Andrew Frank“I warn you against believing that advertising is science.” So said Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s great legends who holds the number one rank in Advertising Age’s honor roll of most influential people. So what would Bill Bernbach think of Adobe’s idea, as expressed in its $1.8B acquisition of Omniture, that analytics (e.g., SiteCatalyst) can and should play a deeper role in the design process (e.g., Flash)? As the patron saint of creatives and the champion of the “big idea” model of advertising, he’d probably despise it.
“Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea,” Bernbach said, “It’s like love – the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.” Such notions seem quaint today, in the age of web analysis, as data and analytics guide marketing and publishing budgets and increasingly become the currency of media. While some lament that digital over-analysis is indeed taking a toll on the creative quality of commercial communications, creative developers continue to take solace in the fact that they still hold sway in the design of Flash experiences, whose effects will be evaluated later – for now. And many have dutifully been instrumenting their designs with tracking pixels for years to make them more transparent – with mixed results.
But what happens when they’re introduced to their new cube-mate, an analyst trained in Omniture products who will look over their shoulder and suggest where to put the data collection tags and how to incorporate design elements aimed at real-time optimization? Such a collaboration might produce breakthrough results. Or it might not.
Bernbach is also credited with introducing the idea of the creative team consisting of a copywriter and an art director, which transformed how advertising was designed. Before Bernbach, we’re told, advertising concepts were thought up by copywriters who handed them off to art directors to illustrate. The team concept energized and accelerated the creative process. (Developers may wish to draw analogy to the “pair programming” technique associated with agile methodologies.) Could teaming up creative developers with analysts using a common Flash platform produce similar benefits? Well…
Creative developers tend to be holistic, “right-brain” thinkers who may naturally resist decomposing concepts into measurable units. Analysts tend to be reductionists, inclined to embrace such decomposition and measurement. Top-down organizational initiatives are unlikely to address the issues impeding their successful collaboration.
So, while most commercial web development interests appreciate the need for increased transparency and accountability in their efforts, the question of how best to integrate analytics with web design as a practical matter remains thorny, and the impact of Adobe’s integration efforts will depend not just on Adobe’s execution, but on industry-wide attempts to evolve the web development process in line with Adobe’s vision.
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: Adobe, Advertising, Advertising Metrics, Bernbach, Media, Omniture
