"Think about content in terms of the end user" - Asda's head of social media Dom Burch clarifies "websites are dead" statement
Asda’s head of social media Dom Burch, the man who proclaimed that ‘websites are dead’ has clarified his comments while speaking at The Drum Live.
Asked about what he meant when he made the now infamous statement, Burch was happy to elaborate, explaining that he felt that those building or commissioning websites should not look towards desktop environments.
“Everything I am seeing is that the way people are consuming content, particularly non-transactional, editorial content, stuff where you’re trying to engage an audience, they’re doing that from a smartphone. So by the time you’ve built this website, which looked brilliant on a piece of paper, you’re actually building something that is going to be out of date by the time it’s there. Not only that, it's really costly to build them."
He continued to advise: "Think about content in terms of the end user. Who is going to consume it? Where are they going to be and how are they going to access that information. If you’re not thinking mobile first, then you are wasting a lot of time and effort potentially.”
He added that websites had become “a bit of a comfort blanket” for some people who saw it as something they could still point towards as an end product.
“I go back to look at who our customers are and they tend to be mums of between 25 and 35. In Facebook terms more than 60 per cent are engaging with us through their smartphones. So maybe not so much that websites are dead, but building from a desktop starting point appears to me to be the wrong starting place,” he emphasised.
More on Dom Burch’s interview at The Drum Live can be found in the next edition of The Drum, out 19 July.