There seems to be a growing tension in the world of social media!

Almost every client brief now asks how we would place brands within the social environment. And I find myself questioning if there really is a place for every, or even any brand, within our personal pages online?

Aren’t the likes of Facebook and Twitter the realm of mates rather than marketing, of chat instead of commerce, of sharing, not shopping?

Perhaps it is for these very reasons that brands are so keen to be part of the social sphere? Marketing managers doubtless recognise this ‘emotional’ environment as very different from the “rational” destinations they create for their own brands online. They no doubt also note their own changed state of mind, when looking at their Facebook pages or writing their latest Tweet? These are times when we are all off-duty, open-minded, less cynical and potentially more receptive.

As an agency, we DO believe there is a place for brands within the social sphere, but only if a certain mindset and approach is applied:

• social media is a personal, emotional space – standard advertising and promotion isn’t appropriate
• context and personalisation are key, relating to users, their likes and dislikes, preferably on an individual basis, are likely to engage and, therefore, succeed
• considering and involving friends and groups is a powerful way to achieve relevant and timely interest
• overall, this is a pretty intolerant space – ‘road-blocking’ or ’spamming’ is guaranteed to create a negative brand reaction

In summary, our belief is that there is no problem combining brand messages with our personal spaces, as long as sensitivity and care are used.

Playing devil’s advocate now, allowing advertiser access to our beloved social media sites may be a necessity anyway! Facebook, Twitter and other social spaces operate under generally unsustainable revenue models today. Inviting brands to get more involved may be the only way we can hold on to these sites we have become so attached to.

Indeed, it would appear that Facebook’s recent news about imminent profitability is heavily driven by The Gift Shop, Facebook Connect, and other ways brands can engage on a deeper, better informed level with consumers, as opposed to monetisation of display advertising alone.

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I loved working in retail. The pace of it, the volume of goods, the customers, the camaraderie of the team. Using early Psion series 2 hand held computers to count stock while earning some student cash in the food department at Marks and Spencers in London’s King’s Road. Inspecting the shopping baskets of celebrities. But what I remember most clearly is the quality of display and service to which we aspired. For example:

• ensuring that the display ends were always full, so that when you entered the store it looked well stocked, even though it quite often wasn’t
• monitoring stock levels of the top 20 lines (smoked salmon, champagne, caviar, that sort of thing) to avoid customers’ dinner parties being ruined by the absence of the crucial ingredient
• placing new lines in optimum locations so they can be seen
• opening additional checkouts if queues started to form
• having staff always on hand to help customers find the foie gras
• a consistent layout, flowers and bread at the front, cold chain to the right, groceries to the left, freezers at the back, so you know where you are
• customer services provided in a prominent location

Why then, do I find online retail so universally uninspiring? Because very little, if any, of the above has been translated into the online space. Food retailers from upmarket Ocado to value-driven Asda have websites that ask you to wade through lists (optimistically labelled as aisles) and then to scroll through endless items with miniscule thumbnails. It doesn’t have to be like this. I see no reason why the general idea behind the iTunes store or the BBC iPlayer site cannot be applied to grocery shopping, presenting things in an intuitive and appealing way. And when it comes to delivery, extra vehicles should be allocated to continue availability at the most popular times.

That said, some retailers are trying. Same day delivery for the instant gratification generation in London and half a dozen American cities from Amazon is more like it. And aggregators like Kayak for travel and confused.com for car insurance show the benefit of innovation and making things quick and simple for customers.

But the sad bottom line is that for the shopping any household needs to do most often, for the food and the washing powder, the experience is depressing. We could fill a shopping basket with ideas to make things better.

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Last Exit is very proud to announce the launch of a brand, spanking new website for Inlet Technologies. Inlet develops cutting edge video encoding technologies and methodologies and needed a digital strategy partner to lead their online asset planning and development.

Video encoding has moved from a darkened-room, heavily technological function to something that now touches many different types of businesses.

Our initial insight was that the buyer of Inlet’s services is no longer purely technical, but may hold commercial or marketing responsibility within an organization.   This presented a challenge insofar as we couldn’t find a common language to adequately satisfy the purchasers’ completely different need for how the products’ benefits should be described.   Compromising between the two languages would seriously compromise the site’s main purposes — to inform the audiences and generate qualified leads.  Thus all product information is presented in the guise of ‘real talk’ for those uninitiated in the bits and bytes of video encoding, and ‘tech talk’ for those how want the precise technical details.

The secondary effect of this is SEO.  The product disambiguation leads to more relevant content which again is practically impossible to achieve through a compromise of natural language, therefore increasing the chances of the real or tech talk matching the prospective purchasers’ search term.

Easy job done! Now we’ll be using analytics tools to track user behavior and continue to refine the persuasion/conversion process of the site to ensure we meet, and hopefully exceed, our brief.

Click the above image to go to the site or the following URL: http://www.inlethd.com/

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The very clever chaps and chapesses at Clearleft in the UK have developed a usability testing app for the Mac. No cameras, no ‘lab’ environment. Completely unobtrusive and invisible to the test subject. We’ve started using this and it’s brilliantly simple and dirt cheap. Also, 10% of sales go Gorilla charities.

This app makes it feasible to test even the lowest budget jobs ensuring a fantastic, seemless web experience for all our clients. Sweet.

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McCann Erickson – London have come up trumps with this ‘hoax’ site for skin cancer awareness. Did I just spoil the surprise? Sorry. Regardless, you’ll enjoy the ad and the site. It’s a short experience but definitely gets the point across.

Reminds s a little of our brain scan test we did for Moli as part of the control freak campaign, where users were encouraged to press their foreheads against their computer screens to get a free scan. Duh!

Click on the image below to view the site.

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Cool Hunting just wrote a piece about the new Vespa site we recently launched which has, in turn, inspired more posts about both Vespa and Piaggio. Even though many of the motorcycle firms have recently relaunched sites, the general perception is that most are still doing a poor job of exploiting the vast array of interactive marketing opportunities and worse,  not representing their brands well online. Their websites seem like after thoughts and do little to speak their audiences (beyond existing, loyal customers). Most brands have something to offer everyone, from high powered super bikes to capable commuters and, therefore, they should be doing what they can to tackle some of the key questions people have when purchasing their first bike – or perhaps returning to biking after a long break – namely the following:

1. Safety: how safe is riding a bike and how safe can I make it?
2. Training: where can i go to get basic through to advanced training?
3. Licensing: how do I get my license and is it difficult?
4. Parking: where can I park (and what can I get away with)?
5. Security: what can I do to secure my bike?
6. Community: where and how do I hook up with other people in my area who ride the same/similar machines, share ideas and get tips/advice?

We’ve begun the process with the Why, Where, How section on both sites as well as the Community Rides tools and this is just scratching the surface. There’s still more that can be done to build brand loyalty and community action. As a lifelong motorcycle rider myself, I believe it’s a very viable, fun and safe method of transportation and mostly this can be achieved through simple education and training. By far, I think the opportunity for many motorcycle brands is to promote the high level of design and engineering their bikes display and capping it off, the innate sexiness they exude and the attachment riders soon develop with their machines.

I would agree with Wes Stiller in Hell For Leather that very few have done anything to reflect the pride of ownership people have or will have upon making the right purchase. Hopefully, the work we’ve done for Vespa and Piaggio has gone some way to do that. We rather think it has.

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Last Exit is very proud to announce the launch of the new Piaggio USA website.

Following the framework of the Vespa USA website launch in November ‘08, the site’s design has been custom tailored to suit quite a different proposition. Where the Vespa range follows a common style, the Piaggio range of scooters is far more diverse; from the small, light zippy Fly 50 through to the intensely innovative MP3 series Piaggio seemingly has something for everyone whilst avoiding any canabilization of the Vespa brand itself. The site has been steered in the same direction and will continue to develop the independant characteristics of each model.

http://www.piaggiousa.com/

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If only it was 1999 again!  They were the days for digital innovation and creativity!

Back in the early days of digital media you could describe the times something like this:

• It was a frontier time for digital
• Client and agency focus was on creating innovation and firsts
• Clients were growing in confidence, but more importantly felt brave
• All efforts were focussed on creating user experience and impact
• There were high levels of creativity and opportunity within the medium
• There was a wide variety seen across final websites, making brand activity distinctive and memorable
• Agency teams were very young, wild-eyed and full of unbridled enthusiasm
• Dot-com finance was in full flow, helping to build digital exposure and adoption

Given all of this, things must really be fantastic ten years on then right?

Well maybe they are and maybe they aren’t?

Taking each of the points above one by one and comparing them with things as we approach 2009 you might describe things like this:

• Digital media is an established and key part of the marketing mix
• The focus is now on effectiveness and workman-like delivery within projects
• Client belief and confidence is high, but many fear ‘breaking any moulds’
• Most efforts are now focussed on DDA compliance, Search Engine Optimisation and Content Management
• Subsequently there are limited levels of creativity and innovation
• There is now quite limited variation across sites making branding more about the logo than about functional innovation or distinctiveness
• Agency teams are now older and far less wide-eyed, particularly at management level
• Dot-com is now a dirty word as opposed to an investment opportunity

Perhaps these things are not just true within the digital arena? Perhaps the same could be said for TV advertising and other types of media? The proliferation of digital channels and global or pan-European advertising  campaigns certainly seems to have had an effect on the creativity and sensitivity used when making TV spots.

All this sounds very negative but the reality is that there is as much opportunity, creativity and enthusiasm as there ever was, if not more, as long as you know where to look for it!

There may be some limitations to the amount of creativity on offer in the business to consumer area but in the business to business arena creative opportunities have never been better. In addition, whilst advertising on TV may be being dummed-down they field of online advertising still offers great opportunities to experiment, innovate and differentiate.

Google Analytics and other web statistics packages have greatly increased client interest, understanding and enthusiasm for the details of any digital activity – the ‘black art’ has finally seem some light and the ‘new’ has eventually been taken away from new media. Even the huge focus now directed towards Search Engine Optimisation has its benefits. Online content used to be largely inappropriate having often been ’stolen’ from elsewhere in the marketing department, as opposed to being created from scratch, but the importance of SEO now means far more attention is paid to the creation of online content, particularly in the written word.

Although the huge sums of money invested, even ‘thrown at’, any dot-com idea ten years back, certainly helped to grow consumer awareness of digital media, the checks and balances in place today mean that the days of ‘www.buy-pet-food-online.com’ are thankfully gone.  Projects in new online-only industries today, such as social networking, are with serious, diligent, experienced and committed clients as opposed to the ‘three mates from college’ teams so often ‘in charge’ of things back in the late 1990s!

Even within the core area of website design itself, there is exciting news. Developments in technology like PaperVision3D are once again encouraging clients and agencies alike to create online experiences, as opposed to just online services. In addition, the open-source roots of PaperVision, and other browser extensions, is creating as vibrant and innovative a space ‘behind the scenes’ as it is on the ‘main stage’.

There is no doubt that times have changed over the last 10 years or so, but surely the reality is that they have changed for the better, when one considers the details? Sure the late 1990’s were exciting, gold-rush, frontier-land times, but the mine is now built and it is time to start getting some of that gold out onto the open market!

I have been ‘lucky’ enough to experience both of these ‘digital decades’, and on balance I prefer the one we are in now!

Am I right, or am I just getting old?

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I wouldn’t normally tout the work of other, perhaps competetive companies but I was having a rather clear, quiet day today and decided to spend a bit of time noodling through some award winning sites from 2008. Most will always point at the funky, flash-filled, product promotion sites. And in all fairness, the rich consumer focused sites are amazing pieces of highly immersive design but what exites me, is the the bigger challenges we, agencies, face in information design, namely corporate websites for mostly B-B companies and big corporate organizations. To that end, I’m extremely impressed by the work that Monique TeSelle (Creative Director for the Project) at Frog Design led for GE. One of my clearest observations over the past few years has been in the confidence that large companies often project through their websites (and other communications). They have the strength, and the brnad, to keep the message simple, coherent and ultimately powerful. GE is, of course, one of the world’s biggies, and the homepage pays hommage to that surety. All to often, much smaller companies give away their insecurites by overloading their mssaging with, almost, apologietically verbose material which ultimately serves to muddy the sell.

Anyway, back to GE.com and design. A beautifully clean design, and grid structure for the site. Even the content heavy pages feel light and readable. A message to us all, agencies and clients alike, for our next piece of information design.

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Agh, I missed this the other day. Better late than never!!

See the posting here: Design Licks

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