What Is a Website?
Mar 25, 2008 @ 10:03 AM · Matthew Grant
 This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.
I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.
Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.
I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.
At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.
This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?
I know this much, the content doesn't!
 The writing is on the FunWall: Marketing is undergoing an unprecedented and overwhelming proliferation of channels. This isn't new news, naturally. It's been going on for a while, what with computers in taxicabs and digital bulletin in elevators and all. But it does seem like every day the web is adding another site, another portal, or another technology that will allow people to connect with each other and, by extension, allow marketers to connect with consumers.
So, in addition to your direct mail campaigns, your advertising (on and off-line), and your promotions, you, Mr and/or Ms. Marketer, need to figure out whether or not you should be blogging, vlogging, Twittering, or podcasting. How can you use Facebook and MySpace? How can you leverage LinkedIn and Plaxo? Where is your sim in Second Life? Your Halo tie-in? Your product placement in Grand Theft Auto? An what about that other cool thing you read or heard about but aren't even sure what it's for?
Everyone feels like they should be doing all or some of the above, but there are so many possibilities, and so much on your plate already, that it's hard to know where to start. To help clear the air and provide some sort of guide to the perplexed, I hunted down a couple of new media-savvy marketers and asked them quite simply: How can marketers best figure out what they should get into and what they can profitably avoid?
click to continue...
1. I checked out their "new" website (launched in April) the other day and was struck by the Yugo Nakamura-esque look and feel of it all. (I was trying to find out if he had anything to do with the site, but my email to W+K's PR folk has gone unanswered.) There is some dispute as to whether the site is cool or lame, cutting edge or same-old-same-old, reflective of their interactive capabilities (or lack thereof), etc. I'm not qualified to weigh in on that subject, but I do appreciate that the site demonstrates at least one way for a multidimensional information space, in this case, the world of an agency's work, to be portrayed as an interactive, 2-D space.
2. Russell Davies, who used to work at W+K, but now apparently works for a "global, small business" called, "Open Intelligence Agency," wrote a post almost a year ago, and several months after he had left, entitled, "7 things I learned at wieden and kennedy (portland edition)." A number of blogs linked to the post at the time, but I just read it yesterday. Aside from reminding me that blogs are collections of permanent ephemera, his list of learnings included this old chestnut: The key to creative genius; work harder. How's the old equation go? 1% inspiration/99% perspiration? Having ideas is easy - doing things requires effort.
3. The local W+K offices have blogs dedicated to their work and office hijinks (to provide but one example). They also use the blogs to introduce new folks. In this post introducing a new member of the account management team in London, the newbie is compared to Lisa Stansfield, in part because they both come from the same town and have both traveled around the world, in part because they "both commend themselves to the eye." As much as I admire that turn of phrase, I'm fairly certain that I couldn't get away with referring to a co-worker thusly on this blog. Is it because I used to work in HR? Is it because I work at a staffing agency instead of an ad agency? Or is it just because I work in the United States and not London? Hmmm.
4. I believe that W+K has been a client of ours at one point or another, at least in Portland. (This more in the interest of full disclosure than as a kind of special pleading.)
5. One other thing from the Mr. Davies' "7 Learnings": You can tell from the work if people enjoyed making it. I think you can make a similar statement about customer service; you can tell from the way they treat you if someone enjoys their job. It should also make people consider their resumes, portfolios, blogs, etc.. How much joy do yours emanate?
As a colleague and I were sitting down to discuss what, if anything, Aquent could do in Second Life at this late date, he glumly informed me that TMP Worldwide just opened a recruiting office in Second Life. He was kind of bummed because, well, we're kind of in the recruiting business and it sort of felt like they had beaten us to the (virtual) punch.
I dug into this a little bit and things weren't quite as bad as they seemed. TMP Worldwide is a recruitment advertising company, strictly speaking, and, if I've understood their press release correctly, they've established a service for recruiters in Second Life. Specifically, they've built "TMP Island," a place where "recruiters will be able to network with prospective candidates, host events, conduct employee presentations, and even build virtual replicas of their real-world offices for unprecedented interaction with job seekers."
As the Reuters bureau in Second Life reported, this unprecedented interaction will consist of "An avatar -- or online character -- of a real corporate recruiter [interviewing] avatars of job seekers, using instant- messaging technology."
Look, I'm in no position to second guess the business decisions of gigantic (erstwhile "Monster-ous") multinationals like TMP, especially given my own erstwhile giddy boosterism a few months back. But when I read in their press release that Second Life is "currently inhabited by roughly 3.4 million residents," it made me think that the folks at TMP either haven't looked at the Second Life homepage, which would have told them that, at least as I write this, only 23,000 "residents" "currently" "inhabit" this virtual world, (to be fair, 1.1 million have logged in over the last two months, though it's unclear exactly what that means), or aren't aware of the quite reasonable skepticism (to cite but one example) expressed about the real-world potential of this virtual one.
I know, I know. Nay-saying and cynical sniping is easy. But the fact of the matter is that Second Life, while very intriguing conceptually, can be frustrating to interact with in reality, is plagued by technical problems (just check out Second Life Insider where you could have read on Monday, "The day was plagued with the same massive problems from yesterday. That's nearly 60,000 unhappy new signups, assuming they all even got a chance to log in."), and, frankly, not anywhere near as popular as World of Warcraft.
Seriously, are recruiters and candidates really going to want to face precipitous learning curves and lurking technical uncertainties just to conduct an "unprecedented" interview with candidates via IM?
For what's shaping up to be my last post of the year I'm going to return to a topic I've addressed before: the talent shortage in the interactive world. Just this morning, for example, in a WSJ article [registration required] about Digitas being acquired by Publicis, I read, "Among the challenges for the coming year: hiring. The industry is still strapped for talent on both the creative and technology sides..." As ad agencies and their interactive arms try to shepherd their clients into the digital age, their biggest hurdle is finding the people who can actually do the work they're selling. Or so the story goes.
I'll ask you to pardon my skepticism with regards to the digital talent shortage. I realize that it is difficult to find experienced Flash developers and Java programmers, but why aren't more traditional web and graphic designers cross-training themselves and moving into this high-demand area? It's probably because there is still a lot of traditional creative work out there. Even a quick glance at the 99 open positions currently listed on Digitas' website reveals that only about a third are properly "interactive" and many of those are not "technical" so much as project management roles.
From a "reality check" standpoint, according to this article online marketing still only accounts for 10% of advertising spend. And while that spending may increase by 28% in the coming year, it has a ways to go before it displaces items like direct mail and promotions. In other words, it makes sense for marketers and creative types to stick to their knitting for the present since there are still a lot of, for lack of a better term, "non-interactive" opportunities out there.
At the same time, it would be prudent to begin augmenting one's portfolio with on-line or other interactive experience sooner rather than later. After all, the demand for this type of experience isn't going to decrease (unless someone dis-invents the Internet). Think about it: If that 28% rate of increase stays steady, on-line ad spending will have doubled by 2009. The question becomes, "What can I do now in order to move into an interactive advertising or marketing role three years from now?"
I never had any formal training in marketing so I've had to pick up what I know about it on the streets. Ever the dutiful student, I can now say with confidence, "Marketing consists of all those activities, enshrined in the 4 P's, required to bring a product to market." When I was young, however, like many people, I would have said, "Marketing is advertising."
Of course, the confusion of marketing with advertising is an honest mistake and one not discouraged by the ad industry itself. Consider the recent WSJ article, U.K. Ad Shops Prowl New Avenues [registration required - M.]. Given the startling news that the UK Media Market should shrink by .6% next year (compared to the modest 2.3% growth in the U.S. or the whopping 14.1% growth in China), and that Google's UK ad revenue will exceed that of Channel Four television by #100 million, ad agencies across the pond are seeking new sources of revenue. Some are moving into ancillary businesses such as music licensing. Others are venturing deeper into "creative" fields such as television production, editing, and 3-D graphic creation. And others are moving into, well, marketing.
On the one hand, you have Publicis Worldwide, a unit of Publicis Groupe, which has hired a group focused on supermarket products that will " design labels, advise on pricing and negotiate with supermarkets over shelf space," thus taking on 3 of the 4 P's - Price, Place, and Promotion (for the sake of argument, I'm subsuming "packaging" under the latter). On the other hand, we find M&C Saatchi going whole hog on the first P - "Product" - by "creating luxury goods and targeting markets for them."
Saatchi's chief executive, David Kershaw, puts it rather succinctly: The earlier an agency gets involved with a product, the more revenue it's likely to generate. This is undoubtedly true for, if an "ad" agency is developing products, determining prices, managing placement, and running promotional campaigns (sometimes known as "advertising"), then it is in effect a company bringing something to market - a tried and true method for generating revenue!
These business strategies make sense because the basic skills that create successful advertising - defining value propositions, identifying target audiences, crafting and delivering messages that motivate them to act, etc. - can readily be applied all the way up the marketing stream. But if agencies follow the logic of this insight, as they seem to be, what's to stop their clients from doing the same, though in reverse? At worst, clients may begin to view agencies as competitors. At best, they may ask themselves, "If an ad agency is basically replicating my marketing organization, why do I need them again?"
|
|
