“It’s a Series of Tubes”: How Ad Agencies Misunderstand the Internet

Sheena Donnelly | 02-13-09

The expedient growth and ubiquity of the Internet has created changes for quite a few Industries. Most notably, Marketing and Advertisement Agencies seem to, generally, be having the hardest time acclimating themselves to the new media.

In the past, marketing, Graphic Design and Advertising had been thoroughly low-tech ventures. In the 80s, agencies began utilizing computer systems for administration and workflow, or as tools for designers, but their end-product was always created for print or television.

As social media and viral marketing have exploded on the Internet, advertisement agencies have begun to take notice and experiment with utilizing this new forum as an asset for themselves and their Clients. As a group, the concept of the Internet seems to be slipping from their grasp. The most general explanation I can see for this is a misconception of what the Internet is. In reality, the Internet is a mode for storing, indexing, finding and communicating information; the key ingredient being the information itself. Out of necessity, Advertisement and Marketing are all about the flash and instant appeal of a visual message or brand, whereas the Internet is all about the substance and real message behind the glamorous cover.

Today on the the New Media Campaigns company Blog, Clay Schossow wrote about two newly re-designed ad agency websites and everything that’s wrong with them. I would like to take a bit of your time to expand on Clay’s message and tell you why some of these these seemly-standard ad agency website conventions are so wrong.

Exhibit A: Forsman & Bodenfors in Sweden Clay’s review focuses on the site’s ridiculous lack of navigation. Pathways to all of the available information on the site are laid out on the homepage in the form of colored blocks with various levels of abstraction and ambiguity. Instead of offering the user a number of clearly defined and well-organized options for navigation, the site simply offers a huge search box layered on top of the non-sensical colored blocks; forcing the user not only to take extra time and an extra step by typing out their request, but it also forces the user to have to think about why exactly they are there.

“It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, so long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice” — Krug’s Second Law of Usability

Since the publication of Clay’s article, F&B has sensibly added a small, text-based navigation to the top of it’s field of blocks, which was obviously influenced by the top two most popular search phrases, “Clients” and “About” (which you can see in the rotating footer of the site). However, the ultimate failure of the site has already done it’s damage long before the new navigation is an option.

The downfall of many ad agency websites is the Flash Intro, and F&B is a perfect example of this. Upon page load, I watched a spinning load icon for more than 13 seconds, followed by an eight-second animation of the company’s logo slowly being drawn and a five-second build up of the actual page content. Were I an average website visitor, F&B would be lucky to have only wasted half of the time that I am going to spend on their site with useless Flash.

To be clear, Flash itself is not an inherently negative addition to a website. Even a 30-second Flash intro can be an asset for marketing and informational purposes. However, at the end of F&B’s intro animation, the user knows absolutely nothing about the company that owns the website, what they do, what their reputation is, nor does the user have any incentive to continue wasting an additional 30 seconds on the site. Bored and confused, the user is confronted by the annoying and frustrating lack of clear navigation.

Exhibit B: North Carolina’s own McKinney. Although a vast improvement over F&B, McKinney’s redesigned site still suffers from the same disappointing lack of understanding of the medium of the Internet. The flash intro and content load screens tell the user a little about the company; that it wants to sit down and have a chat with you. About what? Well, apparently, about itself. The main screen is a confusing 3-D array of questions that McKinney wants you to ask it about itself. After playing around with the flying words on the screen for 10 seconds, the user has spent 30 seconds on the site and all that has been revealed about the company is that it is arrogant.

Luckily, McKinney provides the user with a simple and intuitive site navigation, even if it is in the footer of the site and the least-prominent piece of information. From here, the user can learn everything about the company, but the information is presented in a small box in the center of the browser, with small, low-contrast text and a Flash scroll bar, which requires the user to learn to use a new tool in order to scroll through content.

Once the user has learned that McKinney is an Advertising agency, they may be interested in seeing some examples of the firm’s best works. The Portfolio section of the site is plagued with a even more annoying and less intuitive user interface than the homepage. Thumbnail images representing different ad campaigns oscillate through the virtual 3-D space, reacting to the movements of the user’s mouse. Not only is the navigation clunky and unintuitive (moving the mouse cursor towards a thumbnail causes it to rotate to the center of the screen, thereby moving it past and away from the mouse cursor and causing the user to chase the image) but it is also completely unnecessary. The interface is not an improvement over a standard thumbnail list of options; it doesn’t make the content any more accessible, it doesn’t convey additional information about the items and it does nothing to additionally encourage the user to stay on the site and learn more.

However, I am pleased by having been met with a bit of irony on both sites. The F&B site includes a scrolling footer of visitor statistics, including the “most popular search terms”, which highlight’s the company’s failure at presenting important information in an intuitive manner, as the top two terms are “About” and “Clients”. Similarly, one of the answers to McKinney’s flying, 3-D questions that it wants you to ask it about itself includes the factoid that it took “…about five companies, 10 copywriters, two PhDs, eight linguists, and 10 developers on two continents“ to build their fundamentally flawed website. I’m feeling there’s something I should say about the forest for the trees.

My main goal here is not to belittle these two Advertising agencies. They are great at what they do and consistently produce outstanding work for their list of notable Clients (well, great Advertising work, anyway). However, the Advertising industry as a whole is stumped over the concept of what the Internet is and how to use it. Over 100 years of Industry experience, habit and convention has formed the way that advertisers think and conceptualize their goals, and this conception has always been formatted to fit print, radio and television.

Traditional media are very rigid. You have very limited time or space with which to convey your message; a quarter-spread newspaper ad, a 30 second radio spot or a 4”x6” direct mail card. All these constraints require a hard-hitting, succinct and flashy statement in order to effectively convey a broad message and encourage the audience to act on that message. In contrast, the Internet allows for great flexibility (along with the downfall of infinite combinations of hardware and software which change the way a website is presented to the user) and an infinite options for customization.

This tradition of focusing on presentation in a pre-defined physical space has obviously lead to some of the poor Web Design decisions that fault many ad agencies. The “content in a Flash box with a scroll bar” convention that both McKinney and F&B (in their interior pages) fall victim to is a redundant effort to create a scalable presentation area (obviously, the browser window itself if perfectly capable of this functionality). Similarly, both sites deploy gratuitous use of Flash with no real benefit to the way the site communicates to users, it is simply a method by which to impress, or impress some idea upon, the users of the site. Unfortunately for these sites, the best way to impress a user on the Internet is to give a hassle-free experience and provide them with some compelling information.

The difficulty in designing for the web is that it isn’t purely marketing, nor is it purely information technology. The Internet is a hybrid of these two areas of expertise, and perfecting the ability to create informative, usable websites requires both perspectives, as well as unique experiences not tied to either. The ultimate mistake that these ad agencies have made is to assume that the Internet was the next step in a chain of technology that includes print, radio and television. The Internet and New Media are are something completely different and the need for effectively utilizing these resources has spawned a new breed of competitors for ad agencies. What is yet to be seen is whether the two Industries will eventually merge or if Advertising and marketing will eventually be forced back into its niche.