The challenge with so many digital deployments is that they live for so much longer than a campaign.  Your website, your social media presence and your email communications strategy are foundations which can help ramp up a campaign but need to exist independently of what ever big idea is driving the latest marketing strategy. So if this is true, what is a great digital idea?

Since the beginning of advertising, creatives have been focused on generating a ”big idea” that will capture the hearts and minds of consumers and inspire them to want and buy products.  With the advent of digital, we added the need to “interact” or “engage” with that advertising online and we measure this interaction as a gauge of how good the idea actually is.

To achieve this, we have to employ a much broader range of skills and considerations and this is at the heart of what makes “digital” different. 

It drives me nuts that so many clients still want to see creative in a pitch long before the agency has had time to really figure out what they need to build. 

Driving the right kind of engagement is as much about the technology and how you use it, the interface and how you arrange it (UI), the content and how you structure it (IA) and the way that your interface actually works to deliver against the needs and wants of a consumer (UX).  These aspects require us to gain insights into not only how the hearts and minds of consumers work but how their devices and their brains work too.

Sometimes technology creates barriers to the experience.  It might be that databases need to talk to each other to deliver personalised information, and they just don’t. It might be that the audience is living in a part of Australia that still can’t watch youtube because their connections are too slow.  It might be that you want to deliver the experience on a mobile phone and half the users will be looking at it on a screen that is tiny.

So how do you then balance the technological capabilities with the emotional requirements of the marketing campaign?

To do this in a vacuum is impossible.  Just as ads get tested on focus groups, digital executions should always be tested through usability analysis.  And even once you go live, the data on usage patterns will tell you a lot, not only about what content people are interested in but also, whether the site you have built is easy and intuitive or confusing and not worth the trouble.