Google just released a new feature in its search listings … a chance to view the home page of the listed company before you actually click on it. You just click on the magnifying glass on the right side of the listing.
It’s pretty immediate, and is definitely most cool.
Laurie Sullivan, along with others, in a Media Post Online Media Daily article suggests this will have companies scrambling to rework their Web pages to make them more “aesthetically pleasing.” Because the appearance of that preview could affect whether someone decides to actually click through to the site.
I think she’s dead-on, and this plays directly to my posting about how advertising on the Web sucks because it’s primarily just company name, product, and price. No brand identity, no appealing presentation. No awareness that you’re actually dealing with people out there.
Our Web site, mindthwack.com, was designed for viewer interest and message-sending from ground zero. We’ve created a number of others. We have never failed to keep the viewer or consumer as the primary issue in our design work.
The Web has the potential to be so much more than it is, and so much more effective. If we just think a little about what we’re doing and realize we’re talking to people and not let us be seduced by numbers because it’s all a lot easier to do that.
President Kennedy once said that we choose to do certain things, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The hard-to-do thing is the one that breaks ground and delivers new ideas and information. Creating great online advertising is hard to do, but it is the better thing to do.
To which I would like to add … about those numbers … we should drive the numbers. They should not drive us.
One of the things the Web has brought us is a child’s instant-grat mentality in terms of sales and consumer response.
There’s a serious problem with this.
As we concentrate more and more on the numbers concerning consumer response and movement through the site and Web (and they are really easy to get and amazing in their complexity) … as we spend our time analyzing all this data, we seem to be forgetting the people we’re trying to motivate to action.
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep pushing it … as the discussion revolves around the Web and its potentials, you see very little discussion about how real people are working with the banners, the Likes, the links to friends, the friend requests, the ads encountered on the social network, the actual use of the location-tracking apps.
What are real people doing in this Web space? And what meaning do they make of it?
Without this knowledge, we’re sending advertising into the Web environment with nothing more than a hope and a prayer (and some numbers) guiding us.
Issue of the Day: Present your brand identity creatively (Part II) … actually, find one first.
A major issue that’s being wholly ignored by some online advertising effort is the loss of brand identity because of the lack of creativity driving their online videos.
The attitude and push of a creative ad imparts a sense of what the brand identity is all about. Creatively oriented advertisers like Cheetos … or the well-known Old Spice Man work extremely well.
And the creative idea doesn’t have to be insanely outrageous. Just look at the sophistication and quality implied as the brand identity in the Dow TV and print advertising. First, they began with a great creative concept of tying humanity (the made-up element Hu) to the periodic table of elements, and then they build inspired visual treatments in both video and print. see This Site for an overview.
But you look at companies that could establish a real brand identity in the minds of consumers such as JCPenney.
In talking with my friends and my former advertising students, I find that many of us agree that most advertising today is lame.
But this is a business that’s supposed to present the very best of a client’s story, in the very best way possible. Charged with that mission, and getting paid the BigDollars for it, you’d expect all these advertising agencies and their experts to come up with great stuff all the time.
But the great stuff is exceedingly rare.
What the hell has happened?
the recession and clients – Advertisers (the agencies’ clients) are well-known for pulling back in hard economic times and demanding instant ROI from their advertising. It’s been this way for decades, and while it would be nice to say that the agencies just should not do this kind of work, agencies have to survive, too. So they swallow their pride and get into non-creative hard-sell types of advertising, in the belief that that sells product, rather than the creative approach.
the idea of creative advertising is misunderstood – Most ads do the marketing work and talk about the benefit of the product or service, but generally there’s no real creativity to the presentation. Maybe there’s have a good design to the ad, or the colors in a TV spot get punched up a bit, or an ad on the Internet get animated, but that’s just window dressing. There’s no real central creative idea driving the work at its core.
And why should this lack of interesting creative approach matter? Because without it, the advertising is generally lost in the sea of other advertising just like it and no one pays it any attention. That’s the story we’re told. I’m one who believes it.
That was great creative thinking .. a great concept.
A weak concept just falls flat, however.
And it’s nearly as bad as no concept at all. Think about an ad for a bank, with a family in the foreground, and a headline like, “We know why you need a great bank.” I just made this up but it’s pretty reflective of the kind of advertising you see everywhere for a lot of companies these days. It seems like there’s a good idea there, but there isn’t.that very smart organization in creative thinking and training people to do it is up and running now.
the Web site is www.creativity51.com.
there are a number of different ways to think about creative thinking … creativity51 prefers to take a rational and logical approach to it, rather then the hazy mystical ones too often encountered.
greg
This is a blog meant to challenge all that’s accepted in advertising.
Brands. Target markets. The computer smarts of the younger generation v. the older. Big and small topics like those.
Try the idea of “the new normal” on for size. Too tight a fit? No one buying anything in this new normal? So the question comes … why are we advertising as if the old normal were the way people are still thinking?
Some of advertising’s basic ideas will hold up. Some of it should be shunned like a vampire showing up at the doors of a blood bank.
If nothing else, this blog should give people who need advertising, and their advertising agencies some grounds for discussion.
Just a quick note … I’ve got more than ten years working as a creative/strategist in agencies and freelance, and 12 years teaching the subject (along with some PR) at several universities as an assistant and associate professor.
And I’ve come out of it thinking no one’s really got a handle on things quite yet. So there’s a lot of room for discussion.
Join the party.