  Display advertising has been a significant source of revenue for publishers
and ad networks in online advertising ecosystem. One of the main goals in
display advertising is to maximize user response rate for advertising
campaigns, such as click through rates (CTR) or conversion rates. Although in
the online advertising industry we believe that the visual appearance of ads
(creatives) matters for propensity of user response, there is no published work
so far to address this topic via a systematic data-driven approach. In this
paper we quantitatively study the relationship between the visual appearance
and performance of creatives using large scale data in the world's largest
display ads exchange system, RightMedia. We designed a set of 43 visual
features, some of which are novel and some are inspired by related work. We
extracted these features from real creatives served on RightMedia. We also
designed and conducted a series of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of
visual features for CTR prediction, ranking and performance classification.
Based on the evaluation results, we selected a subset of features that have the
most important impact on CTR. We believe that the findings presented in this
paper will be very useful for the online advertising industry in designing
high-performance creatives. It also provides the research community with the
first ever data set, initial insights into visual appearance's effect on user
response propensity, and evaluation benchmarks for further study.
