CREATION: Attempts at online branding are being scuppered by a 'creative void' in cyberspace

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.

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