People who were there may not believe this, but I originally had nearly twice as much material for my STM London 2015 talk as ended up in the final version.

For those of you who weren’t: before I narrowed it down to “Rise of the Robot Affiliate”, my London talk was going to be a general futurology discussion about upcoming technology and what it means for affiliates. But that topic proved way too broad, as there’s far, far too much interesting stuff happening right now. So I narrowed my topic down for STM London – and that means that there’s lots of other interesting stuff that didn’t make it in, which I will be covering over the next few weeks.

To start us off, here’s one thing that can make a difference to your campaigns right now, one thing that could be a mobile-sized opportunity very soon, and one thing that will just blow your mind…

Practical Right Now: CSS animation

Animated images are a pain in the ass. On the one hand, they catch the eye, provably boost engagement, and generally do Very Good Things on any campaign element where you introduce them. On the other hand, they bloats file sizes like crazy – a big GIF on mobile carrier, for example, will bring the entire thing to a screeching halt.

But over the last few years, there’s been a bit of a revolution in animation on the Web, as browsers are increasingly capable of doing very cool things with animated elements using CSS and a bit of Javascript – meaning that you can introduce animated elements for the cost of a few bytes rather than a few megabytes.

Snabbit.js is currently my favourite library for Web animation. It’s very lightweight – 5kb. It’s easy to use for simple things – creating an animated CTA is a matter of a few lines of code, for example. It’s capable of animating large numbers of elements, and it works in 3D as well as 2D.

Here’s a short list of things that you can do with Snabbit or similar tools in your campaigns:

  • Introduce very natural animation to your Call To Action – pulsing, bouncing, physics-based, whatever. This has been shown to be a simple, effective way to increase clickthroughs.
  • Create animation within your images on adult and dating landers. Adult landers in particular do very well with animated elements, but on mobile you get into the filesize hole. Using CSS/JS an ...

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