An interesting (new?) way to cure ad blindness

On my website, I was using a blended horizontal banner, underneath it was navigation links for my site, and under those was a blended horizontal link unit. All above the fold.

I wasn't getting the CTR I wanted. My link unit was really suffering, and my blended horizontal banner was doing "okay", but I would've liked higher. I decided to, instead of having it blended, make the banner really stand out. I made it red, yellow and black. Did that increase my CTR on the banner? Nope, it dropped.

... on the link unit, however, the CTR has increased.

So, what's going on? My theory is the visitors see the big red, black and yellow thing, recognise it as an ad, but then all of a sudden the link unit isn't so obviously an ad, and gets a free pass into their brain. Maybe a good solution to ad blindness would be making one ad on the page that really stands out, and then the rest of the ads blended.

Has anyone ever tried anything like this before?

 

I've tried to do that, I have a 728x90 ad unit and a 728x15 link unit just below, a 160x600 on the left sidebar, with blended colors. Then in the central content there's an ad unit (the third one in the HTML code --> getting the lowest ad bids, or so I suppose) with a vertical colorful separator. I think that people can see this ad in the middle, and perhaps it makes a difference, because I see CTR over 4% which is not always the case in my other sites.
I came to this ad placement after many, many tries. I don't know if I can do better in term of CTR.