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It is a common theme in the traditional advertising world, and direct marketing world, and sales promotion world that creatives come in sets of two. Art Director and copywriter. They work as a team, are hired as a team and even move agencies as a team.

This makes sense when the agency’s work is primarily a concept — it would be a tough job if the creative blackbox had only one lone hipster sitting in a dark corner, eyes rolling back in his head, trying to reason out whether it should be “Did somebody say McDonald’s?” or “Hey, sombody say McDonald’s!”

In this traditional world where what is given to a client is often a print ad or a script or mail pack, doubling up the creative team makes perfect sense. The account team scales based on the complexity of the client. The planner is a senior consultant and can work on his or her own. Design is a afterthought handled by “mac operators” that are part of the studio once the big idea has been cracked. Production just happens. The real magic is at the concept and with the account folk tapping their fingers, it is no wonder the creatives insisted on working in pairs.

So is this still relevant when our work is so much more complex?

A great campaign now has multiple channels, contact strategies that have to be delivered and synchronised over time, technical executions with data dependencies that require NASA-level project management and fifteen thousand different client teams that need to give their input.

In this world is it fair to put the weight of the delivery on even a superstar copywriter and art director? Can we expect them to know if a flash movie can branch based on if-then logic? If the layout breaks all of the information architecture rules Jacob Nielsen has so painstakingly taught the industry? Whether when a customer starts a card application, a promotion should be offered based on home address, income or key benefit? Whether an e-mail can come from a the sales team, and which of 15 key messages should be delivered in the opening paragraph? How to organise and edit 30 pages of text to make a good argument?

Mark Kingdon on Organic’s site says:

Great advertising was often created in “pairs” — a copywriter and an art director. In the digital world, the creation process is more complex. Strategists, designers, information architects, media specialists, and technologists must come together to create great experiences.

Organic Threeminds Blog

The next step is to look at how the digital agencies are structuring themselves — does RG/A have creative teams? AKQA? LBi? We know Sapient doesn’t, just as Accenture has never heard of them, so where will advertising move to?

Sorry for the delay in following up the post — been on holiday chasing big waves off Vlieland and Terscheling.

George calls out that the majority of the Japanese sites are actually over ranked because of spam links. Be interesting to investigate.

But even with more people speaking English in India then in the United States, this list from Technorati still looks suspect:
1. Engadget
2. Boing Boing
3. Gizmodo
4. Techcrunch
5. Huffington Post
6. Lifehacker
7. Ars Technica
8. Daily Kos
9. PostSecret
10. Mashable

This list reminds me of the phsycographic profiles we did of the “average internet user” back in 1997 – techy, skewing male, gadget-centric and, of course, English-only.

Technorati and BlogPulse shouldn’t be so far apart and I’m sure there has been an analysis of their research methodologies. Peseus WebSurveyor has a posting that is quite a bit dated but does show that if we want to measure “conversations” alongside “brand tracking” and “hard metrics” we have some work to do.

Came across an interesting page this morning:

In the top 10 most linked to blogs, the top 8 are all Japanese. Bring on Google Translate and Babelfish, the conversation of the Internet is shifting from English.

Unfortunately just as their is a difference between Translation and Localisation, simply translating the pages doesn’t exactly tell you what’s going on.

Great to see dynamic advertising getting more attention.

Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0 has a set of great posts including one that covers David Kenny’s profile in the New York Times.

What I question is the need for offshore adaption work when we are talking about a world where all media is digital and thus all media is served. As Digitas’ own GM example shows, the changes are generally a headline or product shot — not full production of a new ad.

The key point here is that you don’t need to do 4000 variants of an add if you have a 4000 types of people to talk to — that’s how variants are managed in the traditional DM world. Today if you make one ad and choose 4 backgrounds based on geography, create 10 headlines based on the customers intentions (say recent online behaviour), 10 product offers based on current producer ownership and 10 calls to action type of buyer, you have 4000 “different ads.” But it is really only one ad with a copy deck and image library. This logic has been used on websites for years built with dynamic content to get a more relevant experience and the cost isn’t in creating the sets of 10 copy lines, it is the strategy and tonality of the overall communication, and getting the systems to a place where we can do this.

Great piece of PR by Digitas and Publicis nonetheless.

Published: August 06, 2007

Microsite Mania – Stop the Madness!

By John Baker

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It is official, all agencies are now digital agencies and brands are under siege… John Baker, Managing Partner at OgilvyOne, speaks out.

Advertising agencies are building brand experiences, sales promotions houses do games to drive in-store trial, PR agencies are building blogger outreach toolkits and DM agencies launch campaign microsites driving name acquisition and conversion to sales. The message has been heard — everyone realises digital marketing is important and everyone is proposing a microsite as part of their work.

The problem is that websites are persistent.

After the campaign has grown old and both the clients and the agencies moved on, the microsite remains. The flash animations play even if the promotion has long ago closed. The copy is served up even if the headline has nothing to do with the current campaign running. The webservers don’t know the online advertising impressions were all used up months ago and people aren’t clicking through as part of a “consistent campaign experience.” Someone asks them to display their message and they do.

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It is a great Internet moment when you can see one of the best music pieces from an obscure movie, Deliverance, next to one of the best live music events of the early 80s, Friday Night in San Francisco.

Many thanks to Jurie Horneman for surfacing these two.

It reminds you why you have to like the Internet as much as you do and makes you want to pick up the guitar again.

But the best Al di Meola, Paco de Lucia and John Mclaughlin song has to be Mediterranean Sundace. They play it at the same concert and have been playing it since.

This from a few years later:

Here is the original link www.intelligent-artifice.com/2007/08/dueling-banjos-.html to Jurie's post.

If you ever questioned whether people use online tools in their financial services decisions, here is quite an impressive data point:  Financial Services are the biggest advertisers according to Neilsen NetRatings.

While it is a pretty conclusive statistic at 39% of all impressions and twice the next industry, it would be interesting to see if the figure isn’t increased because financial services are heavy users of pay per lead or affiliate advertising programmes.  These provide a big multiple of impressions for each dollar spent.  It is interesting to note that all of the top are likely to have a good amount of affiliate deals and barter deals.

Predominently working in anglo-saxon countries you can get lazy into thinking all of these anglo-american companies — media companies, advertisers, producers — are the only players in their industries. 

For years the Internet was in English and the top 3 sites remain Google, Yahoo and MSN on a lot of rankings like Alexa Global Top 500, Quantcast (for the US), and Comscore which shows the strength these companies have online.

Of course some of that large volume to the American sites is also global traffic just to put a spin on it. As MarketingVox pointed out in a posting from last November that 70% of traffic to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and CNET was from non-US users. For a “domestic site” like Google 79.8% of unique users and 89.1% of pageviews are from non-US users. The stats are from Comscore World Metrix.

But what is more interesting is the rise of global sites — particularly the Asian sites like Baidu.com and qq.com. If anyone questions whether the Chinese are online, take a look at the current Alexa Movers and Shakers list and see that 6 of the top 20 sites with highest growth or contraction are Chinese. Or which community sites are most successful like Hi-5 in Portugal and Spain, Orkut in Brazil or of course CyWorld in Korea.

We can only hope local companies like Voila.fr, Terra.es and libero.it hold there own. As Elizabeth Van Couvering is pointing out in her Ph.D. Thesis at LSE, as media consumption shifts online if all of the providers of portal content (like Yahoo) and Search results (like Google) use an anglo-american approach, it could have a dramatic impact on the information people actually see.

Did the world change with the MTV generation. Wait until the Google generation hits its stride and we will really find out.