to address the challenges that online marketers face yesterday?
Clients must learn to rely more heavily on both their internal teams and interactive agencies to remain vigilant while they tend to whatever it is they do best.
When an audience or medium shifts, they must be ready to hear their consultants out, move with conviction, and act swiftly.
Without genuine top-down buy-in from clients, improved creative will not have the oxygen to breathe and succeed.
+METAPHOR ALERT+ The work’ll suffocate.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
What challenges does the
industry face for improved creative?
Once again, the answer comes down to user experience.
With the growth of those technologies which enable agencies to engage consumers more effectively, so is some other application learning to keep commercial messaging out. Remember, with every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction -- pop-up blocking being the most basic example.
Smart creative shops with foresight will think well outside the machine to earn a coveted “brain bookmark” with their audience members. The others -- what with having to involve (heaven forbid) traditional, direct response, and other kinds of agencies -- will be pulled kicking and screaming into the real-world user’s sphere, probably recognizing too late that this was where they should have been all along.
Once again, the answer comes down to user experience.
With the growth of those technologies which enable agencies to engage consumers more effectively, so is some other application learning to keep commercial messaging out. Remember, with every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction -- pop-up blocking being the most basic example.
Smart creative shops with foresight will think well outside the machine to earn a coveted “brain bookmark” with their audience members. The others -- what with having to involve (heaven forbid) traditional, direct response, and other kinds of agencies -- will be pulled kicking and screaming into the real-world user’s sphere, probably recognizing too late that this was where they should have been all along.
How will web creative
-- 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.
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.
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.
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