Why do all ad/marketing/pr/web agency sites suck? For both personal and professional reasons I browse such sites on a regular basis, and the ONLY reaction they give me is to completely lose confidence that they have the slightest clue what they are doing.
There are exceptions, generally among very small shops like my friends at Plank, and even more so 37Signals, to single out two of the decent ones. But the big shops – they display nothing but complete ignorance of the web; which, in 2004, is equal to ignorance of the media and marketing world in general.
aj says
The culture of ad agencies is still pretty much in thrall to the top-down corporate mindset. Leaders of agencies only ever meet with other C-level executives who probably have someone to ‘print things off the Internet’ for them. They don’t really surf the web, and if they do, they usually go to other people’s sites and insist on copies of them. This is why C-level executives always want the website to be ‘more blue’ and to have a useless Flash intro.
Honestly, most of the Big Shops got burned in the 90s on web hysteria and now outsource most of their stuff. Sometimes they will buy a small shop outright to keep it in their stable, but given the fluidity and porosity of most web teams and web agencies, it’s a losing battle. It really is a culture clash between Old Advertising of the David Ogilvy ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ or Big Idea / Dane-Doyle-Bernbach 1960s Creative Revolution and the new advertising, which has been acknowledged not to sell products but really just to reinforce what you already know, remind you of the existence of a brand, etc. In the New New Advertising, ads really an adjunct to smart public relations that gets people talking about your product or service within the right channels, without having to create ‘advertising’ at all.
A company like Adaptive Path is more the model for future agencies: an idea factory where it is acknowledged that work is done by people with faces and names, where everyone writes a lot about what they think and what they do.
Michael says
Yeah, that seems about right to me. It’s about time they figure it out though, because sites like those will drastically hinder acquiring new clients, hiring, spreading to other accounts within a company, etc.
One of the most lasting things to come out of the whole IT side of things is that you have to eat your own dogfood – people expect that the way you use tools on yourself is the pinnacle of what you can do. Based on that principle and the evidence of the big agency sites, I wouldn’t trust them to do any campaign. And more and more people like me are an important gateway even in big companies.
Sorry we missed your housewarming BTW, AJ. Something else came up that evening that conflicted.
aj says
hey, no problem. Saturdays are always busy.
Largely, it seems like The Big Agencies have less and less of a core creative team, and seem to act more as holding companies for the purpose of owning name accounts and chunks of media share. Interpublic, for instance. You can point to great little creative agencies inside the Interpublic universe, or cool creative work that comes out of it, but as a whole they’re so big (like IBM) it’s hard to say what Interpublic ‘does’. And the old corporate mentality purposefully keeps a fog around the who, why, and what, totally 180? in opposition to what companies like Six Apart and Adaptive Path, etc. do.
Boris Anthony says
“all ad/marketing/pr/web agency”
I am reminded of Sesame Street… “One of these things just doesn’t belong here, one of these things just isn’t the same…”
The first three are general media concept creation (cough propaganda mills), the fourth is sort of adjunct. Can be standalone, internal, have “professional relationships” with each other.
In my experience, all these people run on ego. Egos don’t like change. Nor do egos like being told they don’t know as much as they think they do. That’s why that entire machine is still so retarded. ;)
Michael says
I don’t agree that web agencies don’t belong – there are hundreds of them that do everything on their campaign the same as an old-skool agency does. On a large brand you’ll have an ad agency of record, a pr firm of record, and an interactive agency of record. They compete right up there though you’re both right they also sometimes sub to the ad agency. Fjord, for instance, the subsidiary of Cossette, doesn’t just work on creative briefs from the mother ship, they go after their own accounts.
There are lots of different ways these things are configured now though.
aj says
The barriers really are down. Even a ‘hip’ agency like Wieden + Kennedy are terribly old school, if you’ve ever read Where The Suckers Moon, a great story of how they won and lost the Subaru account, it’s all inkstained wretches and Big Ideas. New creative agencies don’t even need clients anymore — also going out and doing their own research, even making their own products (furniture, lamps, mix cds, swag, etc.). They are islands of coolness unto themselves.
If you’re going to add value, I think being a BS detector is the next thing to add to the list of skills. We should be willing to tell the client point blank what the problem with their product is and help them fix it, or avoid launching it altogether (did anyone ask for New Coke?). And I think we’ve all run into the “We suck 20% more, but cost 83% less” line and had to sell that one.
aj says
as an example of that in action: Teehan and Lax in Toronto with their splendid multi-page analysis and proposal of how PVRs currently don’t work well, and how they ought to work based on usability principles. They even went and mocked up their ideal remote control in 3D.
http://pvr.teehanlax.com/
usability is not just for websites!
Michael says
New Coke is an interesting one. I don’t know the whole story, and haven’t read any of the case studies, but I have always thought that far from being a failure it was a complete and utter success. It was doomed to fail, of course, but that was the point.
In most markets I think there were Pepsi and Coke and a regional competitor, viable in an area but not national/international. RC Cola comes to mind, which is huge in some parts of the US (and Canada).
Anyhow, in a perfect market the three would share a third each of the cola market. New Coke, followed very quickly by Coke Classic, no doubt allowed them to grow the part of the pie that was available to them. Certainly not to 50% (by dividing the market into quarters and owning two of them), but not both brands sharing but the 33% either.
That, and it gave them a perfectly plausible excuse to start calling their beverage “classic” – remember that was before some of the really brazen re-branding stuff had gone on – in fact it might be the first example. At the very least, at some point there was some very good strategic marketing in there – whether it was in the “save” as the story usually goes, or in the whole idea, as I suspect.
Anyhow, that Teehan Lax piece was great – I hadn’t seen that before.
aj says
Part of that was perhaps a grand scheme to cover up the fact that ‘reintroduced’ Coke Classic (at least in the US) uses cheaper corn syrup instead of the Original’s cane sugar as a sweetener. Many US friends of mine comment that Canadian Coke, which does apparently use cane sugar, tastes more like UK Coke, where corn syrup is not used.
stark says
Another part of the reason could be on the opposite end of things. Perhaps a lot of marketing/design/orgconsulting companies realize that people don’t really listen to them anyway. Or take apart what they say until it’s garbage. Most people just want to be told that everything they’re doing is perfect, that they just need to change the colour and “have a useless Flash intro”. To be blunt, people are dumb and people know it.