I got some great feedback on my last blog post, “Why Advertising is Irrelevant.” It has spurred some great discussions with people I admire and who’s opinion I respect. I have to admit I wanted to be provocative because of the tired old approach of blanketing the earth with ad copy to get my attention, or worse, reading about work that puts gold statues on agency shelves but doesn’t help the client.

That said, I think I need to decamp for a moment. Everything in the marketing mix has it’s time and place. A TV ad still is probably the best choice for quickly gaining general awareness for some consumer audiences. My point is that we’ve got to start thinking differently.

Our goals as marketers should be to come up with great creative work, but it needs to be more driven by consumer input than ever before….and I don’t mean the kind of input that chooses the ending of Hollywood movies. I am talking using a measurement-driven marketing model to make the appropriate choices at the appropriate times by using input gathered from your customers.

This is easy to write about in a blog, but much more difficult to implement. This is hard stuff for most companies. Even most consultants who are talking about measurement-driven marketing, only get a piece of the puzzle (the left brain or the right) but can’t put the entire picture together in their own consulting company, let alone with the clients. You know as well as I do that internal silos, management structures and lack of clear directives are keeping measurement practices from gaining ground in most companies.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this problem and have been developing some alliances around this involving management consultant, analytics tools and design and development practices that are helping companies gain customer insight through metrics to improve marketing effectiveness. To steal a phrase from Mike Ackmann, one of our favorite consultants, the goal is “Data, not Drama.”

To meet this goal, we’ve crafted a different approach:

1) Strategy Integration
Develop integrated strategies involving key stakeholders across all disciplines in the company. Involving Marketing, Operations, HR, Finance, Technology and Sales.

2) Profitability Practice
Develop processes and practices to integrate customer interaction data into actionable business intelligence across the organization. We translate what is happening out there in the marketplace to what it means for your business.

3) Practical Application
Start simple. Measure what you can today and begin to develop a measurement/profitability practice within your organization. This applies to technology we choose as well. We look for the simplest, most cost-effective tools and technology to get the job done. Learn more about getting started ……

With some friends of mine recently returning from Vegas, it got me thinking of bright, eye-catching, cool, elaborate and over-the-top means to get a message across.

In the world of interactive, sometimes the use of widgets, Flash, or other “bright, flashing things” can interfere with the more important messages or tactics that a site is attempting to execute on. It reminds me of the traditional marketing/advertising star burst. In that case, what was (or god help us still currently is) intended or used as support or enhancement to the message simply became a distraction. That same sort of issue is now translating itself to the interactive space.

To be clear, Flash, widgets and the like aren’t necessarily a bad thing (unlike their traditional counterpart, star bursts). In fact, a majority of the time they can be a very well-used and effective tool. However, as more people and companies learn the ropes of the interactive space I just hope that we’ll avoid the use of Flash, for the sake of using Flash, but rather use it in a useful and supporting manner to progress the larger objectives and goals of the brand or company.

The problem is, too much Flash may help a site look cool and be eye-catching, but when it comes time to actually USE the site or get information what is that technology platform doing to the user’s interaction? How is the Flash interrupting a smart, clean and strategic navigation structure or information architecture? How is too much Flash causing longer load times and a slower site? How is a site made of entirely Flash hurting our online visibility in search engines? How are you hurting yourself with a primarily Flash site, when a part of your audience doesn’t have the latest versions of Flash or even have it all?

Without the intent of bashing anyone or any particular site, I’ve included some examples where they might consider those types of questions to provide a more usable product for their customers:

-www.rmgconnect.com
-www.innerstrengthstudio.com
-www.tampax.com (this isn’t flash, but I just can’t believe they have sideways navigation…did I miss something?)
-Just about any car company website

In a meeting this morning, someone shared a phrase his father used to tell him: “Give a lazy person a hard job and they will figure out an easy way to get it done. “It’s a great, and incredibly true, statement. We have to admit we’re all a bit lazy - or impatient or demanding or whatever term you prefer. However, our “laziness” has allowed for great leaps and bounds in new innovations and processes that enhance efficiency and productivity, making our lives easier - which is what we all really want. I know “lazy” may have its negative connotations, but in the web environment it is usually the smart way to go. Feeding into this “laziness” is part of a good web strategy - organizing website content so that users can get the information they need without having to think and businesses are able to run at maximum efficiency. Simple is good. Often hard to achieve, but good nonetheless. As a web strategist, I for one, have found a career amidst this “laziness” - finding ways to make lives and job easier. I love finding resources (online and off) that make my life more efficient. So, below are a few efficiencies that have allowed me to embrace my laziness, and I would love to hear about the tools you use as well. E-newsletters and RSS Feeds - A great way to get automatic reminders of bills, low bank statements, coupons, sales, concerts, breaking news, the stock market or anything else you may want to be reminded that you care about. Metro Transit GoTo Card - No more scrambling to find exact change for the bus or waiting in line for a ticket while watching the train go by. Just swipe and go with the prepaid card. Meebo.com - Consolidates all your instant messaging accounts in one place. Kayak.com - Gathers flight information from all the major carriers and travel search engines. It also provides trends in flight costs and other great tools. Web Bookmarks - In one click of a button I have access to all the website I visit on a regular basis. No need to type in the URL every time. Auto-bill pay and online banking - I haven’t had one late payment and receive my statement notices online, reducing the amount mail to sift through and overall paper waste.

The twentieth-century saw a great shift in the style and purpose of art and design.

The Art Nouveau movement at the turn of the century had elaborate, lush, organic ornamentation that provided a decorative visual language with an emotional quality. Art Nouveau laid the groundwork for abstraction by breaking organic forms down to basic shapes rather than creating realistic representations.

In A History of Graphic Design Philip Meggs states, “Art Nouveau became the initial phase of the modern movement, preparing the way for the twentieth century by sweeping this backward looking spirit from design.”

The sparse geometric style of the modern movement was a stark contrast to Art Nouveau, and modern design went beyond mere decorative element; it served a purpose.

In A History of Graphic Design, Meggs discusses Walter Gropius’ beliefs on purposeful design. Gropius was one of the founders of the Bauhaus, one of the primary influences on modern architecture and design.

“Recognizing the common roots of both fine and applied visual arts, Gropius sought a new unity of art and technology as he enlisted a generation of artists in a struggle to solve problems of visual design created by industrialism. It was hoped that artistically trained designers could ‘breathe a soul into the dead product of the machine’ for Gropius believed that only the most brilliant ideas were good enough to justify multiplication by industry.”

Now at the turn of the twenty first century, we asked ourselves, what is the designer’s role in the age of mass production? We create so much, and the work that we create needs to have a purpose. We aim to unite art and technology by creating interactive spaces that are both functional and memorable. Creating rooms with walls that talk. Exploiting technology to create structures that the visitor can engage with. Spaces where the creative is fully integrated into the structural planning, not just a facade.

As I stopped to get my morning coffee, the woman behind the counter was going on about this newsletter she receives about her daughter’s preschool and how hard it was to decipher. She still wasn’t sure if her daughter actually had preschool that day or not. Her frustration was obvious, and reminded me of the ever-present challenge of usability in our lives. Nobody likes having a toaster you can’t figure out, roadsigns that are hard to understand or websites that are impossible to navigate. Product developers have an important task on their hands: to ensure consumers find the product useful. We consider ourselves product developers as well because websites can be more than brochure-ware; they are e-commerce engines, communications tools, educational resources and more. On the web, usability is a make or break element. If users can’t understand how to use a website or can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll be gone - probably forever. It is an avoidable obstacle, however, if given some thoughtful planning and consideration. There are numerous schools of thought out there on usability best practices, but a good place to start is to evaluate the current state of your site from a general usability perspective. Conducting a quick heuristics evaluation can shed a lot of light on glaring problems and obstacles. Below are seven questions to ask about your website in the context of your market, goals and target audience, based on heuristics standards set by Jakob Nielsen, 1. Does the website inform users about what’s going on during their engagement and give feedback in a timely and appropriate manner?, 2. Does the website use language and terminology that the user is familiar with and follow real-world logic and convention?, 3. Does the website provide adequate exit options, allowing users to correct mistakes and providing clear error messages?, 4. Does the website use consistent language, navigation and action standards across the entire site?, 5. Is the website structured to prevent or check for user error with tools like confirmation steps, etc?, 6. Does the website provide clear direction about where the user is in a process or in the site, eliminating the need for the user to have to remember where they came from or how they got there?, 7. Is the website content relevant to the section and the audience?

So, I just saw an advertisement the other day for an idea that has been around awhile, apparently. Regardless, Wal-Mart is breaking into a pretty exclusive target audience for clothing retail. I honestly never thought a child (newborn through seven-year-olds) could ever have an opinion or be persuaded to care what they’re wearing or how they look (outside the direction of their parents). On the tail of the Abercrombies and Hollisters of the world starting to drill into the middle school age kids minds that what they wear says who they are, which seemed destructive enough in the easily persuadable mind of such adolescents, I thought that would definitely be the line in the sand never to be crossed. However, without breaking stride, another retailer (Wal-Mart) has proven me wrong.

:: continue reading this ocean post ::

The marketplace is swarming with new technologies and products that promise to make our frantic lives easier and more efficient so we can get more done in less time with less effort. Work less and get more. Talk less and say more. You get the picture. We’ve always got too much to do and too little time. So it’s only natural that we’re drawn to technology that makes our to-do list a little less daunting and life a bit more enjoyable.

:: continue reading this ocean post ::

In a widely anticipated move to counter Microsoft’s entrance into the on-demand application space, Google and Salesforce have teamed up on a global partnership and announced “Salesforce Group Addition featuring Google AdWords” today.  This jointly developed product will allow a connection between Google AdWords accounts and Salesforce accounts, offering smoother integration and linkage between AdWords and Google accounts.  This first release of a co-developed product is targeted at SMB’s who may already be customers of SalesForce but haven’t hooked AdWords and Salesforce together.

The buzz on the Internet has been speculating that Google and Salesforce would join forces, but many thought it might be more than just a simple integration between SF and AdWords.  Microsoft has been making a strong push into the hosted-apps space with their Live platform, and is expected to move forward with a strategy to offer it’s Dynamics software suite as a hosted application.  This would be a direct competitor to Salesforce.   With Google pushing it’s “Apps” platform, a merger between Google and Salesforce seemed like a natural fit, in part to stave off the looming threat from Microsoft as well as to diversify it’s revenue streams.

First steps in partnerships are often much less glamorous than most would like.  Many were expecting a larger initial engagement between Google and Salesforce right out of the chute and today’s announcement is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it’s likely to get more intense moving forward.

Salesforce.com, Google Launch SMB Tool via [PCWorld.com]

One of the things we often miss as American marketers is the fact that there is a bigger world out there. America has had the luxury of being a self-contained marketplace through much of the 20th century. But the world is changing–quickly. Much of the world’s economic growth will happen outside our boarders as the 21st century progresses.

How can companies expand their reach with the smallest investment? Your web site by its very nature is global. Why not harness this power and create a site that is your international calling card?

Here are some steps to get started:

1) Show, don’t tell: One way to communicate effectively is letting visuals tell a story. Think of those international business signs you see in airport. Pictures, illustrations and animations can sometimes tell a more compelling story than a paragraph of text. This goes for data as well. Charts and graphs can provide information at a glance that is universally understood. One technology client, I am familiar with, had success communicating product benefits without translation by publishing industry standard data charts on all their products to help Asian engineers make product comparisons and purchase decisions.

2) Translate: Even if you are designing a site for the North American market, leaving out Spanish is cutting out a larger and growing share of the market. With database and web interface technology, creating translated sites is not only more cost effective than ever, but reaches out to the broader market in a way that speaks their language. Nothing can really replace translation if you want to be global. No, everybody doesn’t speak English.

3) Cultural Sensitivity: If you are going to translate, it is important to find culturally sensitive translators. If you have overseas’ partners, sales or distribution channels, use them to help write copy or develop marketing themes that will resonate. Don’t assume everything translates. I just returned from Russia for the second time in two years. Every guidebook tells you how to say, “Hello, how are you?” in Russian. The trouble is, Russians don’t ask, “How are you?” to acquaintances. This is a question reserved for good friends and relatives. Yikes, I didn’t mean to be rude!

4) Extended Technologies: Design content for alternative delivery devices. Make sure your web site works on other web-enabled digital devices beyond a computer. Cell phone and wireless culture is far ahead in many other countries. Make it easy for customers to find you no matter how they connect.

Small, but considerate steps can go a long way to position your company outside our shrinking borders.