Opinion on banner ad I'm planning on running on TA

You said be harsh: Can't read the black text very well, don't love the wording of it either, and needs to look somehow more bada**

 

+1

you have to show more of what the game is

 

The black text is very hard to read, so people that just scan over your ad probably won't bother to read it. Instead of having a sentence there you could try just some solid adjectives, such as "innovative. interactive. iPhone." Thats just an idea i'm throwing out there. Having a lot of text on an ad is usually a bad idea, you need something very quick and to the point.

The font for stunt drive looks a little aliased (jagged pixels). I don't know if you are using photoshop, but if you are you can just change the anti-aliasing settings on the font to fix that. Not a huge deal if you can't, but it would help the overall look.

I like the left car image, as it kind of leads you in and points you to the ad text. I don't like the one on the right so much, it difficult to tell what is going on, is it driving on a red canyon about to go off a cliff or is it already flying in the air over the red canyon? Looking at the game screenshots I can see what is going on, but with this crop it is difficult to tell. If you could show more of the river to give more context I think it would help.

Those are just my suggestions, I am no marketing expert or even anything close so take them for a grain of salt

 

The anecdotal evidence I have seen suggests that you will not make your money back on ads if you are charging 99 cents for a game.

Unfortunately I can't find any good links in the last 5 minutes of searching.

 

A lack of price and incentive wording to "buy now" is going to be your biggest barrier.

 

The point of a banner is to show off a game and it's features. What you have right now is just two cars. Any car game has cars.
Show something like a car flipping in mid-air. That'll probably catch some attention.

 

Everybody thinks their game is awesome. I was more pulled in by the mention of unique controls. Maybe replace a car with some graphic of the controls. Just my personal take on it.

+1 on the ads not making a big difference.

 

Love the choice of title font and the color scheme is sound. The rest is OK'ish but not brilliant. I disagree wholeheartedly with those claiming that the banner has to show the actual game. The idea of the banner is to lure people into clicking it and investigate further. If you want to include the app store graphics you should try to avoid the mistake a lot of people make, of jamming it into the corner without any space around it. There should always be some "white space" around this object and you can even read about it in Apple's guidelines.

Top of my head:
How about buying some stock-footage of high-speed cars coming towards the camera? (Think burnout).

 

I think it's decent. The cell-shading of the cars and font-choice seems like a good fit. I think the app-store icon is too small and should probably be placed outside the text-boxes, even if this means it will cover up parts of the purple car.

 

Yep. I agree. This one is much better.

 

I suggest removing the purple car altogether and replacing that part of the banner with a silhouette of a crazy rollercoaster track with a little car mid-air between two jumps. Everyone loves jumping cars over big gaps.

 

I would remove both of the car images. They make it look a little cheap. Kind of like bad clip art. I would do a good hand drawn rendering of a car or something if you want an image on there. Ads like that rarely show in game graphics. Maybe instead do a short list of features like 5 tracks, 10 cars, etc...

 

I agree with the comments given by JClardy. What about dropping the AppStore logo altogether since you're having trouble finding a good spot for it and saying something like "iNNOVATIVE, iNTENSE, iPHONE"? Too cheesy?

 

I saw this over on the Unity forums as well, and I think you've gotten some good comments. I think the price is a bit cramped and hard to read - try to give it a bit more space, if possible.

Also, read Apple's guidelines about the App Store artwork. If you can't fit it in at 40 pixels high, leave it out, because right now it's so tiny that it's just muddy and illegible.

I also agree about the screenshots - the textures in the background are kind of blurry and low-res, and the images are cropped so close around the cars that they don't give any sense of action, which is what I imagine you're going for. It just looks like the cars are floating.

Some clean renders of your cars or a vector-drawn substitute, slightly smaller and with enough background to clearly convey the action (like a jump or a crash or something) would do much better to get the idea across, in my opinion.