Five sure fire ways to screw up your next digital campaign
In this guest post, Daniel Monheit has some tips for what digital advertisers should always do if they like to fail.
Stop the guesswork. These tips will ensure you screw up your clients next digital campaign so badly that social media, mobile and the internet at large don’t find their way into another brief for at least a decade. Thankfully, this will let us all get back to REAL work like making interruptive (but potentially award winning) TV commercials and running auditions for flash mobs.
The golden ratio refers to how much we ask a user to do in relation to the size of the outcome they get for doing it. The more difficult, obscure or ridiculous the better.
For example, as a treat for pulling out their phone, downloading a QR code app and looking like a dick by scanning a poster at a bus stop, reward users with a visit to the homepage of your website, preferably scaled for desktop.
” People don’t use their phones for browsing anyway. ” eh, what? Mobile traffic will overtake desktop traffic in the very near future.
I think every agency in the world knows all this.
And this is great advice—in a vacuum.
What it doesn’t acknowledge is the limitations of budgets, non-savvy clients and inter-agency politics.
I’ve worked in huge digital agencies where this process rarely happened, so I can safely say this isn’t solely a problem with advertising agencies.
Great advice. Sadly simple, direct, helpful, jargon-free advice such as this is increasingly rare.
Enjoying the first comment. Sarcasm… lost, much??
@Cpt Obvious, a big reason that digital has limited budgets is because clients are constantly being burnt by agencies making all of these mistakes.
haha informative, entertaining and devoid of self service or agenda – good little piece. cheers Daniel
nice, but can i suggest a 6th – “Lets build it in Flash, Adobe tells us Google can ‘see’ it no probs”
nicely written, thanks mate. blows me away that this sort of the thing is still happening- be cool if there was a list of recent examples of this “adfail”.
Love it.
amen to that, Golfer – from an advertiser who has slashed our budget because we’re sick of digital snake oil
Nice piece, Back to the basics… refreshing
Thanks Daniel
An honest builder in a sea of cowboys
A friend who works at a brand asked me to look over his (under development) website by an agency. It had an “click here to enter site” on the homepage. I was astounded. Then she told me how much they were paying the agency; I was dumbfounded! I then checked the functionality of the site, which was awful – she is now ANGRY! 😉
Thanks guys. Appreciate the comments.
Gold…Dan you just described my week!
Major fail: ‘Content? It’s only a few lines – get the graphics guy or the client to knock out a few words…’ Or
Five massive words that drives everything?
love it
Good piece, that Golden Ratio thing is so true. Step away from the brand people.
At the same time, I have seen plenty of digital folks evangelising campaigns that involve these kinds of interactions a la ‘you guys really need a FB campaign so you can increase engagement and be part of the conversation’. Really, do you really?
It’s unfortunate we have to play on two polarising teams when it comes to the “traditional vs the digital”. A lot of agencies are guilty of downplaying one approach, and upselling the other in line with either their agenda or their stupidity.
#6: hire someone who’s never had experience in an art form to f-ck-up that art form in fake-it-til-you-make-it RMIT style, and therefore screw over the client, like the “Crimestoppers” stuff. Which has been recently used for TV spots! Hey, you make things for TV, and you make things for hand-held iTard devices, and make things DIFFERENTLY for both!
LOVE IT.