Advertising Is Dead Again...

(Editor's Note: Sitegeist is a semi-regularly posted to blog written by the staff at Splat Productions...)

I walked by someone's desk earlier this week and noticed that they had a browser window open and were chuckling. Stepping closer to take a look, I saw that they were looking at the home page of a well known Ad & PR firm, which was loudly asserting that, "Advertising, as we know it, no longer works."

"Hmmmm," I thought to myself, "...guess I better find me a new profession."

"Advertising, as we know it, no longer works." Is there truth in this bold proclamation?

A History Primer

Somewhere in the latter part of the Paleolithic era of human development --- say, after family bands had progressed from nomadic cavedwellers to housebound farmers and hunters -- some clever stone age entrepreneur invented a new tool. In those days, meat was scarce and the staple of the day was a delicious hot porridge made from "locally and organically grown" grains. (Funny, though, they didn't call them that yet...) A challenge of the time, however, was separating the inner, fleshy part of the grain from its outer hull. Those chewy hulls would somehow or another make their way into the porridge and play hell with Stone Age dental bridges and what not. At about this time, though, along comes a gal with an idea. We'll call her Oumquohoka. Using the technology of the time, she invented a stone implement that -- when applied with the appropriate technique and force -- neatly separated the grain from its hull. It was a pure stroke of genius and she knew other cooks in both her village and neighboring villages would wanna get their hands on this revolutionary device. "And," she thought to herself, "maybe I can trade these tools to cooks in other villages, for some of the ingredients which seem sparse in our village..."

It was a great idea but, of course, no one else in any of the other neighboring villages had ever heard of our inventor's new device. And, even if they had, it was so revolutionary that it was unlikely they would have believed in its usefulness right off the bat.

Luckily, Oumquohoka had an ally in a neighbor hunter friend who had an idea. Because his line of work took him far afield from their home village, he offered to take samples of Oumquohoka's tool to other villages and introduce it to other cooks and millers. As he travelled, the other villagers began seeing the virtues of this miraculous tool. They began telling their friends about its usefulness. And then those friends told more friends. And so on and so forth. Thus, in this preliterate, prebroadcast media, preinternet era, the first -- and still the most successful form of advertising -- was born. Word of Mouth advertising. Praise and recommendation from trusted personal sources.

When someone makes the statement "Advertising, as we know it, no longer works," I cringe. One reason I cringe is because advertising and PR literature is filled with "paradigm changing" hyperbole which -- for as long as I've been reading it -- has been telling me (every six months or so) that everything about anything has completely changed. As professionals, we demean our credibility by continually making such overreaching statements. (Remember Chicken Little?) And, as far as I can tell, the fundamentals governing consumer decision making really haven't changed and won't change until we evolve into a species with a different set of needs and concerns. We still value good, cheap food. We still crave sex. We still need to put a roof over our family's heads. And we still crave the companionship of our friends.

What has changed, of course, and what, I think, people mean when they make sweeping statements such as the one above, are the different opportunities our digital era empowers us with to reach our clients, friends and family. Twitter, Facebook, blogging and all the other "Web 2.0" technologies offer unique chances to connect with others. As advertising professionals, it is our responsibility to understand how these opportunities can enable our clients to reach out to their customers and future customers. Having said that though, traditional "paradigms" are still alive and healthy, thank you. It's still easier to sell products which have a unique "revolutionary" quality about them. (Just ask Oumquohoka.) And the fastest way to ensure a huge spike in sales is to get people on the outside -- your customers -- to start recommending your product to their friends, who will recommend it to their friends. And so on, and so forth.

And that, my friends, is what advertising is, and always has been, all about.

Splat Productions Announces SEO PreFlight...

I talked last week about some of the dilemmas facing agencies when smaller clients come in the door and -- with limited budgets -- expect us to both design a site for them and make that same site easily found through organic search such as Google or Yahoo. Despite the additional costs associated with priming a site for search, though, we have increasingly come to the conclusion that to not design with SEO in mind is shortsighted.

In a typical scenario, SEO is often applied to a site post-creation by a third party SEO vendor who gets a hold of a marketing manager or webmaster and convinces them of the value that SEO offers. However, retroactively making a site SEO friendly is like adding an after market air conditioner to a new car. The resulting addon usually costs more money and doesn't work as well as one installed in the factory. Designing for SEO involves more than applying invisible code to the back end of a web site. It impacts all the significant messaging elements -- copy, video, images and links. Designing with SEO in mind from the outset then, offers the opportunity to marry message with searchability right up front.

For this reason, we've developed suite of services which we're offering to our new and existing web clients. Called SEO Preflight ® these services are all designed to ensure that your site will attract traffic initially and -- with ongoing maintenance by one of our partner SEO professionals -- keep pulling visitors to your site.

SEO Preflight services will vary somewhat, according to the needs of every customer, but minimally include the following services:

• Research and develop likely search strings using
  client input and keyword research/discovery tools
  
• Write Keyword embedded copy for all meta tags
• Integrate keywords into all copy for visible portions of web site
• Pay careful attention to tagging all images with relevant text tags
• Make sure all sites have Privacy Statements and Company Information
  pages.
• Create and submit a site map to all relevant search engines
  
• Ensure that site creation is consistent with Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Install analytics monitoring tools to site

Choosing SEO Preflight ® for your new site will give our clients the comfort of knowing that, not only will their new or redesigned site be attention getting... it will also get attention on the web.

Some Thoughts About SEO

As the principal of a small agency which specializes in interactive, we've designed and built dozens of web sites for a variety of clients. These days, clients are obviously interested in getting as much out of the money they're spending on interactive advertising as possible and SEO is a particular concern. With that end in mind, over the next few entries, I'm going to be touching on critical issues agencies and clients need to think about, as they sit down together to discuss web site design and interactive search strategies....

First Let's Talk About SEO

We have designed countless web sites. At the beginning of our process with clients, it is customary for us to have a discussion about how important searchability is. Many clients don't understand that web sites are not necessarily designed with organic search in mind and that there are no "best practices" for web site creation which all designers adhere to. The reason for this is that preparing a site for SEO costs considerable extra time and money. These days, clients are especially cost conscious and we are constantly finding ourselves cutting one or several thousand dollars out of web budgets which formerly would have been more robust. Trying to pad these already skinny budgets with (sometimes) several thousand dollars worth of SEO services, then, is not feasible. Our practice now is to try and have a discussion upfront with our clients about how important, ultimately, organic searchability is and -- if it's a particular concern of theirs -- we work with them to implent and additional package of SEO "Pre Flight" services. In my next entry, I'll discuss, precisely, what these services comprise...