Digital Design Blog

The Web Agency: There Will Be Blood…Or Not?

And if there is going to be blood in the digital agency world, who’s blood will it be? That was the question (or more accurately “questions”) that hung over the SXSW panel that I spoke on at this year’s conference in Austin, Texas. The answer was far from clear, however.

The panel was hosted by Microsoft and moderated by Chris Bernard, Microsoft’s User Experience Evangelist and featured Kevin Flatt Tribal DDB’s Executive Creative Director, ex-Razorfish Brooke Nanberg who now leads the creative group at IP Pixel and former-Frog Peter Eckert who now heads up Projekt202 in Austin, in addition to myself.

On the whole, we tended to agree that the notion of just creating digital extensions of the 30-second spot was headed for the dustbin and that, clearly, would put traditional agencies on the defensive. We also agreed that good creative ideas would still drive digital advertising moving forward — and in off-line channels as well.

We did disagree, however, about to what degree agencies need to continue to adapt to continue to be strong in the digital space. I argued that the online medium was unique and complex and that digital agencies needed different tools to reach and engage consumers beyond creative ideas. My points:

1. Design for Participation – No medium allows the level of interactivity that the Internet does today. And, yes, consumers want to actively participate (see our Consumer Behavior Study for proof). All digital properties need to enable this participation, but we need to get beyond the some of the basics of Web 2.0 (commenting, chatting, tagging, etc.) to get to a more intelligent conversation: surfacing content based on anonymous attributes, for example, or having the content and page layout change based on simple user preferences (e.g. thumbs up/thumbs down).

2. Design for Distribution — No digital property is an island anymore and everything is connected. We need to design experiences that embrace the distributed nature of the web (RSS, widgets, APIs, YouTube embeds, etc.) and try to reach people where they are. The notion of one-stop destinations is on the wane — witness the fall of the home page for proof. Now more than ever how we adapt our strategies to this distributed environment is key.

3. Design for Data-Optimization — The internet is the most data-rich platform we have ever seen. It’s a treasure trove of consumer behavior and intentions — to not optimize based on data would be criminal. Today we need to understand and analyze the way a consumer interacts with a brand (search, display ad, website, mobile site, video game, etc.) and then optimize our offerings. It is about measuring effectiveness and then reacting in real-time (Brave New Beta Future: An Argument for Data-Driven Design). To do so takes a ton of processing power and the analytic horsepower to pull it off. It’s what makes online different from any other medium.

I took some good natured ribbing on this last point from my fellow panelists — clearly I was the “Poindexter” of the group. But, hey, given the rate of industry change — and the ongoing evolution of technology (witness the new YouTube APIs released today) — I still believe we have to embrace the complex and scary if we are to reap the benefit of the medium. To not keep up, well, that’s when we’ll see blood.