Ad hoc, full service, boutique or à la carte?

I am old enough to remember when the advertising industry spawned first, creative hotshops (remember Cramer and Saatchi?), then media independents and it wasn’t long before the discussions began to rage between the comparative value of buying full-service vs ad hoc. Later, when digital media first reared its interactive head it was seen as a separate service. Now, digital has been embraced as part of the marketing and communications scene and the old argument (in a slightly different guise) appears again.

We could spend a lot of time discussing whether ad agencies have sufficient digital expertise or fully recognise the possibilities, or if specialist digital agencies have a sufficiently broad marketing base – but in what is still an immature sector the discussion is rather pointless as the offering is so varied and patchy as to provide no obvious answers.

To compound matters, specialisms within the digital arena are growing and replicating faster than a swine-flu virus. We now have SEO, PPC, mobile, content, ecommerce, content production, international, email, research specialists and many, many more.

Nobody but the biggest digital agencies (big bucks) can keep the depth of expertise on their books to bring together the right mix of specialisms required for even moderately complex solutions. But few clients, particularly SMEs, have either the physical resource or the knowledge to assemble the right team of suppliers for an à la carte solution. The instinct of a big agency is do as much internally as they can; it maintains control and maximises revenue. But to provide a client with the most effective, and cost-effective programme, they need to take a more project management role.

The alternative is for clients to employ a digital project manager to manage the best possible team of disciplines to achieve their strategy.

 

Don’t forget to write.

Despite the growth of rich media and the phenomena of such channels as You-Tube, digital media is still predominantly text based. Writing sound content has never been more important.  I watch the twists and turns of the search marketing fraternity with interest, but of great fascination is the importance and integration with good, engaging and informative content.  PR skills are now becoming deeply integrated into search and social media strategies. Electronic PR (EPR) and the production and submission of articles is now more than a promotional, awareness-building tool but becomes an integral part of a web marketing strategy.  Wordsmiths are back in fashion.

Content production for SEO now moves beyond the mathematics of keyword density etc. For articles to be accepted the must be interesting, informative, engaging and entertaining…  Hmmm, isn’t that what good advertising and PR copy should have always been? Perhaps when much trailed semantic search really arrives we will be seeing websites as well written as the best ads and press stories.

 

Reverting to type

At the risk of having a rant, I despair of the quality of typography in much of the digital media I have to deal with.  Now, I trained as a designer when typographical design was a distinct and highly prized discipline.  Print material - ads, literature, stationary etc. was created by a designer, then passed to a typographer or typographical designer to specify the type.  When DTP arrived, the designer’s concepts could go straight to print – so the output was purely dependent upon the quality of the designer’s typographical skills and understanding, which in many cases was sadly lacking.

So, why does this matter in today’s digital world? Because, despite rich media advances, the web is still largely a text based medium and an understanding of the principles of typography is vital if copy is to be easily read and understood.  Let’s look at just a few fundamentals:

Line length – the landscape format of a web page is not ideal (why do you think newspaper pages are vertical?). The ideal number of words to a line is about 10-12 max. Why? Because that is the ideal number for the eye to scan and move to the next line with ease – without struggling to find the beginning of the line again.

Text layout – ranged left text reads better than justified or ranged right text. Why? As above, it makes it easier for your eye to return to begin the next line as the lines ‘look’ different.

Upper and lowercase text reads better than all caps – Why? Because once we learn to read we then begin to recognise words by their shape, not by reading them character for character, and the ascender and descenders (the bits that stick above and below the line) in lowercase text help us see the shape more quickly and easily(that’s why motorway signs are in upper and lower).

Sadly, part of the reason for the demise of good typography is that text or content in digital media is often left to the final moment. Pages are filled with ‘greek’ text to view the designs, and nobody (certainly not the designers) ever has to consider how well the content is read.

I could go on… but I hope these few, simple examples make the point. There is an old truism… the best typography is never noticed – you are too busy reading the content.

 

Social marketing? I don’t think so.

Sometimes I get a little depressed by the misuse of the term ‘marketing’ – not just because I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, but because it flags up a basic misunderstanding of what I do for a living. Very often clients approach me saying they need some ‘marketing’, usually meaning the require some advertising or marcomms. Okay, I am not going to turn away business for the sake of terminology so I grit my teeth and get on with it. But in today’s Independent (03/03/2009) Yvonne Cook writes an article on ‘Social Marketing’ – by this she refers to such government or other social campaigns to try to stop us smoking and drinking and make sure we eat our five a day. There is now our first Professor of Social Marketing, Gerard Hastings, she informs us and an Institute for Social Marketing (ISM) run jointly by the OU and the University of Stirling. The Open University now runs courses on Social Marketing – and as an OU alumni myself I am reluctant to criticise them.  But it is the terminology that grates with me. There is some great work being done in the social arena, but for me it is not ‘marketing’ – it is ‘communications’.  Going back to my very first marketing text book and the hoary old 4 ‘P’s – Product, Price, Place and Promotion – there is no product, no price and no place – unless you really torture those definitions.  All there is is ‘Promotion’ or more accurately communication.  I am very impressed when I look at the activity in this field and there is some very sophisticated communication being done, using mainstream techniques learned in the commercial sector!

Anyway, rant over… I’m off to write a ‘marketing’ proposal for reducing teenage pregnancies!