The Challenge - An Introduction
O.K., think fast. You find out your client
wants to put up a site on the Internet’s World-Wide Web.
Do you:
Go into a blind rage as you know it represents anywhere up to two hundred thousand dollars that will disappear without trace from your client’s press/print/TV/radio budget.
Race to your local computer book store and buy twenty books with titles like “Become a Web-Page Authoring Guru in Thirty Minutes or Less” in a vain attempt to recapture your billings before they disappear over the horizon.
Approach it like any of the other mediums you work in where the finer technical aspects have to be handled by outside suppliers: Isolate and refine you client’s brief and then find a couple of crackerjack freelance web authors to execute your creative solutions.
If you answered a) or b), have a thought about how you would have handled the coming of television in the mid 1950s. Would you have decided to retire because you knew nothing at all about this new all-singing, all-dancing medium? Would you have gone out and bought your own TV station and then learned how to operate the cameras, vision-switching desks, etc. all by yourself?
Of course not. The arrival of a new medium means only one thing to a true advertising professional: You learn as much as you can about the advantages and limitations of the new medium, and then you go about applying your well-honed sales skills to it. If it’s highly technical, you just have to hire the expertise you need and then make that cost part of your budgeting for the job.
Whether it’s sandwich boards, sky-writing or satellite TV, the arrival of a new vehicle for your marketing messages is simply an opportunity to expand, not contract, the budget. In fact, if your client’s business suits it, a Web Site can easily become a sales outlet/lead generator in its own right and therefore become a profitable, rather than costly exercise.
So, say you’ve decided to wade into the web-surfing world on behalf of your client. What next? Well, you just do what you normally do: Find out what the client wants their web-site to do, and what lengths (or expense) they’re prepared to go to in achieving those aims.
See, it’s not that painful after all - it’s just like planning a magazine campaign, only the pages are made up of electrons instead of wood pulp. (and they can jump, move and do things, but that’s another article entirely).
Your next step is to check out the medium. Much as you would secure a copy of an unfamiliar magazine to better understand the environment your ad is going into, browsing the World-Wide Web will give you a much better idea of the context in which your pages will be viewed.
For the most part, you’ll be able to identify the web sites that have been created by techno geeks (or by clients themselves). They’re the ones that either say lots of nice things about the company (and nothing about benefits to their customers) or are really technically/graphically impressive, again with no promise of performance or offer of any kind being made to the viewer.
As with any advertising, the onus is on the creator of web advertising to involve, intrigue, inform and most important of all, answer the viewer’s perennial question:
Next: "What’s in it for me?"
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