitebar ad (300x600 initial and then all the way 100% width and 100% height responsiveness) For us as ad developer it is quite logic that to do so you have to make some compromises. There will always be some width and height combinations which just look let's call it unfortunate but you have to accept that. Though it's hard to explain the effort you have to put in a responsive ad to make it work 98% acceptable. Often you fix one element / animation overlap which results in another problem for other size variations. Very annoying. I'm always happy when the client himself prefers various static sizes before the one big responsive ad.

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Is the animated banner work slowing down because of static ads?

 

I have heard some claims of static outperforming animated in the last year. 

 

I was doing Dynamic, and had complaints about the added cost of rich media impressions, and my last three dynamic campaigns, they ended up running my static backups.

 

What I thought I knew about impression fees is from the Flash days working for a Publisher using DFP, and at that time, the cost for running static or SWF was the same.

 

Does anyone know if there is a cost per impression difference between an animated creative versus a static in the post SWF days? Obviously we are no longer producing 40kb ads.

 

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