IQ News: What Shines Online?

Three interactive ad vets weigh in on the state of creativity in Web advertising. By Jennifer Owens Here's a question: What factors should One--as in the One Club, a New York-based not-for-profit advertising organization--use to quantify the best creative in interactive advertising? Is killer online advertising simply shining copy and brilliant images? Or is it how elegantly a site connects users to content and commerce? Or is it creating a Web experience that deftly marries brand name with interactivity? These questions elicited distinctly different answers during an informal discussion last month between Chris Needham, vice president of creative services at Agency.com; Kevin Chiu, former senior art director at R/GA; and Kevin Swanepoel, interactive director for the One Club. The three interactive advertising vets served on the judging panel in this year's third annual One Show Interactive Awards, which will be handed out tomorrow at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York. The trio had spent the previous few weeks with 27 other industry judges sifting through a record 1,400 entries for this year's competition. So let's just say the topic of creativity (or lack thereof) in online advertising was fresh in their minds. Old School vs. New Swanepoel, for one, believes that despite the recent boom in online advertising, much still can be learned from traditional offline approaches to creative execution. "I believe the trend that we should see, and it's not happening [yet], is interactive agencies looking to acquire traditional agencies," Swanepoel says. "Because looking at the work, it's very clear and evident that the creative content that is being produced isn't up to scratch with the longstanding traditional agencies." Says Swanepoel, "Agencies that are really getting it right are traditional agencies with a small in-house interactive division. You have all of these big, new agencies out there, like Agency.com, that have gone public--they've got a fair amount of cash. I think the next logical thing will be a looking around for really good, creative, traditional-based companies. They'll try to acquire them to get the good creative skills that are there." Needham, of Agency.com, didn't quite agree, however. "If you think of traditional advertising," he explains, "whether it's broadcast or print, it's been about really intelligent and deep articulation of the message: I'm going to tell you about who we are. It's a promise, in essence." Interactive ads may have text, audio and video capabilities, but to Needham interactive ads aren't as much about articulating a promise as "about the actual doing, playing, feeling of that relationship inherent with me walking into something. So it's less about doing advertising for Nike and more close to building NikeTown," he says. And from that perspective, says Needham, "I'm not sure that we'd go out and buy a traditional advertising agency. I think what we need to do more of is go out and look at folks who are building amusement parks--architects, people that are actually versed in building experiences." The Best From the Rest So what does Needham deem the best in interactive advertising? "I'm not sure it's about the absolute most gorgeous image and the absolute perfect tagline," he says. "It's dirtier than that. It's somehow more communal than that. It's all about building connections between people rather than the thing itself beautifully broadcasting out what it is." Take, for example, last year's Blair Witch Project phenomenon and the controversial rise of Napster, a free, downloadable program that allows registered users to trade and search for MP3s. Both things, argues Needham, are Web developments that--from a traditional advertising perspective-- wouldn't seem all that "creative." "They look like crap," he says. "But they've changed the way people interact online. One has completely launched a movie and created a whole culture around an event, and the other has completely changed the way the music industry is going to have to deal with recorded music." For Chiu, the question of creativity is also one of convergence. "Four years ago it was kiosks, CD-ROM, Web," he says. "Now it's been crushed together and spread out to [include] wireless applications, advanced Web and back-end Web--and somehow it's all integrated." Now, he says, "you can find me online, but also in a store. And at some point, someone with one of these handheld devices may be using it as a scanning device where he can buy, using his credit card account, or check what 300 people are saying about this product on the fly." So, he says, "I think when it comes to advertising and brand-building, where does it stop becoming creative and when does it stop becoming an application? You have to start thinking of something as a single brand experience." Mixing Messages All of which points to the rising importance of the interactive message, claims Needham. "I think it's very important that we drive people to do something," he says. "And that catalyst push to convert people from passive viewers to participants is very important. There's a huge opportunity for better, much more integrated marketing." To Swanepoel, one of the best among the best of this year's ads was Arnold Communication and Circle.com's online work for Volkswagen. And he argues that Arnold's particular strength in print ads showed through in its Web effort. "One, they represent exactly what the brand is going to do, and two, the interactive works with some of the most superior technologies that I've seen," he says. "So I just think the creative input has really made those pieces work from the traditional side where you've got this traditional brand thing, and they've overseen some really good engineers to make it happen." Nevertheless, counters Needham, "we're still struggling with that age-old debate of functionality versus form. I think the Beetle site is a wonderful example of how emotion is really highly leveraged. You go there and you get a strong sense of what the Beetle's about, and you really get a great sort of emotional impact with the funky animations. It's really funny, fantastic stuff. "On the functional side of things, though, let's say you're going to do something as basic and simple as order a brochure. You couldn't actually do it on the Beetle site," he says. "These are basic check-off things, but they were concentrating so much on that heavy brand identity and articulation that they missed a few things on the backside." keep the customer occupied A similar thing happened on the way to the Gucci Web site created by Agency.com. "[Gucci] paid tremendous attention over our shoulders on that Web site," says Needham. "[Gucci creative director] Tom Ford was all over us. But they were so image-attentive and so clearly focused on the clarity of the image that we sort of lost track of the fact that this is an interactive medium and not a passive medium. And there are a lot of things we could have allowed a participant to do in this space rather than just walk through it." Swanepoel notes a lack of true interactivity among some entries as well. "Even in this show, the people who are under the integrated section--folks like FCUK (the London-based apparel retailer French Connection Ltd.) and HP--what I found very interesting about those two examples is that they would literally transport TV ads to the Web site," he says. "That offers nothing extra, and it's actually reducing the quality of the brand. It's a very small channel that you're pushing this animation through so some of the resolution is lost." Likewise, Chiu, who despite noticing "a lot more animation, motion and depth" among this year's entries, also saw "a huge extreme, ranging from some high-quality work and some that really could've been stronger." For a powerhouse, Needham points to Kodak's campaign highlighting a California-based program where kids are given cameras and then sell their photos to buy more cameras for other students. "It was a fabulous story that you could sort of act on by getting involved with this community," he says. "And it was really gritty. It was one of my favorite pieces in the whole show." Another Needham favorite was the flower-filled banner for IBM's Magic Box server, where a click brought a breeze over the plants. "In the doing of it, there's a beautiful, emotional clarity within a very tiny space that made a great connection to me between that sense of magic and what is capable from an IBM server," he says. Swanepoel notes the Nike campaign that encouraged online users to pick their own endings to various television ads. "That was really successful," he says. "And it also carried that user experience where you can get in and create your own messages." For Chiu, his favorites were Arnold and Circle.com's VW work, which he calls "well integrated with the rest of the campaign" and Duffy Designs' BMW 3 Series ad. "It had an excellent visual and it worked very well," he says. "But the interactivity was also very compelling and engaging." And that, says Chiu, is a combination that has become not only more important in campaigns, but in the people who create them as well. "It's left brain and right brain," he says. "Four or five years ago we had people at traditional agencies dealing with applications and then the actual programmers and there was a huge gap in between. I think what we're seeing now is an evolution in this industry--that although we do need very sophisticated back-end engineering, we're seeing a bit of a convergence between technology and creative and more of a divergence later on." Future Talk Looking ahead, Needham says he expects to see much more sophisticated segmentation among Web sites and the advertisers targeting them. "Right now," he says, "there is some segmentation between what we call pilots and passengers," as in those users who want be taken along for a ride versus those who demand much more control. "I think you're going to see a lot more sites targeting men, women, younger folks, and older folks," he says. "There is now some youth segmentation, but there isn't a totally strong feeling behind how it works. We just haven't gotten to that point yet, but I think that's where we're going with e-commerce." In the meantime, though, Chiu says that with Web sites costing millions to produce, clients are already less likely to take a risk in how e-commerce templates are evolving. Needham agrees, adding, "We're seeing version-one sites, version-one experiences that are very, very strained by back-end technology, by the databases or the very system's architecture that is being used to implement these complex transactions." So, he says, "you're seeing great similarities across most of the e-commerce sites. It takes great bravery to try to push against what is becoming a standardized process." It also takes getting your hands a little dirty. "You really have to know the very fabric, the very textures of emerging technology," says Needham. "So you're seeing a lot of innovations coming from coders, folks that are both designers and coders, folks that have that marriage and talent together." And, he says, "I don't think innovation is going to come from people who don't really know that in a deep, factual way. They're going to fantastic storytelling ideas--that's where you learn a lot from traditional narrative structure--but then to push the edge of the envelope of what we're doing will take some perspective. It really comes from that marriage of design and technology." Swanepoel agrees. "You've got to start thinking that a site is one, an interaction, and two, it's visual, and three, it needs to have a functionality or feedback." Nevertheless, he cautions, "there isn't this unlimited pool of people that have the ability to code very well and do good creative. It's just two different skill sets." n

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IQ News: What Shines Online?

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