Organic | cbrady@organic.com
The work of a digital marketing agency has changed dramatically over the past several years. Agency projects now extend far beyond simple website design— the work continually ventures into the realms of content and brand experience. Digital agencies have started to play an expanded strategic role for clients, and designers now have access to a higher-level audience that is empowered to make larger and more powerful decisions. Finally, the teams that execute the work have evolved to include an entirely new generation of designers who have grown up entirely in the digital age.
These changes have striking implications for the digital marketing industry. They create the context for exciting new possibilities, while simultaneously raising new challenges.
Overhauling Today’s Agencies As recently as two or three years ago, digital marketing agencies like Organic worked primarily to create digital wrappers for pre-existing online and offline content. The starting assumption for any project was that we were creating a new website or reskinning an existing one. The client’s marketing department supplied content drawn from brochures, events, and white papers; our job was to refresh the brand and bring it up to date from a user-experience perspective. For many agencies this kind
of engagement is still typical.
However, over the past few years, Organic’s clients have begun to look to us for richer, more complex responses to their marketing challenges. They increasingly recognize that the online platform demands its own original, unique content, not just repurposed brochure-ware—and they’re making budgets available for us to create original, unique methods of experiencing this content. At the same time, our clients see us as playing a more strategic role in their business and are willing to reconsider preconceived notions of what a digital marketing campaign should look or “feel” like.
We now begin many projects not with an assumption, but with a question: Is creating another website even the right thing to do? Consumers don’t talk about and experience brands solely within the context of our clients’ websites, but everywhere they go, online and off. We recognize that there will always be a hub site; a brand needs a permanent home. But we are also focusing on ways to follow the brand conversation wherever it goes. We encourage our clients to think beyond micro-sites and embrace the idea of micro-experiences: widgets and applications that can be detached from the home site and syndicated across the Web, downloaded to desktops, synched with mobile devices, in
order to give the client a presence on blogs, community sites, social networks, and even in the consumer’s own pocket.
For one Organic client, Bank of America, we created widgets for the iPhone, including an ATM locator and a mortgage-compar-ison engine, that can be syndicated easily to other websites and even pushed into a banner space to meet customers and prospects anywhere they go.
For fitness chain Equinox, we built an application that allows members to manage their entire experience—from booking reservations for a spinning class to managing personal training appointments to reviewing account information—all within a richly branded environment. Members can download the app to their desktop, sync it with Outlook, pull it into their mobile phone, and ultimately make it a seamless and essential part of their daily routine.
But with these rapidly evolving practices and capabilities come new challenges. As digital marketing agencies have moved beyond site redesigns and banner ads to take on an expanded role in branding, our proposals increasingly require executive-level signoff from a vice president or chief marketing officer. And while some executives can talk comfortably about XML data, tagging, and other modern user-experience concepts, many don’t speak that language, even if they
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