10 Immersive Advertorial Examples That Bring Content to Life

May 18, 2022

Words by Jeff Cardello

An image of wireframes denoting responsive and adaptive design

Advertorials have emerged as a new way of reaching customers, bridging the gap between marketing and meaningful content.

The old ways of digital marketing have lost their impact; most of us zip right over banner ads, not even registering their presence. For brands to reach us, they need to provide a bit more value than what you’ll find in a 300 x 250 pixel square. To actually make an impact, increasingly they also need to tap into our search for meaning and authenticity.

That’s where advertorials come in—long-form, narrative-driven articles that fly in the face of ever shorter digital attention spans and clickbait content. We’ve pulled together a range of immersive advertorial examples to dissect exactly what makes this “camouflaged marketing” so effective.

What Makes a Good Advertorial?

Customers want to know that companies are more than faceless digital entities. Advertorials are an opportunity to reach them on a more personal level. By providing something useful, whether it’s practical information or a deeper understanding about who you are, good advertorials connect with them through something that’s meaningful—making them ideal for building brand awareness.

Advertorials can take the form of long-form articles, blog posts, guides, and other helpful resources. At first glance, they shouldn’t look like marketing pieces at all. They aren’t search-optimized filler, but say something that matters. They answer questions that customers may have, or communicate something deeper about a brand.

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Since there is no “correct” or standard way to design an advertorial, they can be moulded to fit a brand’s specific creative expression.

Advertorial Design Best Practices

As “marketing in sheep’s clothing”, design plays a huge part in advertorials’ success. Often, as the name implies, they take the form of a web editorial. The purpose is to inform and enlighten—an advertorial shouldn’t feel like an advertisement. Any call to action or marketing angle needs to be gentle and weaved subtly into its content.

Advertorial tone and voice should be consistent with a brand’s identity and never feel like a slick sales speech. If an advertorial is also going to be a piece of sponsored content, it should fit seamlessly within a website’s user experience.

Of course, advertorials need to be more than text on the screen. Just as the information being presented should guide someone in wanting to know more, the design itself should also have a sense of momentum. Using scroll-triggered text animations, visual effects, interactivity, custom illustrations, and other dynamic visuals—dubbed “scrollytelling”— keep things from being a monotonous slog.

An advertorial should find the right balance between visuals and text. With too many graphics or photos, it may appear too similar to an advertisement. With lengthy blocks of writing, it will look like a report. While that means finding the right harmony between visuals, content, and negative space, this also allows advertorials to be extremely experimental.

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10 Immersive Advertorial Examples

Since the medium is so flexible, there are a variety of inspiring advertorial examples out there to draw from. We’ve analyzed ten different approaches to break down their design and hopefully showcase what’s possible with this highly creative content format.

Economist Impacts

With expertise in policy-making, sustainability, and health, Economist Impact works with big companies and organizations in creating digital solutions for them.

Unlocking the future of work, details how the workspace has changed because of COVID. This piece emphasizes how IT and networks need to evolve in providing workspaces that feel the same whether an employee is in the office, or working elsewhere remotely.

This is one of quite a few advertorial examples we’ve seen built with Vev. It’s full of well-researched writing. Along with valuable content, this design mixes things up with text and images that fade in on scroll, big brilliant photos, and block quotes that emphasize the points they’re making.

This advertorial manages to convey a wealth of information on the current state of the workplace, what it’s going to need tech-wise, and shows that Economist Impacts are subject matter experts.

Gordon’s Gin

This advertorial example created in conjunction with Gordon’s Gin captures nostalgia for the holiday season before COVID-19 hit, as well as a hopeful optimism in returning to socializing. It’s a cheerful stroll through the cocktails and spirits that people enjoy around the holidays.

The piece feels very warm and personal, with a first-person perspective on this special time of the year. Along with great writing, there are colorful illustrations that add to the sense of holiday cheer.

This is also a great example of subtle marketing. At the very end of this essay there are only two mentions of cocktails you can make with Gordon’s Gin. This keeps us in the moment, and enveloped in the spirit of this piece, making us look forward to raising our glasses with friends this winter.

Thinkful

Data science takes hard numbers and extracts insights. It can be a daunting topic with many complexities, but this post from Thinkful explains it in a clear way, in a design full of mesmerizing three-dimensional shapes, grids, and vectors.

This design tickles our retinas with a kaleidoscope of pleasing colors, but also thoroughly answers the question of what data science is. Thinkful, offers a bootcamp in data science, but this gets only a single mention at the very end. This is another excellent advertorial example that puts an emphasis on providing helpful information while showing restraint in its marketing messaging.

Regenerate Canada

Advertorial content isn’t just the realm of retail companies. The World Wildlife Foundation is a non-profit, and Regenerate Canada is a decade-long proposed plan for decreasing carbon emissions, instituting more sustainable industrial practices, and protecting wildlife habitats. Built in Vev, this piece utilizes attention-grabbing text animations, visuals that appear on scroll, and dramatic photography to help bring the key messages to life. We love seeing dynamic advertorial examples like this in the non-profit space.

The WWF depends on donations, but they never let this get in the way of what they’re trying to communicate about this environmental campaign. At the bottom of this piece is a form for people to pledge their support, and a call to action to donate at the top right.

Real Simple

Real Simple’s Get it Done Virtual Home is an AR journey through a gorgeous colonial property, guiding you from room to room. There are lightbulb icons that you can click on along the way which reveal not only home decorating information, but sponsored links to related products.

It’s fun to explore through the various rooms of this home, and there are plenty of great tips here about interior design to help you in making your home just as lovely. The product links aren’t forced, but rather feel like Real Simple acting as a friend looking to make your job of home improvement easier.

Gucci the Epilogue

Gucci’s I Can’t Believe My Eyes is another great advertorial example with loads to learn from. This is a surreal and delightfully weird digital space, reflecting so well the spirit of Gucci’s Epilogue line.

The narrative they tell feels like an art-house movie. From fried eggs on Badminton racquets to cotton candy bubble baths, there’s enough whimsy here to make even filmmaker Wes Anderson jealous.

It’s a strange story through this design, that they tell through elements of scrollytelling. There are scroll-triggered effects like text moving over changing images, cinematic video clips, and plenty of vibrant colors throughout.

The surreal user experience makes you forget that it’s a piece of marketing until the very end, when a gallery of Gucci products appears. What’s great is that they don’t use this web space to talk about their Epilogue products through boring copy and bullet points. Instead, they offer an immersive web experience with a delightfully warped sensibility that captures the essence of the Epilogue line. This by far is one of the more eccentric advertorial examples we found, but that’s what makes it so great.

Telenor

Telenor is a telecommunications company whose history can be traced back 165 years. Prevent the Spread of Covid-19 is one of the more journalistic-styled advertorial examples we found that was built with Vev. It details how the mobile cellular data gathered by their towers can help in slowing down COVID transmission.

This has the perfect combination of text and visuals, and utilizes scrollytelling in revealing each bit of content they want you to read. With embedded videos that have text scrolling over them, ample whitespace, and rolling out content in a logical succession, they show how what they do can have a positive impact on something like a global pandemic.

Preciosa

Preciosa, a luxury jeweler, bills this piece as “Nostalgia for the Future”. In it, they expound on what this philosophy means to their craft as jewelry makers.

Nostalgia for the Future is a celebration of extravagance. From the science fiction inspired outfits of their models, to the multitude of scroll-triggered animations that spin and rearrange the space in dynamic ways, it’s a design that you want to keep scrolling through.

Dynamic text is a great way to keep visitors engaged, and there are also several eye-catching effects in this design. We especially like the text that scrolls into place from set positions on the left and right, before taking a fixed position on the screen.

Just as a jewel shimmers with different cuts and facets, Preciosa shines with an advertorial web design that has many lovely and brilliant details.

Polestar

Art of Buying a Car, is another slick one of the best advertorial examples we’ve seen created with Vev.

Polestar automobiles, with their sleek lines and high-end elegance, further differentiate themselves from the rest with this campaign where people can swap art with a value of at least 1.6 million kroner for purchasing a Polestar car. This is a unique marketing campaign and they make many parallels between fine art and their vehicles. This is an angle that works so well with their brand identity.

This advertorial reads like something from the pages of a luxury magazine. There are brilliant images of their vehicles, along with text that tells how this art for cars deal works. Along with a classy layout, they take advantage of Vev in building out horizontal scrolling sections as well as other interactive animating text blocks over background images that are also in motion—offering a slick navigational experience that perfectly mirrors the sophistication of their brand.

Guido da Costigliole

High-end restaurant Guido da Costigliole use this advertorial to communicate their approach to cuisine and who they are in a way that goes beyond being a standard “about us” page.

Each section has a gorgeous color palette, with scroll-triggered animations that keep your eyes focused on the screen. These animated pieces are made of individual frames, and scrolling iterates through them, resulting in a sense of motion. This movement along with the rich color palette draws you right in.

With lush visuals and a journalistic telling of who they are, Guido da Costigliole communicates their passion for cooking in a way that feels authentic.

Create your own slick advertorials

Want to start creating your own dynamic advertorials? Check out Vev! With our pre-coded library of interactive design components—like scrollytelling video, text animations, and parallax images—you can quickly craft immersive content without knowing any code. Use our example advertorial projects, like the one below, to kickstart your own creative vision.

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