Organic Digital Marketing 2.0
Conor Brady
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
