11 Minimalistic Yet Highly Effective Banners

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No matter where you happen to live, work or visit, you’ll likely come across banner ads in some shape or form every single day of your life.

They’re on the Internet, printed on the subway, printed on the sides of buses, and there are even printed banner ads on huge billboards at the sides of most busy roads. The fact is: there’s simply no escaping them.

There’s one thing you might have noticed about all of these locations, though: they’re all extremely busy.

This means that anyone viewing a banner advertisement in any of these locations will likely only have a few seconds to understand what the banner is all about.

What’s more, as these locations are so busy and packed with energy, it’s often the simple, minimalistic banners that tend to stand out.

Below, www.discountprint.co.uk have rounded up some of my favourite minimalistic, yet highly effective banner ads ever:

1 – Band Aid: Censored Cuts

• Band Aids are simple products, so you might assume that there wouldn’t be such a creative way to advertise them; however, you’d be wrong.
• The ad above is about as minimalistic as it gets, yet it shows off the Band Aid product beautifully.
• This ad is one of a number of similar ads, in which the Band Aid is featured on a pain-inducing product, such as a safety pin (shown above).
• There are no words, as the imagery does all the talking.

 2 – Citroën C-Zero: 100% Electric

• Electric cars are the future, yet one thing is for certain: they’re not typically as exciting as petrol-powered cars, which can make advertising difficult.
• With regular petrol cars, it’s easy to show off the car in all it’s glory, making a beautiful sound and speeding down the road. This isn’t the case with electric cars, though.
• This ad combats the problem beautifully, by featuring a minimalistic design that resembles both a car, and a plug. With the simple strapline at the bottom, it works perfectly.

3 – Pringles Jalapeño: Tongue

• Pringles are one of the most popular snacks in the world, and the company regularly releases new flavours, which of course, have to be marketed.
• This rather minimalistic ad for Pringles was created to market their new Jalapeno flavour.
• Clearly, the Pringle hanging out of the tube in the ad is meant to represent a tongue; most likely hanging out of the persons mouth due to the intensely hot flavour of the snack.

4 – McDonalds: Wi-Fries

• There’s no doubt about it, McDonalds is a global megabrand, and they regularly push the boat out when it comes to marketing.
• If you’re an avid McDonalds fan, then you may already know that in every restaurant, there’s free Wi-Fi available to all customers. McDonalds found that a lot of their customers didn’t realise this, however, so they embarked on this minimalistic advertising campaign to let them know.
• It’s a simple ad, in which the iconic McDonalds fries are used to represent the iconic Wi-Fi icon.
• The ad is cleverly entitled: Wi-Fries.

5 – BMW: Spare Parts

• BMW produce beautiful cars, but there’s no doubt about it: they’re not the cheapest to buy.
• They’re also not the cheapest to repair should anything go wrong, which is why a lot of BMW owners tend to get their cars repaired by third-party garages, rather than at BMW’s official servicing garages.
• However, there’s a problem: the parts used by third-party garages don’t tend to be of as high quality, and they’re certainly not official parts.
• This clever ad from BMW runs the slogan “Use official parts”, alongside the jumbled up letters: BWM.

6 – Nori: Japanese food from 11AM

• Nori is a Japanese restaurant with a unique selling point: they serve Japanese food starting from 11am, everyday.
• Not all of their customers knew this, however, so Nori created this beautifully minimalistic ad to let people know.
• At first glance, you may assume this ad shows nothing more than an eye-catching red clock, showing the time 11am. But, if you look more closely, you’ll notice that this isn’t a clock at all; it’s actually a red plate featuring strategically arranged chopsticks.
• It’s very simple, but clever.

7 – Westone Earphones: Mosquitos

• Westone might not be the most well known company on the planet, but they produce headphones with a unique selling point: there’s no buzz.
• While this unique selling point is clearly great, it does present a problem when it comes to visual banner ads: it’s hard to portray the absence of sound in an image.
• Cleverly, however, the company came up with this ingenious solution: they decided to portray the absence of “buzz” by using mosquitos (perhaps the buzziest insect out there).

8 – Dulux: Sad

• Dulux is perhaps the best-known paint producer on the planet, despite the numerous other brands out there.
• They’ve built their reputation on the quality of their products, and also around their ingenious advertising campaigns.
• This ad focuses around the idea that “colour is everything”, and applies an emotion (sadness) to a number of iconic Dulux colours. It’s saying: “colour has the power to change how you feel” in the most simple and elegant way possible.

9 – Lego: Plane

• Lego regularly embark on creative advertising campaigns that bring their plastic blocks to life, and this minimalistic ad is certainly no different.
• Lego is all about creativity; the idea behind the product is that with a few simple coloured blocks, you can create just about anything: it’s all about your imagination.
• This ad ingeniously portrays that concept, by picturing nothing more than a couple of red Lego blocks, with a shadow of an Airplane below it.
• The message is simple: let your imagination run wild, you can create anything with Lego.

10 – Fedex: Berlin

• FedEx is a unique company; they’re responsible for delivering hundreds and thousands of packages around the world every single day; but how do you showcase this fact in seconds on a banner ad?
• It’s simple: you make use of some of the most iconic structures in the world, yet you mismatch those structures with location names.
• For example, this ad features nothing more than the word “Berlin”, yet it also features the Statue of Liberty, a structure iconic to New York City, not Berlin.
• The ad goes even further by utilising the two iconic FedEx colours: orange and purple.

11 – Fabercastell Truecolours: Dachshund

• To most people, pencils are pencils, but to Faber-Castell, pencils are the implements needed to create beautiful, lifelike pieces of art.
• It’s this concept that this wonderfully simplistic ad plays on: the lifelike nature of their range of colours.
• It features a dog, with a pencil for a tail.
• Clearly, though, the colour of the dog and its pencil-tail match, thus showcasing the true lifelike nature of Faber-Castells pencils, without saying a single word.