Tuesday, April 27  

What a bunch of absolute rubbish

What a bunch of absolute rubbish

Hello. I have this theory about advertising people. The theory is this:

They have almost no idea what they are doing.

Harsh? Sure.

True? Probably.

When you develop any sort of marketing campaign - whether that be advertising, brand awareness, direct mail, web sites, whatever - the only sort of measure is this:

Does it work?

And to work it must generate the most wanted response.

That response might be:

* sales
* lead generation
* awareness
* trial
* whatever

Here in my home state some advertising types have these awards that have been going for 3 years. Called the Cream awards.

The Cream Awards were introduced in 2001 with the Cream standing for: Creativity, Relevance, Effectiveness in All Media.

That's from the web site.

Then they go on to say this:

The Cream Awards were introduced in 2001 to a combination of cheers 'at last you people in advertising are prepared to recognise that effectiveness is as important as creativity'.

That's from the web site. Which is the only point of contact I've seen for these awards.

So here we have the web site: www.creamawards.com.au

* Built in Flash (about 20% of people don't have the Flash player)

* The design is so incredibly complicated - try and figure out how to find the information you're after (if it's not immediately obvious then it fails at effectiveness)
* Search engines can't index Flash

* The "Cream call for entries" is a pdf file of 1.4 mb. That's about 1.36 mb too big. 1.4 mb on the average computer will take about 120 seconds to download. People won't wait 10 seconds. About 1 in 100 people will bother to wait 120 seconds.

* To join the mailing list they have developed a 15 field form (more than 2 fields is too many) - 6 fields are mandatory (although it doesn't say that - I've just assumed that from the little red stars they have next to 6 fields). There's one- (1) easy way to stop people filling in your form - have more fields. The more fields that have to be filled in the less people will fill them in. People don't want to fill in forms. They just want information.

I won't go (and I do!) on because it is simply mind boggling. These judges of what is effective develop the most ineffective web site possible to promote the awards for the most effective.

And sure, you can say that the target market has fast web connections, they'll all have Flash, they'll all happily fill in the newsletter subscription form. Wrong. I'll guess that a good 10% won't have or do those things.

And when you develop a web site you have to develop it for the lowest common denominator so that absolutely everyone gets your marketing message. It's just common sense. Anything else is just playing around so you win awards.

Not so you give your client the best possible chance of success.

Cheers

Brendon

P.S: I now don't like my chances of winning those awards!