Editor's note:
On November 27, Advertising & Marketing Review convened a panel of creative and Internet knowledgeable people to discuss what the Internet has done to the media mix in advertising and predict some of the future with the Internet in the media mix. The panel was led by Terri Maize, President of Resonant Research, and consisted of Damion Damiani, Interactive Design Director, Integer 2.0; Jerry Sexton, CEO, Digital Metropolis; Bob Taber, Senior VP, Director Account Planning, Thomas & Perkins; and Peter TenEyck, Director Marketing Development, Crosspoint. Following is the edited version of their one hour discussion.
Terri - Our major objective is to find out how creative may or may not change as a result of the Internet as a media vehicle. As you all have transitioned into this world what is the one most important learning that occurs when you're adding Internet to the media mix, and electronicly delivered messages.
Jerry - For me it's a blend of technology as well as creativity. It's tools that, for the most part haven't been defined yet. People, when they first got into it, it was like you had to program with HTML code and you had to know the code. And then they to came out with Web page development where you could use tools like Front Page to actually go in and start to do design layout. Now you're looking at database driven Web sites, people utilizing Sequel servers in order to go in and start serving up the data quicker, faster, and cheaper, than having to author all of those pages. So, it's a whole new blend now of technology with traditional tools of design and layout.
Pete - I think bouncing off of this, it's also important to note immediately who the heck the end user is. Is it business to business or is it business to consumer, because the technology and the applications are going to vary widely, and therefore will affect creative and the technologies that are put to use as well.
Terri - Can you explain what some of those difference might be?
Pete - Connectivity is a large part of this in business to business situations. Business people have access to ISDN at the very least, and possibly DSL or faster connections, so Web sites can be designed with more flash, with audio bits and video clips and that kind of things. If it's business to consumer you're looking 28.8 modems realistically. Maybe some DSL is creeping into the home. But, those things have to be weighed and measured in effect, the ultimate design and creativity, and how that all blends into print and other pieces that get put together. It's an important element.
Terry - Other comments on adding the electronic material to what you're currently doing.
Bob - I will take the approach of the consumer which is my job every day, and also because I can't talk to technology the way these guys can, nor can the consumer by the way. I, like the consumer, get lost in all of that and in the end don't care about all of that. What I care about in the end is relevancy and the old original word with the Internet content. Content still remains king in communication regardless of what type of communication it is. We have internally, in any traditional advertising agency, an ongoing discussion right now about what is the Internet. We don't know what it is. Some people say it's a branding tool. Well, yes it is, but it's more than that. Some people say it's just another medium, well, it is another medium, but it's more than that. Others say it's an e-commerce, it is transactional, yes it is, but it's more than that. I think because it is so many different things that we haven't had in one form or one medium before, all media heretofore has been one-way communication. Now you introduce a medium that is not only in two-way communication, but interactive transactional data capture as well as branding informational content. It is, from my point of view, marketing communications point of view, it is still undefined to us. We don't have a good sense about what it is, and how it will affect creative, other than from my point of view representing the consumer, it better be relevant to me, otherwise I'm not interested. And, in that sense nothing has changed.
Pete - And it better be fast. If you can't get it to people, either business to business or consumer, quickly you've lost them, and they're gone, and you're not doing your client any favors. By over-designing something that's very cool that has no relevancy to the consumer or to the end user they'll never wait to see it anywhere.
Jerry - Taking what you were saying earlier... when you deal with a client for the first time it's almost like they're growing themselves as to how to use the Internet. Normally, the first generation is, everybody's got a Web site, I need to put a Web site, so this is going to be a marketing Web site. Then when they start to take it into the next step it's, well now we want to go and sell products online, and they want to add an e-commerce portion. Then they start to look at, not only do we want to do e-commerce but we want to do customer support, and that's the third phase that people start looking at because they want to be able to conduct transactions and integrate brand in the content. You also want to have two-way communication where the customer can come back to you and tell you what's wrong with your products, and now it morphs into this large thing. When people first get into it they say, I have a budget of X number of dollars and they haven't even started to look at all of the other things they can do, because that takes more money, but they can save that money up front by cutting it off of their customer call center. They can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer call center costs by putting it into their Web site at half the cost.
Bob - Part of the problem of what is this thing. I can't easily put it into a box that I've always had before. Is it a channel of distribution, is it customer care. Well, yeah, it's those things. It's more than that.
Jerry The big problem you run into is, the rules haven't been written yet. When you talk print to advertising you can probably go out and get 50 books on it and these are really hardcore rules that everybody has learned over the years, but when you talk about the Web there are a lot of people we call techy charlatans, they kind of talk the talk but they really haven't ever done Web sites but they can write a book, and so they're out there, but then when you read the content in the book it's a lot of BS. We really look at, what is the return on investment and what is the business case for why you want to do things.
Terri Damion, you've worked in both the print world and the digital e-world. What is the greatest creative similarity, and what is the greatest creative difference between those two things.
Damion - Similarity for the most part is, and this is the art director in me, is the way you actually approach it. You still go through the basic steps of illustrators, photographers, that kind of things. Content is still most important. Then there are a lot of Web sites that tend to be lost in the pizzazz. For the most part it's a merge between technology and print. I like breaking it down to the client's likes as if I came to his a store or storefront. It's like you open up your door and in effect, come walking through the door. Who is that customer, so you base your technology and everything else off of that, and I can go from there.
Bob - It does start in the same place as a print ad in the sense of how many of you have gone to Web sites and say, I don't know what to look at. Because, they haven't thought about what you want me to look at first. And in a print ad that's the first question you ask yourself. What do I want the reader to look at. I go into so many Web sites and just the sheer volume of buttons, and gizmos, and flash, and stuff going on I lose it right there because I don't know what you want me to look at and I don't have time. So, a good art director says, here it is, here's my headline. I want you to look at this first, and then I want you to look at the illustration, and then I want you to read the body copy, and then I want you to see the logo. That needs to start from there. Where it gets complex is the user usability aspect of it. Where do I go from here, and sometimes that's intuitive and I think we're getting more research to know about that. Jerry was absolutely right. David Oglevy wrote the book in the 1950's and basically print advertising, communication has not changed in that time period. This is all brand new to all of us, so it's a lot different.
Pete - Again, to bounce off that thought, there are some tools that we can employ like the usage reports that, when you take a look at how someone's using your client's Web site, you can begin to see how they're traveling through the sight, and hopefully use that as a guide to revise, modify and refine a Web site design.
Jerry - Another big distinction is, there's no set standard on design size. You set your monitor at 1024 X 768 and you've got a 21-inch monitor or you have a 17-inch monitor. With print, this is an 8-1/2 X 11 page. This can be twice that size on a Web page. Everybody's going to look at this the same way, but they won't look at it the same way on the Web. What we have to do is actually go in and build the parameters and build in the constraints to have it so that the design will look consistent, or how does it look when you're running Netscape Navigator or Internet explorer and AOL.
Damion - We'll design more sights for clients and they'll say it's for Internet Explorer. By the way my dad has AOL and it's version 4.0, can you make it so that it'll run on that. Hopefully Netscape's working well with it.
Terri - Do these considerations involve a lot of sacrifice on the creative end of things?
Jerry - We always go to the lowest common denominator and build to that level. If you have determined that your target audience is business to business and they all have DSL lines or better, then you can go in and get the high quality streaming video and audio and everything, and make it look as pizzazzy as you want. On the other end is if you've determined that you're going for business to business and business to consumer you now have to develop to them, unless you're going to build a site that allows you to dive off and go both ways.
Terri - Damion, what about creative sacrifices you have to make to accommodate different equipment, different capabilities?
Damion - There's actually a lot of sacrifices because where we develop we do develop for AOL, Netscape, and Explorer. Just Explorer and Netscape there's huge differences when you develop things. Three quarters of the Web sites we build you have to a split. Create a Web site for Netscape and one for IP so that you can control, for the most part, what the viewer is seeing but still will get the majority of people, and there are going to be a lot of people who go home on their 486 IBM PCs on version 2.5 that it's just not going to work on. So, you have to go after the majority and who your customer is, but there's just no way to get everybody.
Terri - Any other comments?
Pete - I'm not a designer so I don't have to live with those limitations. I have to take them into account when we analyze what the client is trying to accomplish, and it's my poor designers that have to live with the sacrifices in the end The technological line in the sand that we draw is, the lowest common denominator. Colors and not big images, they have to take up download time, a lot of white space, small images, and speeding things up.
Terri - I wanted to ask the creative sorts, how do you present creative? Is it different for the Internet?
Damion - We're actually still figuring out what's the best way to present that kind of creative. Sometimes some words. A lot of times now we're actually presenting it on the Internet itself. This is instead of a board layout, here's a Web site. But, again, like I said, everything is still pretty new and we're still trying to figure out what's the best way to do it for our clients.
Pete - I think you have to do it using the medium that it is going to end up being used on. With television you can board things up and many sophisticated clients can make that a jump from the storyboard to moving pictures and they get that kind of set, but for some reason people can't get the interactivity thing. It's like playing 3-D chess and some people are better at it than others. It's hard to communicate off a flat piece of art what it's going to look like. You can show them a layout but they have to touch it, and they have to use it and feel it. That's exactly what we do is, we have an FTP server that we give them access to and they can check out the 2 or 3, or 4 or 5 different looks that we've come up with. They can play with them, we modify them and start refining from there.
Jerry - The beauty of the Internet is your customer base no longer has to be in Denver, Colorado. We did a lot of work for clients that were in Germany, Switzerland, and Atlanta, and you can go in, create the concepts, create the look and feel, post it up. The media, once it's done, I can load it on any server throughout the world and you can literally go in and be able to work anywhere. You're working in a virtual environment. We do online forms where people can go in and fill out the forms and say this is the information that we want in this particular product. Online reviews and everything. It's an incredible way to actually interact with your clients.
Bob - I see a lot of analogies to when television came in as a medium. I didn't mention it, but I was also a professor of advertising for five years, so I spent a little time on the history of advertising. Advertising agencies in the early '50's were primarily print and radio driven, and it was the radio people that started developing the television commercials, because they were both broadcasting. What they would write were radio scripts. When they got into film now I can do many scenes, so somebody had to develop the concept of the storyboard.
Today, I think the equivalent of that is the site map and the complexity of that, and there is a tremendous amount of more time spent up front before you create anything. Starting to create what you're seeing on the Web site is the last thing we do. There is so much more work that has to go in before that now it is mind boggling, and it takes many more people to do that. I can create a strategy for an ad single-handedly. Any good copy writing creative person can. Not one person can develop a site map single-handedly. It's way too complex.
You need to know too many things. You need to know the user, you need to know the client's objective. You need to know the technology. No one person knows all that yet. So, it's way more complex than laying out the blueprint for it. So, when it comes to presenting it all you're really looking at is what we call skim, and that's really relatively speaking, a small part of it in terms of building it. It's virtually everything to the consumer because they don't understand all that's behind that skin. They think the skin is what it is. We do it within the computer because that's how the user is going to see it. Whether we host it on the backend of our own Web site, and the password lets the client in the back door to look at it, or they just come into our office and look at it on the server. We show it to them as it's going to appear. They're just design concepts, they're not functional at all. It's the equivalent of what the computer has done in print now. Composite ads look like finished ads but they're not.
Terri - As we were talking about the site map I was thinking of the comments about generational needs and how it goes through phases. First we want the skin and then we want these other capabilities. What are the three dos, and don'ts from a creative standpoint when it comes to developing creative for Web delivered material. What are the three things that a client needs to know.
Jerry - First off they need to know who their target audience is. I think that's the critical component that most people don't know, and then the second thing is, what do they really want to accomplish with the Web site.
Pete - I'd say they almost go hand-in-hand because it's like a good print ad or a good TV spot. Classically, when you get a client who wants to cram everything into 30 seconds or everything into a print ad, they're going to end up losing ... wasting their money basically. It's the same thing with a Web site. Is it an extension of the marketing effort, is it an intranet that's meant to deliver data and information to employees, is it meant to be e-commerce? If we want to try and do all of these things maybe we have to do a separate section that's individually controlled and it's invisible to the end user, but it's really three efforts.
Jerry - Another thing you really look at is, what's the call to action. Once I have seen your Web, site what do you want me to do. You want me to give you a call, fill out an online form, buy something, get a warm fuzzy about your company? What do you want done. You've got to know your client, know what the call to action is and what your message is that you're trying to get across. Those are the three critical components to it.
Terri - Let's talk about things that clients need to know not to do.
Pete - I think they have a right to expect the full promise of the Internet. It's our job to help them refine what they really need to do. Help them identify those things, build that flow chart or site map to help them figure out what this things job is going to be and then employ all the other talents, the design elements. Content becomes for us a huge stumbling block, because more often than not they will endeavor to create that on their own. And when that happens it opens a huge Pandora's Box up, because it sparks all kinds of other positioning thought and marketing thought that they haven't, heretofore, thought of. Now we're stuck while they try to figure that out.
Jerry - Plus they want to have it up by 1 January and they haven't even thought about writing the content that's going to go into it, but they want you to have it ready by then, even though they won't get you a content until the 24th of December.
Pete Can't we create the shell and then just plug the content in? In theory that works, but that's one of the big things that, if clients were to be making an analysis of their Web site they need to have given some forethought to what they want the content to be, and who's going to create it. I think in all instances here we can help them do that. It's a question of them letting go of that. They do it all the time for television, they do it all the time for print, but they seem not to be able to do it for the Internet. I'm not really quite sure why that is yet.
Jerry Another problem I run into is, my son's taking this HTML class in high school and he can do this himself. Yeah, he can probably program the HTML pages but now we're starting to talk about the business process and what are you trying to accomplish with this Web site, and also the creativity and the quality. There are a lot of sites out there that I like to use as sites that show poor design, poor content. More often than not, though, those are the ones where the person says I don't want to spend any money on my Web site because I don't know what I'm going to do with it. But, where else can you put something out there 24 hours a day 7 days a week in full color and it doesn't cost you but about $40 a month for a hosting fee. If you printed 1,000 pieces for 1,000 hits it'd run you easily several thousand dollars.
Pete - There's another important part of this, and that is, once you've built this piece and you're all sitting around very proud of it and it's on the Internet, how the heck are people going to find it. That becomes one of the biggest issues. I spent all this money, there are millions of Web sites out there, it's growing daily, there's new domain configurations coming out, the (dot) I's, the (dot) biz, the (dot) firm, the (dot) whatevers, who can make sense of that and how do you market your Web site once it's built. If it's a portal site it's going to become a revenue-generating site. You better plan on spending some serious dough to let people know that it's there, so when they're planning this they need to set aside money for the design, maintenance and hosting of the site and the upgrade, and continually upgrading the content, but it's the marketing of the Web site that can really get expensive and should really be considered at first blush, so that there's money there to do that.
Jerry - Now days, the way you get on those search engines is through affiliate marketing and being listed on other people's Web sites and cross links.
Terri - One of the don'ts then would be, don't look at it as just a Web site, you need ongoing diligence and ongoing marketing.
Pete - You have to make a commitment to the Web site, not just build it and be done with it. It's a work in progress, it should change continually. People keep coming back to your site and they see nothing's changed, they're not going to want to come back. You need to give them fresh content, fresh copies, a fresh look even.
Terri - How often is that?
Jerry - It varies. It depends on your client. Essentially, what you want to do is create a community for your products. You want to give people a reason to come back to you again and again. What you're really trying to do is just build that community environment properly.
Bob - To answers do's and don'ts, from a user consumer point of view. I'd say the first thing is simplicity versus the don't clutter. I think it was '95, or maybe early '96 we did user labs on Lycos. We took all of the possible functions you could find on the Internet, weather, sports, news, shopping, search, and it must have been 50, 60 buttons, and we created these buttons and brought people in who were pretty computer literate, Internet savvy and we gave them all the buttons, and we said, design your own home page, what would you put on it. On the average people put about 7 or 8 buttons out of the possible 60, and some people would put one button. I need search, that's all I need, I don't need anything else. What I learned at that moment is that everybody is going the wrong way. Everybody's trying to get more and more and more onto their home page and that's a mistake. Simplicity, help me find what I'm looking for as fast as possible. So, simplicity on one hand from the user point of view, lack of clutter or confusion on the other side.
The second one is back to relevancy. It's got to be about me, it's got to have what I'm looking for, better make that point real fast. The opposite of that or, the don't is fluff. I think there's a very big difference between advertising and a Web site. They are not the same thing. People don't have the patience to sit through the kind of fluff that we can put into a print ad or a television commercial. They don't have the patience on a Web site, they don't give it 30 seconds. If you want to get some emotion in that you've got to do it in a different way. You can't do it with text. The third one is complete. Make it complete. Let me do what I came to do, as opposed to dead-ending. How may times do you get on a Web site and you realize, where's the back button, I can't go back. That's going to kill a user's interaction with that Web site. They will not come back. So, from a user point of view these are the things that we hear a lot of Internet savvy people. Keep it simple, make it relevant, and let me do what I want to do with it. Don't make me go through hoops.
Terri - Damion, do's and don'ts of creative, and some of them may have already been touched upon.
Damion - Actually, a lot of them have been touched upon. Number one is, do you know your customer, and develop for that customer. Don't fill it up with a bunch of plug-ins and everything else. When you start hitting a customer with a lot of that pizzazz... granted the site may be very cool, but after they download the first or second plug in they're going to say, okay, this is too much hassle and go somewhere else. Who's their competitor. Two, I would say have a purpose. Do you know the message that you're trying to get across. Do you know the product, do you know the site map and everything else, and make that point very simple and very easy to get to. Don't send them 3 and 4 layers deep into a Web site. Some of the don'ts are don't fill them with a bunch of stuff. Don't make them go so far into a Web site. A lot of this stuff is so new that we're still trying to find out a lot of it.
Terri - Let's talk, in general, about where you see the media mix shifting to in terms of a company communicating with its marketplace. I know this is gross averaging, it's the worst example, but say the Internet contributes a certain percentage to a media mix of a business to business company. What would you estimate that portion to be now, and where do you see it being in the future.
Jerry - Like HP says, they want to do, 95% of all products are going to be sold online by the year 2001. What you're looking at is, their product mix ... their products have changed over the years. Instead of buying a $10,000 vector scope it's now a $500 circuit board that plugs into the back of the computer. So, what they're now looking at is how do I now sell that at an economical price because I can't have a college educated sales guy out calling on customers one by one. We've got to be able to sell it quickly online. That's where, it's not just the Web, but interactive digital business cards, the CD-ROM's, all of that integrates together. Now days, I don't think you can say in business to business you have to sell X amount of percentage online, but what you have to realize is that more and more businesses are requiring transactions online. You have to be able to do client reviews online, you have to review to RFQ's online. They send the RFQ's to you via e-mail. They're basically researching you online. I've gotten four proposals in the past month that I never talked to the client before but they found out about us online, and they then sent us an RFQ's.
Pete - And to do that it's going to cost them money. To get back to the original question. I don't want to get bogged down with percentages of what they're spending now and what they should spend in the future, but certainly Internet marketing and interactivity is going to cost more and require more revenue. Certainly, more manpower and time for management. In all aspects it's going to require more resources, because it is a cost-effective way to get to your customer.
Terri - Any difference in the B to C world in terms in terms of traditional media.
Jerry - You've got to keep it as simple as possible because most of the consumers are still just learning how to turn their computer on, much less how to upgrade the computer.
Terri - How about B to C companies spending on traditional media versus e-media.
Bob - We certainly can look up the stats. Advertising on the Internet as a medium is still a very small percentage. Single digits of advertising dollars in the United States. It's growing quickly but it started from such a small base. I do not believe that it will ever be a dominant medium the way TV has been for 50 years or so. These guys tend to talk about it as a distribution channel for the product itself as opposed to a medium. So, I'm going to talk about it as a medium for a moment. The medium is affecting other media. It could never replace as much as Clue Train Manifesto and other Internet provocateurs who want to say newspapers are dead, magazines are dead, TV will be dead. It never will. No medium has replaced any existing medium. Television changed radio, it didn't replace radio. What's happening now with certain technologies such as replay TV and Ty-Bo with enabled distribution systems through television. The ability to deliver a single message to a single person over television stations.
Jerry - I think the TV and the Web is going to actually merge into one. I look at a lot of people with Palm Pilots and wireless Internet but I think the broadband capabilities is going to merge between TV and the Internet. I really feel that long-term you will see those two merge.
Bob - A problem I think that we're going to have to deal with, and it's the notion expressed in lean forward media versus lean back media. Lean back media being passive television. I just want to veg out, I don't want to be entertained, versus lean forward media, I'm researching, I'm going after information, I have a task in mind. Confusing those two I think is a human behavior problem that we're going to run into. I have a hard time understanding how viewers are going to be in the lean back, lean forward modes simultaneously, and I think that's the bigger issue. I can understand the producer's issue of it ruins the story line, I think from the viewer's point of view, either I'm interested in your story and if I'm not I'm not, and I'm going to go to the next thing. I like Seinfeld's way of expressing a man with the remote in his hand doesn't want to know what's on TV, he wants to know what else is on TV. If you're not holding my attention in I'm gone, I'm off to the next thing. So, that's a bigger issue we're going to have to deal with. How do we get people to switch back and forth.
Terri - When it comes to the media mix it's more reflected and interwoven.
Bob - Exactly. I think it's going to become even more integrated than we can imagine. It's how do all these come together when interactive television happens. How does that mean you're going to change your 60-second, 30-second television commercial. I don't think 30-second television commercials are ever going to go away. Not in our lifetime. Not unless television goes away or paid content becomes the norm, and I don't think it will. I don't think we as consumers will want paid content exclusively. So, 30-second television commercials will remain the same. Content or relevancy will become key, because we'll have to know our audience much, much better than we do today to keep their attention.
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