Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

I came across a site on WebForumz today that got me thinking about the way things are advertised today and how it differs from the way it was 10 years ago… or how it doesn’t. The site is for a company called Periscopix who deal in pay per click advertising campaigns. The site is totally weird, especially considering the subject matter, with strange flash animations of Rube Goldberg machines powering projectors and elephants riding around on penny farthings. But does this make the site a failure? Well, the jury is out on that one as it hasn’t actually been released yet and it is still hosted on the test server, but early critiques seem to suggest that the site will indeed fail and despite the fact that it is exactly what the client requested of the designer it will, none the less, lose the company business.

I don’t agree and I’ll tell you why. Websites of this type, when all is said and done, are interactive adverts, nothing more. By that rationale, then, why should you not apply the same techniques that an advertising agency would if they were to showcase your product on television? The most successful adverts in history have been the most wacky. Take the SMASH robots for instance, or the infamous John West Salmon advert where a fisherman is seen to kick a grizzly bear square in the nuts. Sure, these ads might contain at least some reference to the product itself, the robots want the secret to creamy faux potato and the fisherman wants all the salmon to himself, but even if the subject matter is totally removed the advert can still be a huge success. Case in point; a large male silver-back gorilla playing drums with gusto to “In the air tonight” by Phil Collins has absolutely nothing to do with chocolate but boy, does it make me want a Dairy Milk.

The key, it seems, is all to do with grabbing the consumer’s attention when he is at his happiest. This causes him to relate the product being advertised to a happy feeling that he experienced while watching a drumming gorilla, potato-loving robot or indeed a guinea pig happily using her Egg Card to pay for her gym membership. That makes the Periscopix site, in my opinion, truly great. I can imagine clients looking for a company to manage their new pay per click campaign and coming up with forty or fifty sites which all say the same thing and all look the same. Corporate blue and white with all the fancy long winded technical terms to boot. Then, they will come across Periscopix and, if they have a beating heart and functioning brain, will stop and take in the delightfully quirky animations. They might not buy straight away but when they think back to all the companies they looked at, Periscopix will stick in their mind as the one that gave them the most enjoyable user experience.

There have been occasions where this has failed, however. I recently saw a TV ad for a new type of plug-in air-freshener using the common ploy of portraying a CGI animal as the user of the product. Fine, except the animal was an octopus. They’d advertised an air freshener with an animal that spends 100% of the time under water. Kind of like getting Stevie Wonder to advertise your new line of HD Televisions right? It goes to show that this type of advertising still requires some serious thought to avoid disaster but when it’s a hit… it’s a big hit!

Of course there will be people who disagree, after all you can’t please everyone all the time, but the world is changing. People in top level, decision making roles are getting younger and hipper. These are the people you are pitching to. Sadly, web designers seem to be lagging somewhat and designing sites for fastidious old farts when they should be pitching to young, hip and (dare I say it?) metro-sexual decision makers. Come on, the Internet is the newest of all advertising media and as such it should be on the bleeding edge of modern advertising methods. Time for this new dog to learn some new tricks for a change.