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.

ad:tech Sydney’s marketing “love-in”

I read someone on Twitter describe this week’s ad:tech Sydney conference as a “love-in for marketers and ad agencies.” (Read ad:tech twitterings here.) It’s an interesting description that betrays an obvious slant towards the “other camp” which I heard one ad agency exec describe with a hint of derision as “all these social media consultants.”

As an aside, we’ve also got the “tech” part of this whole “ad:tech” meme. But that’s been conveniently sidelined in the battle of marketing ideologies. Maybe we just take technology (ie. the one giant computer called the internet) for granted now, since it’s use-case scenarios that matter.

So all this got me thinking. What is it about the mindset of agency-types, and the mindset of social media consultant-types (I tend to fall into the latter), that causes mild friction at events like ad:tech?

If I can be permitted to grossly simplify, agencies are commissioned by clients to conduct campaigns. Defined periods of time in which various media tools are exercised to generate sales on behalf of said client. No shock there, since advertising still keeps most of the media industry running.

Then we’ve got social media consultants, whose stock in trade is the intellectual property and experience they sell to clients for the purpose of engaging target stakeholder communities in conversations about brand, ideas, ideologies, and so on. The marketing angle can be less clear, or stated positively, more broadly defined.

It’s the classic conundrum where the disciplines of marketing, advertising, communications, PR and good-old editorial collide and get mashed up. The answers are not simple or easily quantified — unless of course you’re an agency charged with delivering quantifiable results to justify a very large invoice. Quantified results are where you make, or lose money. And by the way, that’s what this whole internet thing has promised the marketing community since the mid-1990s and we’re still trying to figure it out!

Anyway, while listening to keynotes and panel discussions yesterday, I got the impression agency types are very clearly focussed on the profit motive (surprise!). They might not be getting it right all the time, but their drive to find measurable results is clear. And you know what, I don’t think that’s bad.

However it does raise a challenge for content-focussed social media consultants (communities are giant content machines, after all). They must come up with some clearly agreed metrics and models that communicate to c-level executives just why the social media revolution matters to the bottom line. I’m the first to admit this is not an easy problem to solve.

But let’s face the harsh recession reality: if more of the social media consultants out there want to make more (or any) money from client engagements then it’s time we developed more solid, industry-wide accepted answers when companies demand reasonable levels of quantitative measurement.

Am I right?

Mark Jones is an enterprise technology strategist, speaker and journalist. mark@filteredmedia.com.au