Our time is being squeezed and our attention fought over left, right, offline, online. When bombarded simplicity cuts through. It’s always challenging and brave to develop and to back the essence of a brand or campaign execution; but ultimately if committed brand work comes together in a ruthlessly simple site execution the result is incredibly effective. We enjoy seeing more and more of this focused assertive brand distillation in action. This year’s global Twitter repositioning ‘Discover Twitter’ was a simple one page site explaining itself in 3 sentences. EF language schools sold the simple dream of summer love in a foreign city in four beautiful videos in their ‘Live The Language’ campaign. And HTC’s ‘Quietly brilliant’ brand comes unassumingly to life in HTC ‘Sense World’.
Online creating an audience, maintaining an audience and developing audience advocacy is about staying in touch. Ongoing editorial is a very natural way to keep talking to people. You can push the content to where people expect conversation – Facebook, Twitter, email – and you can engage people closer to conversion on-site. The trick as marketers is to create an engaging ongoing content platform that requires limited resources to maintain. Mr Porter’s Father’s Day content is a good example – insightful but concise creative leads straight to shopping recommendations. Man City’s site is another example. They have totally editorialised the club investing in a platform that dramatically brings the club to life.
Our old friend ‘The Fold’. We’ve discussed you a lot. Where did you come from? Where do you go? What should go above you? That top of the page real estate is valuable and should be treated with respect. But once you know the rules it’s good to break them. In a world of endless page rendering, touch screen tablets and of course the good old scroll wheel mice, we love how creative the Internet is becoming with page length. From Facebook and Twitter to trendy parallax design and one pager sites long scrolling pages can communicate a unique narrative. Puma’s ‘Clever Little Bag’ site pulls together a diverse range of campaign content and functionality. INQ walks you through their ‘Cloud Touch’ product demo. And Nike ‘Jumpman’ uses endless page length for a typographic led basketball ad.
HTML5 is a major revision of how the web is put together. Much of the development is in incorporating and developing multimedia functionality that has previously been bolted on technology within a browser. Other advancements include smarter use of offline storage, geolocation data and forms. Early HTML5 examples are already hinting at the possibilities. MSN’s ‘Royal Wedding’ timeline shows more seamless, high definition use of interactive animation, images and audio. Rough Guides ‘Make the Most’ site, in a similarly seamless fashion, visualises geotagged flickr photos wonderfully. And of course the now seminal ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ music video from Arcade Fire that pulls together video, animation, and geotagged satellite imagery into your very own personalised music video. Very exciting.
