Keep it simple - learning from yesteryear
Digital has a lot to learn from the traditional disciplines of advertising and design when it comes to mastering the art of simplicity, claims Chris Thurling, managing director of Bristol-based agency 3Sixty.
The best advertising makes the complex simple – think of David Abbott’s seemingly effortless copy for the Economist. And so does the best design – think of Apple’s elegant and easy to use products. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” as Leonardo da Vinci put it.
A fair criticism of lots of digital marketing is that it’s still in its adolescence when it comes to keeping it simple.
Because it’s so straightforward (and relatively inexpensive) to keep adding more “stuff” to web pages, people often can’t resist the temptation to do so. It’s also very easy to get seduced by the “wow” factor – the technology tail ends up wagging the marketing dog.
This begs the question, how do traditional design and advertising principles of simplicity apply in the ever changing world of digital? This article would need more space to cover all of this territory, so I’m just going to look at two key areas.
For a start, it’s worth noting that the disciplines of design and advertising are much more closely related online than they are offline. When an agency comes up with a traditional TV or press ad, the creative team does not have to spend much time thinking about how the target customers will navigate their way around the piece of communication. Not so online. A great creative concept will be fatally flawed if the creative team hasn’t considered user experience. As a result, how the advertising is designed requires a lot more care and attention online than offline.
Temptation
So the first and, I think, most important rule of keeping it simple online is putting user centred design on an equal footing with planning and creative. Poor usability can completely undermine even the best ideas. And this means resisting the temptation to be different for the sake of it – especially with things like navigation – and recognising that in most cases users aren’t going online to be passively entertained, but to seek information or do things. So making web pages simple to use, even if they are essentially pieces of advertising, is vital to keeping the customer happy (and thinking fondly of your client’s brand). Furthermore, just as most TV ads are tested with focus groups before millions are spent on media budgets, digital campaigns need to be user tested to ensure that people can actually work out what to do when they arrive at a web page.
To give an example, a giant US retailer had a suspicion that its e-commerce website wasn’t performing to its potential. Rather than commission an expensive new advertising campaign to drive more visitors to its site, the retailer spent a relatively small sum on user testing the crucial page and discovered that people were confused by the wording of a humble button. By merely re-writing the copy the retailer produced a staggering $300m in additional sales! Simple things…
Another area where digital needs to learn from offline, but then apply its own expression, is the classic advertising concept of the “single minded proposition”. Take a look at most corporate websites, and it’s fair to say that most of them are anything but “single minded”.
Struggle
The struggle to get clients to accept that less is more is most acute, in our experience, with website home pages, where every part of the business – marketing, sales, HR, corporate relations, you name it – wants a piece of the action.
Having the courage and confidence to leave out the link to the graduate recruitment section of the site or the latest company share price is something that digital agencies need to get better at persuading clients to do. But we can’t do this without an intellectual justification, and that’s where we are failing more often than not. Perhaps because the discipline is so ‘young’ (I’m one of the few people I know over 40, with over 15 years experience in digital advertising) digital agency advice is frequently not taken as seriously by senior decision makers, who would probably sit up and take notice of a wizened offline advertising agency sage.
What digital agencies need to do is follow the example of the best offline agencies, and painstakingly build up the case for creative solutions based on customer insight. And if you ask the customer what they want, nine times out of 10 they will opt for simplicity over clutter. Just look at Google!
In probably less time than many of us think, digital will be the most important medium for the majority of advertisers. Those agencies, be they digital or traditional in their heritage, that can combine advertising and design simplicity with technical knowledge and innovation will be the next decade’s equivalent of the great agencies that mastered the art of the TV commercial 40 or so years ago.