A creative void in cyberspace is stunting the growth of online
brands, a top agency executive has warned.
Mr Kent Wertime, chief executive officer for Asia-Pacific of
OgilvyInteractive, said that the Internet had been and continued to be
built largely on functionality.
However, he said that although this is important, it is not the end all
and be all of the cyber experience.
He stressed that an emotional element was also important in brand and
relationship building but he noted that this ingredient was lacking or
missing in 95 per cent of websites he has seen.
"The fact is that people are not moved as consumers simply by
functionality.
They're moved by character as well. But a lot of the sites lack online
character and there is a lack of creating exciting relationships with
consumers.
"A majority of the sites you see today have a lot of material but I see
a lot of cheap 'trick' banner ads or gimmicks that does nothing for
brand building," said Mr Wertime who gave the global creative effort so
far a paltry two-out-of-10.
"When I was in above-the-line advertising, I saw clients cry or laugh
over storyboards; these are emotions that are needed in building
brands.
But I don't think that the Internet has been used to the same extent,"
he told MEDIA.
The solution, he said, was to have strong creative ideas enveloping a
site in order to build the brand character and identity, as well as to
give it a chance to realise its full potential as a key communications
medium.
Mr Wertime said that creativity did not mean the look and feel of the
site. Comparing a website to a TVC, he said that the former was
multidimensional and the latter one-dimensional.
"I'm not knocking television. It's a great way to build brands. But a
website is led by the consumer who chooses to navigate as they want," he
said.
"It is an experience that isn't limited to 30 seconds. If the site is
good, it could be hours.
"There are many levels to think about and the way you help facilitate
the consumers' use of a site - navigating, interacting even transacting
- is a function of the creative process."
The champions of the Internet so far are the technologists and the
people who come up with the business models.
When he gave the two-out-10 rating for Internet creativity, Mr Wertime
said he wasn't "damning" the medium and that the industry should take an
optimistic point of view.
"If I am a creative person then I'll say, 'terrific. I've got eight more
points of potential that I could be doing to make things better'."
He added that in a traditional business setting, consumers could
differentiate the counter sales people from the marketing department and
the production department from the accounting department.
But this is not true of the consumer's experience on the Web.
"Offline, you can divorce the product from the intermediary; the shop
staff who treats me poorly or the salesman who responds promptly to my
complaint. But a website is the marketing, sales, retail, production
departments all rolled into one.
"With an Internet site, how well you provide customer support, how well
it builds a relationship, how attractive it looks, how interesting the
content is, how cleverly it is designed and how easily it is navigated
are all important because to the consumer they don't see the different
component. They just see this one entity before them," said Mr Wertime.
