If you miss material closing dates in print, chances are the publication will run a house ad or recompose the book. Same for newspapers. Late creative is consistently in the top few concerns of publishers at almost every trade conference I've attended. And little has been done to address the issue, which is often out of an agency's hands, particularly if they're a media-only shop.
Just sayin' is all...
Since I'm getting up so early during the week to get to work on time, my sleep cycle really doesn't permit me to sleep late on weekends. I've found that, especially during the summer, there's half a day to be enjoyed before most people get out of bed. Friday night, I picked up my car at the dealership after it they fixed the alarm system so that the car would actually start with the key. I cooked some dinner when I got back and then turned in early.
I was up at 5 AM on Saturday, made breakfast and coffee and hit the beach by 6:30 AM. I caught two striped bass during a two-hour stint surfcasting, but both fish were waaaaay too small to qualify as "keepers." Still, there was a lot of action down by the beach, even if it was mostly from nibbling sea robins.
Upon getting back to the house, I used some scrap wood from around the property to build a log stacker for some firewood we've been stockpiling in the back yard, and I stacked a good deal of firewood up near the back corner of our property near the rose garden. After that, I went for a quick swim and then put the Corvette up on ramps and changed the oil. I then spent a couple hours washing the car, stripping all the old wax, tree sap and bugs off of it and giving it a fresh coat of wax.
I went for another swim, did some odd jobs around the house and then hit the beach again with Dennis. This time, we caught the tail end of the high tide and nothing was biting. Dennis got a couple sea robins, but nothing was biting for me. After fishing, I turned in early and watched "National Treasure" on the movies-on-demand thing.
At 7:30 Sunday morning, we were loading up Craig's truck to go to the range. We had breakfast at the diner on Main Street in Riverhead and then headed to the range for a couple hours. We set up our launcher behind some barrels so that shooters couldn't see where the targets were coming from, or how many would be thrown, and this presented a nice, new challenge.
After shooting, Craig showed me how to change the ball joints on my quad, which took a couple hours because I'm not mechanically inclined like he is. But we got the ball joints changed and I took a ride for about half an hour on the trails North of North Country Road.
After that, I went home for a bit and relaxed and then headed over to my grandfather's house in Cutchogue for Father's Day dinner. Tried to call my Dad, but unfortunately didn't get in touch with him. I came home at around 10 and went straight to bed.
There's a lot of living you can cram into a day if you wake up early. The sun is up really early in the summer, so if you're up with the sun there's plenty of time to get to all the things you want to do and all the errands you need to run.
In his Online Spin this week, Cory Treffiletti asked "Why Do We Make Things So Difficult?" (Link requires registration) That column went in a completely different direction than I thought it would, but it got me thinking more about how the complexity of what we do in this industry hurts us. Specifically, we have problems with client education and agency/client process that repeatedly put our business in jeopardy.
To hone in further on what I'm talking about, let's explore the status quo. If an agency puts together a print campaign, it can tell the client "we recommend P4CB insertions in the following 20 magazines" and the client will immediately understand what that is. That isn't always the case with online. "We plan to run ad banners across the following 20 websites" has a whole lot more complexity below the surface than a simple print buy.
For example, what sizes are the banners going to be? Will they be rich media or animated GIFs? How many impressions are we buying from each website and what share of voice will that give us on each site?
The intricacies behind a print buy are easily conveyed by the standard terminology. Not so for online. A 20-website buy has the potential for a lot more variation than a 20-magazine buy. Two web buys on the same roster of sites can look completely different, even if they use standard-size ads.
When you're working in integrated media, and a client is spending upwards of $50 million on broadcast and significantly less on interactive, it doesn't make much sense to allocate more time to understanding the issues inherent in interactive when that represents a much lower percentage of the spend. Many clients would not rather deal with the intimate details, until there's a snafu. Therein lies the crux of the problem. If you're a brand manager and you're dealing with distribution, in-store presence, big television buys, the FSI that drops next week, etc. the details inherent in interactive tend to slip through the cracks. You may not consider it an efficient use of your time to delve into the details of why every Flash banner on an online campaign requires a GIF backup. (And rightly so.) Unfortunately, attention to these types of details is what is required to make an online campaign run smoothly.
So the client pings its agency to ask what sort of creative it will be running. Instead of saying something simple like "Page 4-color bleed," the agency has to put together a complex spreadsheet, detailing a variety of sizes, technologies and caveats. Somewhere in the process of communicating these intricacies internally or to external creative agencies, the details tend to be overlooked. Someone will forget to produce GIF backups for the Flash banners, or they'll forget to adhere to the click commands standards in putting Flash ads together. And the process hits snags.
I'm just using the above as a convenient example. The bigger issue is that clients understand what a print campaign looks like. They know what a TV campaign looks like. They don't necessarily know what an online campaign looks like.
And this is because we do tend to make things more complicated than they really are. When we say something like "Flash ads" to a client, it should generate an understanding that there will be a banner, a skyscraper, and a rectangle of certain standard dimensions, GIF backups for all sizes, and standards-compliant click commands.
Instead, everything in interactive seems to be open to various interpretations, meaning that more errors are made and fewer expectations are met.
Traditional media doesn't really have this problem. There's much less detail work involved, more standardization, less time investment and therefore, smoother implementation. As I expose more of our staffers here (the ones who came initially from online backgrounds) to print, radio, outdoor, television and other more established media, they can't believe how comparatively easy these campaigns are to put together, present to a client and implement.
All of this isn't to say that I think everything in online should be standardized for the sake of making things run more smoothly. But I do think we're going to have a significant number of problems trying to get clients to fully understand interactive because such an amazing amount of detail-oriented work is necessary, and because clients are required to invest a good deal of education time for such a relatively small commitment of media dollars.
How do we solve it? Well, that's a toughie. I often offer clients the opportunity to sit in on topical "101" seminars we give on sub-topics in the interactive marketing industry (e.g. - Blogging and Online Communities, Paid Search, Rich Media, Ad Management, E-mail Marketing). But busy clients can rarely make those kinds of time commitments.
But that may be changing. While I'm not sure that every client wants to know the nuts and bolts, the more they experiment with interactive and launch online efforts, the more they realize they need to understand the nuts and bolts on some level so they can figure out the range of capabilities. They may also hit some snags they would like to avoid in future efforts. This may help us in the long run. But for right now, I think many clients could benefit from allocating whatever downtime they have to educational efforts.
A while back, I switched my default browser to Firefox. I also downloaded all sorts of plugin goodness for the browser, with Sage among them. I used to use NewsGator to read feeds through Outlook. Truth be told, though, it was a pain in the ass. I'd much rather have a reader incorporated into my browser, which is precisely how Sage handles things.
My daily web stops include about 20 online content publications covering news and opinion in politics, marketing and technology. There are also a number of blogs I read regularly. I would spend a good deal of time during the day going to each site individually, checking for updates and reading up on the latest posts. Sage is saving me a good deal of time in that regard. Whenever I want to check for updates, I simply click one button in my browser and within a few seconds know which sites have updated and which haven't. From there, Sage lets me browse the content feeds in a stripped-down manner, without bandwidth-hogging "just for show" graphics. What used to take me an hour during lunch now takes about 20 minutes.
What's more, I'm learning about new stories more often and visiting the sites more often as well. So my consumption of these sites has increased while the time taken to consume them has decreased. Ain't technology great?
Sage also has a great little feature in its "Discover Feeds" button. Simply visit a site that syndicates via RSS, click on the button, and Sage finds all the feeds from that site, presenting them in a menu format so that you can pick the ones you would like to subscribe to.
Setting up Sage properly has saved me a lot of time. Check it out if you're looking for a simple, easy-to-use feed reader.
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