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"The Interactive Industry needs its own Identity"

19 June 2009

Simon Van Wyk downloads some of his thoughts on the Industry, its future and where he believes Digital should sit in the marketing / advertising mix...

You’ve made it well known that you think the Interactive Industry needs its own identity. What exactly does this mean?

Back in 1995 when the interactive industry really began, we all started with a 'can-do' pioneering attitude that really forged the industry. People were looking to do new things and there was a swagger. We were going to change the world, almost!  The thing that the industry had was that we were all committed to making a difference, measuring things and being accountable. We tried to forge an industry with a new way of working, we had a clean sheet and were keen to see things done in a different way.

I think the industry needs to hold onto that mantra, in terms of energy and ways of doing things, and not fall into the habits of the advertising industry. The Interactive industry is also fundamentally different to the advertising industry because we build things.  Building things requires a team – business people, programmers, information architects and designers.  There is no room for a single vision only driven by creative.

The advertising industry really should have been the interactive industry – they had the clients, the imprimatur, the relationships and most of them did nothing about it.  Why? I think they lacked the passion. It is a fast moving and constantly evolving medium.  Also ad models evolved in an era when there was a scarcity of media, when there were basically 4 TV channels and 2 major publishers of newspapers.  That era was all about target markets and truth about the product; our era is different. There is now no scarcity of media, consumers don’t need advertising like they used to. It is so fundamentally different to the old way of doing things, we need to find an identity that reflects this.

Do you think that traditional agencies can successfully provide a 360 service to clients, or will there always be a need to have an external web partner? Is creating our own identity being counter-active, shouldn’t we be working collaboratively with traditional marketers and advertisers in a channel agnostic way?

The opportunities are now way too complicated for one group to claim they can offer a 360 degree solution.  Also my experience of 360 was a TVC and a range of other things that looked the same.

I think the integration should start from digital out, not the other way around. The web gives the understanding of who is buying, who is looking at your product and why. This gives us the ability to go back to traditional media with insights that you would never have seen going the other way.  In the U.S for example, some digital agencies are now controlling the budgets.  Digital should elevate out and above the advertising industry rather than be a part of it. 

Media planners have unlimited opportunities and tools to maximize insights and then feed back into campaigns where they can be optimized to better manage budgets and drive maximum ROI, that opportunity should feed its way back into traditional planning, marketing and advertising.  Rex Briggs for example, thinks interactive budgets are optimal at around 20%, but the understanding that you get from that 20% almost makes sure the rest of the spend is optimised. In terms of channel agnostic, I think everyone says they are channel agnostic but it seems to me guys like Naked have really managed to separate themselves from the advertising industry on the basis of truly being channel agnostic.  So I suspect that whilst most agencies say they are channel agnostic the reality is that more often than not it's not the case.

Some brands have adopted and are embracing social media, do you think social media can work for industries such as IT and technology? Is brand engagement through social media relevant?

The problem that I have with social media is that in 1997 we built 'Manhood,' which had the ability to help build a community and engage with a community (link: http://www.manhood.com.au/) It was a common sense solution and I think that part of the problem with social media today is that common sense has gone out of the window. The goal of agencies is to help sell products.  FORD in Asia is a great example of this, they have been using social media for one of their launches and it has been a complete failure because none of the initiatives are going to help buy a car, you can’t build a community around buying a car.
 
In terms of brand engagement, I don’t think anyone has done it better than Harley Davidson. They built a brand, created a community and haven’t looked to control it but have instead fostered it.  Whether technology is utilised or not, a community will be successful if it is fostered in a manner that works for the community first and the brand second.  This is because you can only build community where a community already exists.  A community doesn’t exist around peanut butter, but it does exist around mums and that is where the community needs to be fostered, not just within the social media space but everywhere.  Going back to the Harley Davidson example, everything they have done is around “fostering” a community. It’s the community that brings the brand engagement to life and I often see this done the other way around. 

Dove ‘real beauty’ was also a great example. They built a community with the values they wanted to imbue in their brand.  They did not try and build a brand community. (link: http://tinyurl.com/ylzku6) It’s subtle but quite different.

Favourite project you’ve worked on?

There are two. The first one would be the Prius for Toyota. We worked with John Connomos who had a vision for us to essentially sell cars online. This was a world first and we connected the supply chain to the website.  You could price a car, search for stock, select a car or order one and track the delivery online.  This was 2000 and it’s still not common practice today.  Toyota made the dealers respond to online leads within 20 minutes. It was such a good project and we did it in an extraordinarily short time with a team across the company.  No politics – only a shared vision to get it done right and on time.  We also launched a game called ‘Race around the world,' a viral that you could download, the car drove around your desktop.  If was distributed virally and 58,000 were downloaded. 

Sexbytes was also a great project – it was our very first website.  We were doing CD-ROMs and we could see the web was on the way. I had in a previous life written 800 pages of sex education content covering everything from contraception to the nuts & bolts, and we though ‘why don’t we put that live’?  We spent our nights going to other sites asking for links and because of the quality of our content we got them.  We were getting so much traffic, we were the 6th most accessed site off Webcrawler and had more traffic than the Sydney Morning Herald.  Then we eventually sold it to Microsoft and it became part of the first NineMSN websites as Feelgood.  Now 10 years down the track the whole project still sits well, the concept – the photos, the content. And it was FUN!


Profile: Founder and former MD, Hothouse Interactive (http://www.hothouse.com.au/)

I have been in interactive communication since 1993.  I started with a multi-national group on a product management/marketing career path, and for the first 8 years it gave me a sense of how large organisations work.  In 1994 in a stroke of luck I had the opportunity to start making CD –ROMs.  We made the first commercial CD Rom in Australia and used this to launch Brilliant Interactive Ideas. Unfortunately the CD-ROM market died, they were cool for about 6 months and that market really just crashed.  I moved over to a small advertising agency called Frontline, working with Microsoft. We founded Hothouse as a separate business off the side of Frontline with our first client being Microsoft.

Written by: Simon Van Wyk talks to Jacinta Coyle

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