"World Wide Wonderland"

Online - The BIG Idea - July/August 1996
by Bayard Saunders

Having embarked on the path of embracing online technology with a passionate curiosity, like Alice passing through the looking-glass, creative directors are finding rabbit holes everywhere! Which one do you choose to fall down?

Online Focus

So you or your boss or client decide, perhaps for no better reason than "keeping up with the Joneses, Inc.," (which is a valid business reason in some cases) to publish on the net, get wired, establish your presence in cyberspace... You need "Alice’s Online Survival Guide for Creatives:"

Rabbit Holes - Publishing, Marketing or Commerce

The World Wide Wonderland today has three possible rabbit holes to fall down... First, you may engage in publishing for entertainment or the distribution of information. Second, you may try marketing to help guide prospects through the shopping process, and communicate with owners to build loyalty through relationships based on the exchange of data. Finally, you may conduct commerce and transact business online, taking orders and delivering products or services. Each of these options demands increasingly complex creative elements to be done successfully, and respectively, greater commitment of budget and senior management support. Choose wisely, because once you start falling down a hole, it is almost impossible to change your objectives and arrive at another.

"Drink Me" Bottles - Online Publishing Software

Advertising in magazines or through direct mail, these are the "easy solutions," offered by online publishing software companies promising to cure what ails you - to do your job for you. They may make you tall. They may make you small. They have no FDA warnings. And the only certainty is that, like the early desktop publishing software, anyone can and probably will use them to make an easy buck. But like those hideous basement-published newsletters and brochures of the early ‘80’s, quality is the final test, and websites constructed with these simple tools almost never pass muster. However, the best work today is done by creatives who do use these tools to help them design (how can you work creatively in an experiential medium without experiencing it firsthand?), and then jointly develop the implementation (interactive programming) with information systems professionals.

Cheshire Cat - Consultants & Vendors

Few companies have the resources internally to staff online development projects, so the choices are: hire a company whose product/service mix encompasses all areas of expertise online, or hire a consultant to build a temporary team for you, or help you decide on an appropriate vendor relationship. The worst case scenario is the consultant who merely "oversees" your process, adding no valuable contribution to a team effort, whose real objective is to be transparent, and whose morale-busting uber-project-manager grin taints your corporate collective-memory. The best is the consultant who can help facilitate your strategic planning, to truly integrate online communications into your existing advertising/marketing business plan, and whose company or virtual network of resources has previously delivered successful programs. It also helps if you can agree ahead of time on knowledge-transfer from their organization to yours, and the manner of their (hopefully) quiet disappearance.

Mad Hatter’s Tea Party - Creative "Users Groups"

There is no tea party. Other than national conferences where networking is encouraged, there are few resources for creative individuals to interface about this medium and its inherent challenges. In an effort to help establish an environment to encourage the sharing of ideas, MIIACOM, Inc., (http://miia.com) is sponsoring an electronic bulletin board or forum for the purpose of bringing creative individuals together in a community of interest about online communications. Anyone is lucky to be fifteen minutes ahead of anyone else in this business, where things just get curiouser and curiouser, so there is no reason not to share as much as possible with each other at this stage. Please pass the sugar... one lump or two?

Red Queen - Senior Management

Roughly 7% of all advertising budgets of the Fortune 100 companies last year was re-distributed to direct marketing program budgets. A little less than 1% went to interactive communications, like internet world wide websites, but that percentage is increasing in direct proportion to the increase in direct marketing expenses. The most prolific problem is that true support from the executive levels of management cannot be forthcoming until those individuals responsible for leadership are able to understand the new medium, to the extent they can include some of the medium’s inherent relationship marketing principles in strategic planning at the executive level. Without support and ownership at the highest levels, it will always be easier to cut off someone’s head than learn from these early experiences online.