Rather than the customary "Ads by Gooooooogle" along the top of an ad, new graphics such as "Google" in colored letters and sometimes just a big animated letter "G" have been showing up.
These vary by page impression, and sometimes have the effect of making your ads less "blended" than the simple "ads by goooogle" that you probably designed your layout around.A big colored label makes the ad stick out more than a small, simple label, especially when the new graphic utilizes a white backround on a page with a black backround. I mean come on, that's a little pushy of Google if you ask me. But it appears that testing has shown these new graphics to actually increase click-through rates.
I think any increase in CTRs may actually be a short term phenomenon. Any time you change the look of an ad, especially the heading of an ad, you're bound to make people take a fresh look at it, and maybe even change their basic feelings about checking that advertisement out based on its new "introduction" to their senses. But like anything else that heralds an advertisement on a regular basis, the jaded web surfer is likely to tune it out because of all the junk ads on all the made-for-adsense pages out there.
So in the end, if it all comes down to making a nicely blended website with useful and integrated advertising, then publisher control will trump fancy graphics any day of the week. With the possible exception of Saturdays.
