just because it's always teed up for you...

Direct marketing is by definition a response medium. And when I get briefed on a direct job, I’m automatically thinking about how to maximize response.

In digital, the intentions aren't so clear cut. In digital anything is possible. A kick-ass awareness campaign. A staggeringly efficient CRM campaign. A hugely succesful consumer engagment and prospecting campaign. It's all there for you...

But not even digital can do all of the above things simultaneously.

And that’s a really important thing to look out for when you're working in digital, I find. You have to be really clear about your purpose – your client, your account team, your creatives and tech people all have to be aligned on that one strategy. And that strategy should answer the question, how are you building the client’s business? 

I've had clients in the past say they wanted to do an awareness campaign with banners, but they'd measure its effectiveness by clickthroughs and number of leads generated. Not that those are bad metrics of course, but they're not the first (or even second or third) metrics I'd look at if I'm trying to broaden awareness. Inevitably, when we got briefed on that client's work, they kept assuring us, "No, this time we really want to create awareness," and so the team would go off and come up with some pretty cool ideas. And the reaction in the creative presentation would be great. And then the feedback would come, hours or days later, and it would all be couched in the language of being more effective at generating clicks. We began to feel like Charlie Brown, barreling down the field to kick the ball that Lucy promised not to pull away this time...

The finished work was never as good as it could have been for this client, because the creative always twisted as the strategy and metrics changed.

It should all come out at the brief, I know. Everything should be clear at that meeting when everyone's questions get voiced and hopefully answered. It just doesn't always happen that way.

And I don't mean to say it's all the client's fault, because agency folks can do something similar. I've had an art director get briefed on something like a landing page for registering people, and actually tell me that the page was all about registration – and then present me with page designs that buried the register now button under all sorts of cool flash and video, the fifteenth thing that a user might see. It's so easy to play, to do cool things, to offer up the latest technology. It's so easy to push your design for an email and insist on sweating over it when it hits someone's inbox as one big jpeg... forgetting of course that images don't automatically download in most people's preview panes, where your award-winning creative is instantly skipped over, its message totally lost.

In digital it's really easy to be unclear about what you want to do, because you can do it all. It's always all served up for you. It just requires the extra discipline to remind yourself that you can't do it all at once.

the bowl which is super, or not

I have to confess that I don't really understand the whole Superbowl ad phenomenon. Obviously any event which exalts the creativity of our product is a good thing. And the buzz can only be good for those of us who toil to make ads which air the other 364 days of the year, right?

Consider the mere build up, the foreplay to the big day. The GoDaddy spot got some 3 million views based on not be allowed to air by CBS. The Focus on the Family spot got acres of coverage for their point of view for weeks before the actual game. After all that, the real live spots can only be brilliant, right? Well, of course not. Apart from the Snickers spot with Betty White and Abe Vigoda, which actually operates on the classical model of having a campaign theme and executing good creative that delivers against it, most of the spots seemed a little sad, like simple embodiments of the brief, or carny sideshow exhibitions, or spots guaranteed to be intertubed around the world... for about five seconds.

In some ways it's a wonderful synergistic model of consumer engagement across multiple media platforms. I know all the arguments about why something this big has to be good for clients. In other ways it's not good that much of the actual value provided by the millions being spent is not found in the TV eyeballs conjured up by the media buy itself, but in the cloud of accompanying hype and discussion and linksharing. How much lasting value are companies getting out of advertising like this? How much real consumer engagement is happening after you view a few of these things? How long until clients try to find ways of getting that kind of hype at a cheaper price?

It all feels somehow, well, wrong. People talk about the spots as a commodity, like race horses or chickens bred for cockfighting. The Betty White spot is well ahead of the field, with the guys staring at the camera spot a distant second and the talking babies lagging well behind...

The only thing that matters is being funny or weird or cute or stupid enough to be passed to your friends. The clients, apart from a few obvious exceptions like Apple with the 1984 spot, get forgotten, their logos and URLs slapped on for the last few seconds as a tip of the cap to the idea that advertising is supposed to convince consumers to feel something, as a means of getting them to buy something.

Update on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 9:53AM by Scott

Okay, the Google spot is brilliant. Maybe even a little teary, in the way that the first 10 minutes of Up get you. (Or the whole of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Go see it on stage some time.) Using their core functionality to suggest how two lives come together is really powerful. When we talk about branding in this crazy new modern century of ours, Google is the case study – they built their brand purely through their usefulness to consumers. Kudos to them for bringing that to life in a traditional brand spot.

maybe this is why creatives have been known to have a pint every now and then

Yes, we offer outstanding strategically driven ideas to our clients, and when our client relationships are working we can feel like partners in their businesses.

But in direct and digital creative departments, there's one unalterable reality. After you sell that big cool idea to client and there is much congratulation and backslapping and you start thinking you're hot conceptual shit, you've still got to go back to your desk and make the damn thing.

You've got to put in long hours over a keyboard and mouse, work out a million details with your IA and tech folks, or wrestle with your print production manager about what Canada Post will let you do.

After the glory of the blue sky stuff, we have to become really good craftspeople. We need to know Flash and grammar and inDesign and how to proofread. We need to build insanely complex PhotoShop files showing in depth how something will animate, or write hundred-page copy decks full of not just brilliant content, but navigation and error messaging. We write forty letter versions for a package, or spend endless hours wrestling with iStock to find the one perfect image that may not exist. We don't get to outsource it to a studio, or a junior team or a production house. We have to get consumed with the details.

There are lots of folks out there who can competently handle execution no problem, but can only ever manage conceptual clichés. And there are a fair number of folks who are fantastic ideators (ugh, what a word) but who don't have the willingness or skills to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty for weeks at a time.

Craft is boring, executional and absolutely essential for what we do. We all know that great execution can almost save a bad idea, and bad execution can really sink a great idea. (The Diamond Shreddies stuff is a great example of bad execution. I know it won tons of awards, but for me it isn't anywhere near as good as it could be. Something seems really flat about the assembly line part, like the script and the direction just missed the point. And what's up with the mannequin at the end?)

All of which goes to demonstrate that the best direct and digital creatives have to have two almost contradictory skill sets, mind sets and purposes – free-ranging yet obsessive, outlandishly creative yet unerringly logical, accepting no boundaries but always being aware of them.

Okay, let's actually write the punch line, as if I needed to: good digital and direct creatives need two heads.

how many sites has Elmore Leonard designed?

Well, none, I'm guessing, but he's got some brilliant words of wisdom for designers.

"I try to leave out all the bits that people skip."

(Okay, Elmore's talking about writing, but none of the art directors I know would pay attention to a piece of advice about writing, so shhh.)

He talks about how you've got to be able to distance yourself from the work. You have to develop the ability to kick back and say to yourself, that part's pretty and this part is really interesting to me and oooh I loved coming up that – and then realize that anyone else coming to it is going to think all it's a waste of time and skip right over it.

Yes, Virginia. People are going to skip over all the crap that's between them and what they're really interested in.

Users don't give a shit what you're trying to say or how clever you are; they want to start doing what you want them to do. Or rather, what they want to do. (For writing, it means that the eyes of the reader are going to pass right over that page of description of how good looking someone was, or the paragraphs of philosophical perspective, until they get to the point at which the story starts again.)

This sensible wisdom is born out by the fact that the IAs I've worked with have been insistent about concentrating on boring questions like, "What is the one thing you want the user to do on this page?" They then started smacking clever ADs and writers until we pared the page down to focus on that one thing, instead of all the cool/cute bells and whistles that we were thinking somehow made the page, in some vague way. They got Elmore, even if we didn't.