The Talstone Group is heading in the right direction with their website. They’ve already done the hard part, choosing a bold and narrow positioning statement (they specialize in healthcare marketing). They also have a site platform that includes a news section and blog so they have the means to employ a solid content strategy. But they seem to stumble in implementation of a content strategy that accords with their clear positioning.
Positioning: As already mentioned Talstone specializes in healthcare marketing. Their portfolio shows many examples of work in the healthcare area. The only criticism I have of their positioning is their list of strategic capabilities. They list 53 distinct areas of service. For a six person shop this is seems like a stretch. Capabilities lists should usually follow the truism that “less is more.” If you have any distinct areas of service that relate specifically to an area of expertise, by all means list that. Otherwise a brief list of overall service categories is sufficient.
Content: Content is where this site falls short of its potential. First, the work section could use descriptive copy for each piece. So much goes into the final product of an agency’s work that there should be plenty to say. They do have an excellent case study under the “case studies” section. A few more would be welcome. They also offer an email newsletter for tips, information and white papers. I’d get this content onto the site. Most people at least want to see some samples before giving up their email address. Besides, it’s this kind of content that empowers a website.
The “News & Notes” section is out of date, the last news item is from November 2007. I’d guess that’s because they started their blog around that time and began paying it more attention than the news section. That’s fine, in fact I’d say agency sites that have integrated blogs could just go with a news category or tag and the separate news section out. In this case I’d just convert the existing news items to back dated news posts in the blog and kill the section.
The Talstone blog looks like it got off to a decent start, but posts have dropped off of late. I’d guess that’s because there wasn’t a strong content strategy behind the blog in the first place. The content of the posts consist of fairly random musings. Which is fine–general interest posts can add real personality to an agency blog. However, general posts ought to be sprinkled in among more regular, meaty, thoughtful, and professional posts. Since Talstone has a clear positioning statement they should be able to devise a corresponding content strategy–one that will demonstrate their expertise.
General content, or design oriented content is a common mistake for agency blogs and newsletters–especially when the agency doesn’t have a focused position. In these cases the time investment for generating regular blog posts becomes too great. It becomes difficult just to come up with subjects. And when the impact of the blog is so low it hardly seems worth it. Chris Butler wrote an excellent newsletter for Newfangled on developing a sustainable content strategy.
Platform: I don’t see any particular problems with the website’s platform. I can’t detect if there is a content management system underneath, but I assume there is since there’s a blog. As with most websites there’s a great opportunity to optimize the content for search by implementing unique, page specific title tags.
Design: I like the visual design, it’s clean, simple, easy to navigate, everything you hope for in a web interface. I get a little thrown off by the window shade navigation. The sections stay open even after clicking a new one–except when they don’t. And when a few sections are open at the same time it gets visually confusing as to which items are the main categories and which are the sub pages. It’s relatively easy to decode, but as Steve Krug insists about web design “Don’t Make Me Think.” Fixing the functionality so that only one sections stays open at a time and perhaps indenting the sub page titles would help. I also find that the diagonal line pattern in the main content area has a bit too much contrast on top for readability. All in all, minor criticisms for an otherwise well designed site.
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Every week advertising agency publications like Advertising Age include articles highlighting challenges to marketing in the digital age. This is the first post in an ongoing series. I’ll review Advertising Age and point out articles that address issues related to web strategy and digital marketing.
The August 25, 2008 issue has a few notable articles.
When big brands like GM decrease their marketing budgets it’s big news to the entire industry. Jean Halliday’s article “Spending slows 6.1% among automakers” tracks this downturn. A common theme I’m seeing, in articles that discuss spending cut backs (all too many of them), is how companies are looking much more closely at effectiveness. With tighter budgets, performance is being more thoroughly examined. And with digital media being so measurable it’s not surprising to see increases in these areas while other media channels are cut back.
The article “More Marketers Want to Get to Know You” by Michael Bush and Rupal Parekh also hits this theme. In addition to digita media being inherent more measurable, the use of CRM (customer relationship management) systems enable companies to engage their customers in far more direct and ongoing ways than was ever possible in mass media marketing.
Nat Ives has a piece about the resizing of some popular Magazine formats. While each magazine discussed showed an increase in overall circulation they all showed a down turn in newsstand sales–and perhaps more importantly, a significant decrease in ad pages. Clearly a reflection of the overall trends in media spending.
There were two articles about Facebook in the digital section. One concerning a new ad platform and the other a case study in how college recruiting is using Facebook. Advertising in social media is still an iffy proposition (as the first article points out), but the article about college recruiting is very helpful for any agencies that have university clients or that specialize in educational marketing. For the education industry navigating the social media landscape is not an option. Social media is way too important and influential among today’s students to ignore.
Finally, Steve Rubel has a column on cloud computing. I’m a fellow fan of web based applications. I have a goal of being completely platform and computer independent. He give a good overview of the trends in cloud computing. And yesterday’s announcement of Google’s new browser “Chrome” will have a huge impact in the practicalities of cloud computing.
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This month’s HOW magazine (October self-promotion issue) includes an article by Lisa Hazen called, “Rock Your Website.” Lisa interviewed me for the article and quotes me generously throughout (thanks Lisa!). The article also includes a side-bar I wrote called “8 Steps to Make Your Site Sing.”
I’m heartened to see that Lisa reported a consistent theme from all the various experts she cited–that content is the main point on the web and that design should serve the content, not overshadow it. For example, she quoted Megan Slabinski, executive director of staffing agency The Creative Group. Megan hits the theme with her advice about adding content to portfolio items, “describe your role in the piece…explain what the design or business challenge was…quantify results.”
Lee Lefever creates these wonderful videos that take what can be complicated tools and concepts, turning them into easy to understand primers. His first (or least first massively popular) video was RSS in Plain English. So this video on Google Reader is a great companion.
I recommend Google Reader to my clients as the best and easiest way to begin engaging in an “outward facing” web strategy. Google Reader is an effective tool to manage the first step, listening to others. It’s ability to easily extend this effort by sharing with others is another key benefit. The next step is to begin participating by commenting on some of the posts you read. I’ve started using Google Reader’s tag folders to sort my feeds into a few groups. My first group includes those bloggers I find most compelling and that I intend to read more thoroughly and potentially comment on more frequently. I can then scan the rest of my feeds a bit more quickly, sifting for a few nuggets here and there.
This video is an excellent overview of Google Reader. Chris Butler also wrote a great Web Smart newsletter on RSS and Google Reader with valuable tips. Take a look, and if you aren’t using RSS go ahead and grab a free account and get started. (I also embedded the original RSS video below.)
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It’s 2008 and sadly I still need to write about splash pages–an unfortunate stronghold of advertising agency websites. The use of the “splash page” has a long history (long in Internet years anyway). Back in 1999 I wrote an article for Web Techniques about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of website splash pages. Today that article is moot. There are no appropriate uses for a splash page.
A splash page uses a website’s home page to make a visual impact rather than provide basic information and navigation. Splash pages are usually animated sequences that precede the actual site home page. Sometimes the splash page will transition into the homepage (sometimes seen in Flash based sites) but others require a click through to the home page after the sequence completes. Most splash pages (at least those with a modicum of courtesy) will provide a “skip intro” link so you can abandon the animation and go straight to the actual site.
Splash Page Abandonment
There are some significant misunderstanding of web strategy that cause agencies to utilize splash pages. But before I address those misunderstandings let me share some factual data that I hope is enough to dissuade you from this practice. My analysis of website traffic reports over the years has consistently shown that at least 25% of all site visitors abandon a website at the splash page. At Newfangled we used to have a splash page our site. In fact we spent months building it. But once I saw the abandonment numbers, I dumped it.
Impact–the wrong place at the wrong time.
Agencies are prone to the use of the splash pages because they feel that they make a strong visual impact–and they do. Splash pages, as creative expressions, can be very cool. Unfortunately, when it comes to web strategy, this impact just gets in the way.
Because agencies spend most of their time helping their clients compete for attention in a crowded marketplace, they must exert significant creative power to capture attention before they can get a message across. But when it comes to the web, attention can be assumed. People don’t navigate to a website by accident. Websites aren’t pushed in front of them; they go to them on purpose. They find them in search results, or type in a URL, or click on a link on another site. Attention is gained before they get there. How the site looks, or how impressive an animation is, has absolutely nothing to do with a decision to visit a site.
Agency Sites are B2B, Not Entertainment
When a prospective client goes to an agency website, they want information–quickly and easily. They certainly don’t want to sit through an animation before they can start looking. An agency website is a business to business marketing tool. It’s about information–not entertainment. So splash pages just get in the way and annoy.
Creative agencies sometimes feel like a splash page, or flashy website, is a demonstration of their creativity. And I suppose it is. But creative firms have plenty of creative work in their portfolio section to demonstrate this. It’s a mistake is to think of the site as another opportunity to be creative, rather than a means of showing your creative work.
Are You Being Strategic?
Let’s think about this impulse some more. In fact, let’s hold it up to the claims most creative agencies make for themselves. Every agency claims not just creativity, but creativity as a mean to an end–the client’s marketing goal. They say they’re experts in helping clients use the right tool for the right job. They guide clients strategically. They would never, for example, produce a creative television commercial for every assignment because television makes the biggest impact. That would be stupid. Instead they devise campaigns that work for best in each particular case.
Is a splash page the right tool for the maximum effectiveness of a business to business website? Is turning 25% of visitors away necessary? Is significantly hindering search engine optimization a smart use of the web? Certainly not. What the agency says by the use of a splash page is that they are willing to ignore the best practices of at least one medium (the web) for an opportunity to demonstrate creativity.
Let’s be honest
We’re creatively wired. We love what we do. And who doesn’t have a million stories of clients that picked the worst logo, or the safest (not best) ad, or watered down the concept of a brilliant campaign? It’s frustrating when our creativity gets down-shifted in the real world of clients and corporate politics. But nobody can tell us what to do on our own website, right? Finally, an opportunity to go all out, to give full reign to our creative powers! We’ll get that Communications Arts profile or One Show award for sure!
But at what cost? We may tell ourselves that we’re being strategic about our creative splash page, that we’re making an impact or demonstrating our creativity. But really we’re making a strategic mistake–improperly employing a medium and using creativity in the wrong place. Not a good start for when we want to then persuade a client how smart we are, how expert we are at employing the right marketing tools in the right way for the right goals.
This is the creativity barrier in action. We forget we don’t need to employ creativity to get the click. We just need to fulfill the visitor’s expectation for information. And we want an opportunity for unfettered creative play on our own sites so much that we’re willing to ignore best practice.
All things considered a splash page is a seriously bad idea. I can’t think of any upsides and there are serious downsides. The numbers don’t lie, and our true motives betray us. If you haven’t already, it’s time to dump the splash page.
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This week I consulted on web strategy with Forma Design in Raleigh. We worked through all of the concepts that ultimately lead to the conclusion that an effective web strategy depends on a robust content strategy. Most agencies, when they get to this point, begin to feel the weight of regularly creating compelling content for their website. Where will they possibly find the time to do that?
That’s why agency positioning is so crucially important. The only why to consume and create compelling content regularly is have a clear focus. Without focus sustaining a content strategy is indeed impossible. An advertising agency’s content strategy must flow from focused positioning or else blog posts and articles will devolve into commonplace topics that get harder and harder to produce, and less compelling along the way.
Unfortunately, most agencies embrace positioning about a much as a trip to the dentist–sans pain killer. They fear boredom, or the potential loss of opportunities. Fortunately, this is not the case with Forma. They’ve adopted a position as experts in Life Science Marketing. Their work, their experience, their client base, (and soon their content strategy) all back this up.
While digesting all that goes into web strategy, the technology, the concepts, the tools, and the time, it is easy for an agency to feel overwhelmed, and even lose heart. But positioning is a great encourager. It makes web strategy–while certainly hard–definitely possible.
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Thanks @itafroma (That’s Mark Trapp for you non-twitter folks) for tagging the Bear Brook site in del.icio.us with my accrit tag.
Positioning: Bear Brook Design’s positioning, clearly declared on the home page, is “experts in entertainment and media marketing.” This expertise is demonstrated front and center with a rotating series of entertainment-oriented work samples. The portfolio further proves their expertise with clients consisting of radio, television, media and arts organizations. Their range of services is refreshingly kept to four: Branding, Environment, Print, and Web/Interactive. True, these categories do cover a lot of ground. But at least they don’t go out of their way to list every possible area of service as though they were afraid to leave any opportunity uncovered.
One of the real strength of Bear Brooks positioning is under utilized. They have an entirely separate website that describes their unique “Brandopoly” solution. This looks like a highly refined offering. It certainly differentiates them and demonstrates expertise. I would make more of this on the website. They do link to it off the homepage, and it is listed under “Services,” but such a powerful tool should have more of a site wide presence, perhaps even it’s own navigation tab.
Content: The site’s content is good, but could be pushed further. I’m happy to see some commentary on all the portfolio detail pages, and the news section is updated regularly. They also have a resources section with a handful of thoughtful articles. I would add article dates, in order to establish an expectation for update frequency. With such a focused position though, establishing a more robust content strategy, perhaps integrating a blog, should be quite attainable.
Platform: Bear Brook is running Drupal as a CMS so I’m sure they’ll have no problems making site updates. The page coding is clean and should give search engines no trouble. The URL structure gets a little long (too many slashes) as you dig down into the content (ex. http://bearbrook.com/about/news/2008/bear-brook-brands-bethel-woods). Since the most robust content pages end up with the longest URL they’ll take a small hit in search results. This is minor issue but could be improved (Note: whenever changing URL structures remember to use 301 redirects for the current page URLs). I love it that they use unique title tags for each page! But they could be more strategic in the choice of phrases.
Design: The visual design is very clean, intuitive and easy to use. It’s sign of web maturity when a design agency shows restraint on the overall visual design in order to promote the work, the thinking and the content. While the website won’t show up in Communication Arts Interactive annual (and I don’t think agency sites should be aiming for this) it is a refreshingly clean site, with an attractive design and no significant interface problems.
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When I review an agency site for “The Crit” I look for examples that perform well on at least one or two of the four criteria I consider most important for a successful agency website: positioning, content, platform, and design.
I’m making an exception for this post. This agency website fails on all counts. My intention is not to poke fun at this agency. In fact, I’ve gone to great lengths to obscure their identity. I’m also not linking to the site, instead I’ve recorded a screencast and blurred out all identifying information. I’d also appreciate that if anyone happens to recognize this site, please do not name the agency in the comments. Instead just ask yourself if any of these failures can be found in your own agency’s site, and if so, fix them.
One thing that cannot be seen in the screencast is the irritating (and all too common) practice among agency sites of automatically maximizing or resizing my browser window. A previous blog post was a rant against this practice so I won’t need to express my irritation again. But adding insult to injury this site not only maximizes my browser window, but it begins a 2.7MB Flash file download. Perhaps with the ubiquity of broadband these days this practice is not as presumptuous as it used to be. But I happen to know that this site has been online in its present form for some time–well before a 2.7MB was considered lightweight. Still, it’s bad form.
The site gets a third strike even before we get passed the intro. It begins playing a music automatically. There is a small sound toggle button, but we’re treated to an earful before we can locate the off button. I’ve shortened the music in the embedded screencast’s, so you won’t have to listen for long.
The site ironically provides a “Skip intro” link, but it does not show up in the animated sequence until well after the download finishes, after the music starts playing, and the intro animation is halfway finished.
If it wasn’t my job to help agencies with web strategy I would have bailed on this site before the preloader ever finished. But since it is my job, I stuck it out and analyzed the rest of the site. Let’s examine it from The Crit’s four criteria.
Positioning. Quite simply there is none. They define themselves as a “marketing and communications” firm with services that run the gamut. Even the “About Us” section offers no distinctives. Instead they begin asking about “Your Customers,” “Your Clients,” and “Your Audience.” This might be appropriate text for a process page, but I’d like to know a bit more about what makes Anonymous Associates the right fit for my business, what makes then different? The only thing they say about themselves is that they “ask questions” and “think.” This fails the “I would hope so” positioning test. If after hearing a positioning statement you could respond “I would hope so!,” it fails. Who wouldn’t ask questions and think. This is hardly a differentiating position.
Sometimes an agency’s client list is more revealing about the firms actual positioning than the agency is willing to state outright. Anonymous Associates lists many clients in Real Estate. They also list clients under Service and Financial, and Corporate and Manufacturing. Based on the list I think with a little work and a bit of boldness they could define a more strategic positioning. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they claim and demonstrate expertise in real estate marketing when they pitch new real estate clients. But the site takes no advantage of this expertise.
Content. Aside from one press release (from February of 2007) in the “All The News” section of the site (which is the only news in this section) the entire site contains just over five hundred words. Most of these words are found on the directions page. You’ve already read more words in this blog post. Their portfolio contains nice images of their work but the descriptions of the work consist of one sentence each, all they all follow the same formula “When the [client name] wanted to [stated goal], ANONYMOUS AGENCY DID IT.”
Platform. Since the site’s platform is entirely Flash based, which usually ensures a failing grade, there’s not a lot else to say here. Except for one curious detail I’m suspicious about. I can’t be sure, but it looks like the text in the Flash movie has a bit of a jpeg halo around the letters. Meaning the words are not text in Flash, but rather embedded graphics of text in Flash. If this is the case Google’s recent announcement that it will begin indexing Flash movies will not benefit this site at all, since the “text” is still in graphic form, thus invisible to search.
Design. I’ll go easy on the design. I’m not a fan of the visual design, its definitely very old. It also typifies the agency inclination to use impact visuals rather sharing expert ideas–a common symptom of the “creativity barrier.” The information design fails. The browser resize, forced download, and music on start would be enough to fail the site. But they also add animated transitions to every section, an annoying practice that wastes the visitor’s time. They have not, however, committed the mistake of creatively labeling the main navigation bar titles. They’ve kept to normal and obvious labels: About Us, Our Work, Our Clients, etc. So I guess it doesn’t fail on all counts, it fails on all counts minus one.
I don’t like being an unduly critical critic. But because so many agency sites make mistakes like those pointed out in this review, I thought this post would make a good mirror to hold up in evaluating agency sites. Your agency site might not be as old looking, and maybe you have better taste in music, but the impulses, failures, and framework for this kind of agency site are sadly typical. And this needs to change.
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Last May I addressed the topic of search engine marketing at the Highland Capital Partners Internet Marketing Summit. The May 2008 Web Smart newsletter “Search Engine Marketing: At the Corner of Context and Intent,” provides the substance of my talk. I highlighted three main principles for evaluating any online advertising opportunity; context, recommendation and intent.
I recently tagged an article on the Social Times called “How Long Can “Ad Supported” Last?” Nick O’Neill echoed my main point when he wrote, “Search is still the only thing that can measure intention [italics mine] and nobody has figured out a better way to reach people.” There is a lot of excitement about social media, and the explosion of web based applications, media, and services. Most all of these sites are advertising driven, yet the effectiveness of the ads in such contexts is not as great as advertisers would like.
It’s incredibly important for advertisers to be learning about and participating in the social media movement. But not so much to figure out where to best place their ads. Rather they need to be in tune with how it’s changing the nature of marketing and advertising all together–the effects of which we are just now beginning to feel. But this is not a post on social media’s impact on advertising, it’s a reference to my search engine marketing session and newsletter.
While search engine marketing (both optimization and advertising) is not the newest most exciting subject, it is still by far the most effective avenue for driving traffic. That’s because it meets us at the corner of context and intent. It’s in the act of searching, using various iterations of search phrases, that a search engine delivers it’s results. And it’s when we are searching as part of a purchasing process, contextual ads have their greatest effect. They not only reach us with the right message, but more importantly, at the right time.
So while social media is very important to brands and marketers, search is still the bread and butter of active, traffic-driving Internet advertising. Check out the newsletter to read more.
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As an agency consultant I spend a good deal of time visiting agency websites. I haven’t counted precisely, but a large percentage of the agency sites I visit attempt to take over my browser. These sites either launch a new window, or maximize my browser to fill the screen. Before I calmly explain why this is a very bad idea and a poor web strategy I must vent some rage… PLEASE STOP! STOP STOP STOP. YOU ARE NOT INVITED TO REARRANGE MY DESKTOP!
Ok, that felt good. The impulse to control the browser window is common among advertising agencies. It stems from the art director’s historic ability to precisely control every aspect of page layout, typography and design. I remember in the old days prepping a Dexter Shoe ad layout for Hal Curtis (a creative director whom I greatly admire). It involved sending out for a photoset type galley, scanning the text, enlarging it on the Cannon copier (not the Minolta) and finally reducing it back down to size with the stat camera to achieve a subtle worn, slightly grainy feel. Hal Curtis is a true craftsmen, and this full spread ad was an award winning thing of beauty.
Agency art directors are used to this level of control over layout, so the idea that they need to design for a format that has no fixed width or height is sometimes just too much to endure. When they ask if there is any way to control the browser’s size (thus ensure their carefully crafted web page layout’s integrity) and hear that yes it’s possible but… what ever follows the “but” goes in one ear and out the other. If there is a way to control the browser that’s what they want (and they usually get their way).
But this is a mistake. First of all it’s just plain rude. I have my desktop situated very carefully. I’ve set my browser’s location, in relationship to my Instant Messenger, my Rhapsody player, and other windows as well my browsers width to maximize my productivity. If you maximize my browser window you screw all that up. It’s so inconsiderate and arrogant to think that I would of course want to maximize my browser to see your wonderful web design in all its full-screen glory.
Now some agencies just pop up a smaller window rather than maximize the entire browser. This is less obtrusive and not as infuriating as maximizing my browser. But it seriously hurts the effectiveness of the agency’s site. For one thing, it pretty much closes the door on search engine indexing. When Google or any other search engine sees a link embedded in javascript (which is what you need to use to pop a window and control its size) they ignore the link. That’s because this technique can be used to maliciously redirect link from one page to an entirely unrelated (spam) page. So if you feel so strongly about preserving your layout that you’re willing to dismiss all search engine traffic, you may have a clean layout, but you’ve proven that you can care less about maximizing web strategy. Not a good idea in this day and age when the advertising agency’s influence is slowly eroding due to its weakness in digital media and web strategy.
One other reason browser size should be left alone has to do with the content of the website. Effective websites are content rich.Website’s that have gone through the trouble of controlling browser size usually also want to control copy length. They want to preserve the layout and not mess it up with lots of paragraphs (Oh, the horror!). So browser control leads to copy control, which tends to make sites static and shallow.
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