Looking for advice on banner ad implementation

Depends on how much advertising you want to do.

If its only a few banners you could look at ASP AdRotator

If you want to do a lot then theres OpenX, its PHP but they offer free hosting for the app and can simply include with Javascript.

The obvious is to play the banner in the header - or you could alter the built in Google AdSense code to display your own after the first post of each topic.

Check our forum at http://theamcforum.com/forum
We use banmanpro lite version. It's asp.net so does take a bit of server resources needing the dot-net turned on, but works great, is simple to use and VERY flexible, great reports, daily email if you want, etc.
Some small car forums seem to charge roughly $25/month (a couple of the model specific Ford sites were roughly 25), we're asking 35. Some say that's a bit steep but we're also the biggest and most active AMC specific car forum so anyone advertising with us has a captive audience of hundreds of dedicated AMC fans. We may need to adjust down a bit, some folks don't seem to mind the price, others say AMC is too small a community to support that.
In any case, we like the software, it's supported VERY WELL, they'll install it for free, and IMO, their support is second to none and friendly. You email them, you get a good response back in hours normally, sometimes minutes. Gee, I had a couple of things settled via email in less than 15 minutes.
It seems to work fine with our forums, we're using it in really simple mode now, but it can handle multiple zones in multple pages and so on.
And the part I appreciated - they use SQL and keep things up to date to help avoid SQL injection attacks. I read where another large banner ad software company had some security warnings against it, and the company wasn't really keeping up their code well.

We have a single page PDF file that we email out, with the forum logo/banner at the top.
We also use Google Analytics as even though the host server does a good job on stats, there's this thing where folks seem to be more likely to believe anything Google tells them, and seem to use it as a "standard". If it's not google stats, it doesn't seem to carry the same weight even though the host logging may show the same or similar numbers. We give rough numbers from Google Analytics, visits, hits, etc.

billd3 wrote: Check our forum at http://theamcforum.com/forum We use banmanpro lite version. It's asp.net so does take a bit of server resources needing the dot-net turned on, but works great,

Hi Bill

I'm curious as to how you got that to work? I thought it was not possible to have classic asp and asp.net code in the same page?

I ask because I'm looking into adding banner ads to my forum as well, and as the classic asp ad rotator component is no longer supported in IIS am looking for a suitable alternative.