-- and I'm talking EVERYTHING -- change over the next 12 months?
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
Or, for the simple folk, only one "simplicity," please.
After a decade of adding functionality ad nauseum, Google and its stark sterility are the multi-billion-dollar gorilla. Oh sure, there’s plenty of technology under its Egyptian cotton homepage, but the site’s enormous success -- in contrast to its minimalist design -- proves less is more. Heavy on the “more.”
Certainly, Google is no more an ad unit than is The New York Times, but it’s time we stopped viewing online ad initiatives so separately from site environments; the user’s eyesight has had every reason to blur these two together. Ads and the sites they occupy have been sharing DNA for years now.
Even offline we see the iPod-itization of our surroundings. (No, not the 20 million iPods sold, which are ubiquitous.) It’s what art gallery curators worldwide have always known -- busily overwhelm your visitors and they’ll quickly exit.
The causes for clumsy interactive products are many, but to my mind, the culprit is two-pronged: first, user feedback just doesn’t make it back to the engineers and designers, so they work in a vacuum and lose touch with customer needs; and second, the immense competition for consumers leads companies to pile more and more toppings onto an already ten-pound pizza.
Online creative, as adroitly as it moves, will follow closer than any other medium. Over the next year, we’ll see the “keep it simple stupid” approach flourish big-time.
P.S. With such an evident surge toward cleanliness and simplicity, mobile devices and their users should benefit greatly (at least in the States, where we’re behind in infrastructure). After this movement is manifest, watch speech recognition software become the hot new sector. When users only have to press the “Send” button to get whatever they want, it can’t get much simpler.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Is the sea-change
in online creative gaining sufficient attention internally?
Absolutely. After the interactive agency world was forced to get over itself, those shops left standing had learned a valuable lesson: this space was never about technology, it was always about the user.
“Application intoxication” had long worn off; strategy, psychographics, trending, analytics, ROI, and long-term accountability -- basically, the factors that have always mattered to successful communicators and their audiences -- peeked back through the dot-bomb ashes.
Today, technology pretty much allows an agency to build anything but a “Save the World” button. (And we’re working on it.) Rich media, broadband access, and browser advancements have joined forces to level both the agency playing field and the creative work these firms generate. Almost every agency has its tech wizards; the late-90s paved the way for that. So technology, as critical as it is to everything we do, has become the cost of entry. Compare that to 2002. Indeed, the messaging wizards are now center-stage.
Translation: shops realize that hitting their ever-accelerating-moving targets will be mandatory -- and recognizing and reliably acting on emerging trends is growing into the agency breadwinner.
Absolutely. After the interactive agency world was forced to get over itself, those shops left standing had learned a valuable lesson: this space was never about technology, it was always about the user.
“Application intoxication” had long worn off; strategy, psychographics, trending, analytics, ROI, and long-term accountability -- basically, the factors that have always mattered to successful communicators and their audiences -- peeked back through the dot-bomb ashes.
Today, technology pretty much allows an agency to build anything but a “Save the World” button. (And we’re working on it.) Rich media, broadband access, and browser advancements have joined forces to level both the agency playing field and the creative work these firms generate. Almost every agency has its tech wizards; the late-90s paved the way for that. So technology, as critical as it is to everything we do, has become the cost of entry. Compare that to 2002. Indeed, the messaging wizards are now center-stage.
Translation: shops realize that hitting their ever-accelerating-moving targets will be mandatory -- and recognizing and reliably acting on emerging trends is growing into the agency breadwinner.
How has online creative
changed over the last couple years?
Beyond the continued expansion of broadband -- and the richer-media creative executions it allows -- I contend that the involvement of the audience itself in building, enhancing, and trafficking creative content represents the most seismic shift.
By and large, the marketing creative we build and launch isn’t truly user-manipulable (yet). However, it’s the growing expectation of the web consumer to not be spoken to, but rather cooperated with, which has changed our tone, our content, and our placement of creative.
TiVo, iTunes, podcasts, blogs, wiki’s, Flickr, Creative Commons, online prediction markets, local news media offering addresses for eyewitnesses with cell phones, mashups, anything on-demand, cool-hunting, software enabling users to change the websites they visit, tagging, mobile phone-affected outdoor advertising -- these and dozens of other examples are just a slice of what’s going on at the cross-streets of Choice and Power. And it won’t be long before the marketers who ignore their users will themselves be ignored en masse.
At this stage of web creative, the product must at least acknowledge the user’s power as authority. Very soon it’s going to have to live by it.
Beyond the continued expansion of broadband -- and the richer-media creative executions it allows -- I contend that the involvement of the audience itself in building, enhancing, and trafficking creative content represents the most seismic shift.
By and large, the marketing creative we build and launch isn’t truly user-manipulable (yet). However, it’s the growing expectation of the web consumer to not be spoken to, but rather cooperated with, which has changed our tone, our content, and our placement of creative.
TiVo, iTunes, podcasts, blogs, wiki’s, Flickr, Creative Commons, online prediction markets, local news media offering addresses for eyewitnesses with cell phones, mashups, anything on-demand, cool-hunting, software enabling users to change the websites they visit, tagging, mobile phone-affected outdoor advertising -- these and dozens of other examples are just a slice of what’s going on at the cross-streets of Choice and Power. And it won’t be long before the marketers who ignore their users will themselves be ignored en masse.
At this stage of web creative, the product must at least acknowledge the user’s power as authority. Very soon it’s going to have to live by it.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Saab, I got me
dyspepsia. Just tell me your new tag isn't "Born from Jets" and I'll recover.
If this isn't in fact a low-grade trip, to the shop behind all this -- albeit an alma mater of mine -- I respectfully present this haiku:
"Born from Jets" is Lowe's.
Don't ever do that again.
The humanity.
If this isn't in fact a low-grade trip, to the shop behind all this -- albeit an alma mater of mine -- I respectfully present this haiku:
"Born from Jets" is Lowe's.
Don't ever do that again.
The humanity.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Communicating, regardless
of who the sender is or how many receivers there are, is a four-layered phenomenon. That may not sound logical at first, but I contend that one message can have as many as four different meanings during the long, strange trip from the sender's brain to the receiver's brain. They are, in chronological order:
Notice the layers ascend in difficulty; naturally, it's easier to control your perception of what comes out of your mouth (a.k.a. speaking from the heart) than it is to control what your audience believes it hears (a.k.a. damned near impossible).
What we do for a living every day as marketers is, to harken back to school days, an incredibly expensive game of "telephone" -- except that all the kids in line passing the message are buried deep inside the recesses of our communication and perception functions. Indeed, branding is a sensory thing.
Which means building a brand requires more than making sense. It needs to be sense.
What substance mixes fastest with water? Water. You have to build your message out of the very essence of your and your audiences' gray matters, or you jeopardize your budget and potentially the brand itself.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, this blog entry isn't some hot-air ad for consumer research, though that discipline often provides a springboard for effective messaging. No, this is a plea for you to REALLY scrutinize your brand and your consumer -- and to be brutally honest with your assessment of both.
Remember, the sender represents two of the four steps in the communication process. Roughly translated: you're in control of your own house, and the receiver's is, at best, an educated guess. So, the first two quarters of your communications football game are a lock if you a) believe in what you're saying, and b) tightly control your message touchpoints. Achieve these and you'll go into the locker room at halftime with a strong lead.
I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's doable. (See anything from Apple recently if you don't believe it. Huge credit goes to the Apple product engineers/designers, to their ad shop TBWA/Chiat/Day, to Apple's p.r. agency Edelman, and to the folks at Apple who supervise and approve their work.)
Here's a less clinical view of my conjecture:
Last year, one of my buddies had a conversation with his wife, telling her that "Steve's going to become an S-Corp," meaning in shorthand that I was just about to turn my business, Brand Spanking New York, into a corporation.
Much to his surprise, his better half was visibly stunned, and a moment later, appalled. She stopped in her tracks and stood speechless outside their apartment on Broadway.
John asked, "What's the big deal? I'm seriously thinking about doing it too."
Alberta reached for a nearby wall on the verge of fainting, as John innocently told her that he might make his own design consultancy a real company as well.
"Honey, I don't think you're thinking practically," he pleaded. "It's smart. A lot of successful people start out like that. It's good for taxes. He'll be good at it."
Alberta nearly hyperventilated. "John," she exclaimed, "isn't that dangerous? Isn't it illegal? I can't BELIEVE what I'm hearing from you. I think I'm getting sick. Tell me you're joking. PLEASE."
John giggled out of embarrassment, genuinely dumbfounded at his wife's overreaction. Here were two people occupying seriously opposite ends of the communication spectrum.
Turns out, Alberta heard that I was about to become an "escort," not an "S-Corp" -- and for a moment seriously reconsidered not only her marriage but her sense of judgment. (Not to mention her opinion of me.)
Good for a hearty laugh, yes, but it corroborates my point. John thought what he said "S-Corp," and sure enough, he did say "S-Corp." But that's as far as THAT message went.
From there it became a different -- yet no less real -- message, if only for a moment. However, a moment of attention is a lot more than most marketers get from their audiences. This is the scary synapse between steps in the four-tier process. (And the basis of every Three's Company episode ever.)
The pre-school game of "telephone" had just passed along a new position on my morality to an audience which, just seconds later, found the speaker literally defending it.
So, to save your brand (and perhaps your marriage), know exactly what you're saying, who your audience is, what their predispositions are, and follow up with them to confirm they got it right.
Anything else and you might have a lot of 'splaining to do.
- What the sender thinks he said
- What the sender actually said
- What the receiver actually heard
- What the receiver thinks he heard
Notice the layers ascend in difficulty; naturally, it's easier to control your perception of what comes out of your mouth (a.k.a. speaking from the heart) than it is to control what your audience believes it hears (a.k.a. damned near impossible).
What we do for a living every day as marketers is, to harken back to school days, an incredibly expensive game of "telephone" -- except that all the kids in line passing the message are buried deep inside the recesses of our communication and perception functions. Indeed, branding is a sensory thing.
Which means building a brand requires more than making sense. It needs to be sense.
What substance mixes fastest with water? Water. You have to build your message out of the very essence of your and your audiences' gray matters, or you jeopardize your budget and potentially the brand itself.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, this blog entry isn't some hot-air ad for consumer research, though that discipline often provides a springboard for effective messaging. No, this is a plea for you to REALLY scrutinize your brand and your consumer -- and to be brutally honest with your assessment of both.
Remember, the sender represents two of the four steps in the communication process. Roughly translated: you're in control of your own house, and the receiver's is, at best, an educated guess. So, the first two quarters of your communications football game are a lock if you a) believe in what you're saying, and b) tightly control your message touchpoints. Achieve these and you'll go into the locker room at halftime with a strong lead.
I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's doable. (See anything from Apple recently if you don't believe it. Huge credit goes to the Apple product engineers/designers, to their ad shop TBWA/Chiat/Day, to Apple's p.r. agency Edelman, and to the folks at Apple who supervise and approve their work.)
Here's a less clinical view of my conjecture:
Last year, one of my buddies had a conversation with his wife, telling her that "Steve's going to become an S-Corp," meaning in shorthand that I was just about to turn my business, Brand Spanking New York, into a corporation.
Much to his surprise, his better half was visibly stunned, and a moment later, appalled. She stopped in her tracks and stood speechless outside their apartment on Broadway.
John asked, "What's the big deal? I'm seriously thinking about doing it too."
Alberta reached for a nearby wall on the verge of fainting, as John innocently told her that he might make his own design consultancy a real company as well.
"Honey, I don't think you're thinking practically," he pleaded. "It's smart. A lot of successful people start out like that. It's good for taxes. He'll be good at it."
Alberta nearly hyperventilated. "John," she exclaimed, "isn't that dangerous? Isn't it illegal? I can't BELIEVE what I'm hearing from you. I think I'm getting sick. Tell me you're joking. PLEASE."
John giggled out of embarrassment, genuinely dumbfounded at his wife's overreaction. Here were two people occupying seriously opposite ends of the communication spectrum.
Turns out, Alberta heard that I was about to become an "escort," not an "S-Corp" -- and for a moment seriously reconsidered not only her marriage but her sense of judgment. (Not to mention her opinion of me.)
Good for a hearty laugh, yes, but it corroborates my point. John thought what he said "S-Corp," and sure enough, he did say "S-Corp." But that's as far as THAT message went.
From there it became a different -- yet no less real -- message, if only for a moment. However, a moment of attention is a lot more than most marketers get from their audiences. This is the scary synapse between steps in the four-tier process. (And the basis of every Three's Company episode ever.)
The pre-school game of "telephone" had just passed along a new position on my morality to an audience which, just seconds later, found the speaker literally defending it.
So, to save your brand (and perhaps your marriage), know exactly what you're saying, who your audience is, what their predispositions are, and follow up with them to confirm they got it right.
Anything else and you might have a lot of 'splaining to do.
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