ShoppingAds has prettied up their ads. The plain boxes look much better now. Darker borders work best. Now they just need to get the reporting working properly. See attached.
John Chow seems to like them... he got a ShoppingAds ad blended nicely on his homepage. http://www.johnchow.com/
It's not a face lift. Auctionads are more like the disabled sibling that they hide in the basement/attic so the neighbors wont see it. The face lift that AA did get involved 100% unblendable ads, and a complete stoppage of allowing blog comments to be seen by the public. They left all the AuctionAd publishers behind in favor of a newer project, which by the posts I've seen is just as disabled as their other child. Though, maybe once they get out of beta with the shoppingads, they will get back to fixing auctionads.