www.StopChildAbuse.com.au

About 20 meters from the front of my office, this compelling and poignant piece of advertising has just appeared at the corner of AC/DC Lane & Flinders Lane.

Simple, thought provoking and effective.

www.StopChildAbuse.com.au

Web Trend Map 2009 – Information Architects Japan

Hard on the heels of my post a few weeks back, Information Architects Japan has just released Version 4 of its Web Trend Map. The full version can be viewed here at http://www.informationarchitects.jp/wtm, or click on the below image for a full size 6740 x 4768 (JPG 2.56Mb) on Flickr. As at time of writing the Map wasn’t up on IA Japan’s website yet….

Digital Agency Structure

I was watching the Gruen Transfer on ABC tonight and as usual, was suitably impressed, entertained and intellectually stimulated all at once. It is a great show. In saying that, I thought I would have a look at the website itself and was drawn to their section titled Adworkers. It lists out the different roles within your typical ad agency -

Ad Agency

• Production Manager, Flash Developer, Copy Writer, Art Director, Creative Director, Strategic Planner, Account Executive, Account Director, Personal Assistant, Managing Director, Finance Director & The Founder.

More pertinent are the summaries attached to each – succinct, accurate and precise. Working within a digital services agency as I do at Areeba, it has become more apparent that digital as a career is so young and immature relative to the more traditional realms of sales, operations, accounting, law, medicine, engineering and the arts that we have a bit of a task in explaining ourselves to a client about how we work and why. Ad agencies have been around since the 1850′s and if you tell someone off the street that you work for one, most people have a reasonable idea of the field of endeavour. They might not understand exactly what you do, but they get the context.

Digital is different. There are dozens of niche areas of endeavour, expertise and excellence in this burgeoning realm. To name a few: ad serving, portal management (think working for Yahoo!, Google, Ebay, Amazon, Sensis, Bigpond), social networks, data mining, data planning, customer relationship management (CRM), media buying, analytics, search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, design, development, campaigns, brand relaunch & alignment, stakeholder engagement… The list goes on.

From a digital agency perspective, structurally, there are similarities, but due to intent, there are differences to your classical ad agency. Web sites by their very nature, are a technical discipline, because if you build a website, it’s not just the visual that gets taken into consideration from a brand perspective, it goes deeper into the usabilty and the enticements that keep people engaged with your site that start to play a part. Websites are a derivation of software development, which has to take into account human interface aspects like usability, accessibility, ease of understanding, communications and audience assessment. Kick in there technical considerations. Think on this as one: Internet Explorer 8 was released last week. But consider that there are still 25%+ using IE 7 and 17%+ using IE6 (as at 26th March 2009). Then take into consideration this: if a website works on IE6, then it’s highly unlikely it will work properly on IE8. Introduce Safari on Mac. Firefox. Chrome. Opera….. That is ONE technical consideration. Next: Flash. Version 8, 9 or 10? Next: Javascript. Next: Form’s validation. Next: Data interoperability between website capture database and legacy environment like SAP, Oracle or Siebel. Each of these systems cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to deploy.  So back to the digital agency structure.

Many liken web studios to a software development house.

Yes & No.

• Yes: technical rigour, testing, rollbacks, disaster recovery, code standards, compliance and then the digital hallmarks of usability, accessibility and legibility, which had their underlying foundations in software development.
• No: Brand preservation. Brand extension. Brand enhancement. Brand iconisation. Campaigns. Engagement. Loyalty. Retention.

Software dev houses don’t give a toss (generally) about brand – a logo in the top left corner will suffice. People in Marketing, Corporate Comms, Public Relations and Sales WINCE at this approach because it detracts from the overall cohesive message of a unified, cohesive and consistant company.

So. To the digital agency structure. In my experience, they are structured, one of two ways, depending on the skew of their origins – technical or creative:

Software Development Agency foundation and underpinnings

• Executive – Managing Director, Operations Director, General Manager, Commercial Director; Alternatively CEO, COO, CTO/CIO, CFO, CSO
• Production Technical – Solution Architect, Senior Developer, Developer, Analyst Programmer, Programmer, Delivery/Release Manager
• Production Creative – Design Manager, Senior Designer, Mid Weight Designer, Designer, Junior Designer
• Production Compliance – Strategy Manager, Project Manager,  Senior Business Analyst, Usability Engineer
• Sales/Account Management – Business Development Manager, Inside Sales, Pre-Sales, Account Manager, Account Executive

Creative Services agency foundation and underpinnings

• Executive – Managing Partner,  Creative Director, Strategy Director, Planning Director, Group Account Director, Client Services Director,
• Production – Executive Producer, Senior Producers, Producers, Senior Data Planner, Data Planner,  Flash Developer, Database developer, Senior Art Director, Art Director, Senior Designer, Designer, Junior Designer

Digital Agencies can be either of the above or a hybrid of the above. In addition, you can count as additional roles that pop up by the uniqueness of web: User Experience Architect, Digital Strategist, Engagement Manager, Digital Planner, CRM Strategist, eDM Strategist….. Areeba is unique in that we don’t really have an account layer, preferring to get those senior individuals in the industry who actually enjoy dealing with the clients directly. If you are a developer, you deal with the client. If you are a creative, you deal with the client. If you are a business analyst, you deal with the client. if you are a digital strategist, you deal with the client.  If you are part of the executive team, you deal with the client. No hidden mushrooms or low level juniors hiding in the background working in the sweat shop. Works for us.

So in saying all that, what is my point? Ad agencys are turning to digital, because its the new “it” thing. It’s also where the money is shifting too, driven by the clients who want a tangible measure on their dollars spent verses the result gained. From a marketing and PR perspective, the internet is able to empower clients so much more from an analytics, peer permission and social network context, that the dollars being spent are miniscule and a raindrop compared to where we will be in the next 5 to 10 years. It is only the start of the evolution that is igniting our industry and the first step in this is to get our clients to better understand the value that the industries staff and the digital agencies themselves are able to offer.

Regardless of the structure of your agency, or the agency you are engaging, I see it very firmly that it is our job  and obligation  to communicate the value and worth of each and every staff member across the business, so that the old fashioned values of trust, value, friendship, loyalty and understanding are met. Simple.

Information Architects Japan – Web Trend Map 3

This is very cool. Using the Tokyo Subway as an overlay, the uber smart dudes at Information Architects Japan have listed out close to 300 of the WWW  most visited and influential websites. Each train line represents a trend which the site portrays i.e. social network, news etc.

Interactive version here: http://informationarchitects.jp/start/

Information Architects Japan - Web Trends Map 3

Time Management

Writer Chris Hardwick reveals the inside story of his feature on the art of organizational self-help. Spoiler: After three methods and six weeks, he’s still a little disorganized.

I read this article in my hardcopy of Wired Magazine (January 2009) last night Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek by Chris Hardwick – and got a real laugh out of it, as his summary of modern day time management philosophies gelled very closely with my own. He spends time assessing 3 different time management approaches. The context of his reference to “Get off my lawn” was hilarious. However, in reading this, the article got me thinking about time management in general. I’ve been called/accused/labelled over the years as  a “Schedulling Nazi”, and variations of  (pick one): “Hyper/Extremely/Super/Irrationally Organised”. More accurately put, “Anal Retentive” is as apt a classification as any.

In saying that, since I was a teenager baking bread at 3am at my first job, I have run on the below rule set, which has served me pretty well.

168 hours in a week (7 days x 24 hours)
42-49 hours I’m asleep (7 nights x 6-7 hours each night)
10 hours I’m travelling to/from work (5 days x 2 hours each day)
_________________________
116 hours left, which occupies:

35-45 hours at work (5 days x 7-8 hours each day)
71-81 play, eat, talk, read, interact, look, hear, smell, touch etc.

That is ALOT of time. I don’t care what anyone says, 70 hours to do your own thing is alot, no matter which way you cut it. Luckily I also catch the train, which allows me to read a fair bit, listen to music and on the odd occasion chat to a random somebody (sometimes my dad, sometimes my boss, sometimes a neighbour).

The comfort I take from the above is that I don’t try and make more time. That just ain’t going to happen, much as some other people may try and believe it. So as a conseqence, what prescious time I have, I try and make every second count – type quicker, read quicker, talk (often too much) quicker and cut to the chase on what is important to me. This extends to interactivity – why hang out with people I dont think much of? I would much rather work and spend time with people who I respect, enjoy their company, opinion and as I have alluded too earlier “someone who i can have a beer with”.

The approaches which Hardwick assessed were:

• David Allen:  Getting Things Done
• Julie Morgenstern: Never Check E-Mail in the Morning
• Timothy Ferriss’: The 4-Hour Workweek

Each is definitely worth a read.

The personal side of a Web Project & Relationship

Website building is an endlessly fascinating endeavour because it marries up the functional with the aesthetic, site owners goals and hopes with professional opinion, conjecture and many paths to resolution and understanding & learning. Simplistically one of the biggest problems our industry faces is a lack of care and understanding from both sides of the fence – client & agency – about what one is asking and what the other is expecting.

There are 2 viewpoints which are greeted by any variation of the above:

Client has a problem, desire, goal or requirement to get a web system up and running
Agency has to interpret this input

Agency has a problem, desire, goal or requirement to get a web system up and running
Client has to interpret this output

As a consequence, aspects of how web agencies get chosen from the clients side reasonably fall loosely into the experience, expertise, metric/capacity or fiscal spheres of assessment:

• Experience: How many projects have you done of a similar nature? What technology spread do you support (JSP, ASP, Java, PHP, Unix etc), What is the spread and makeup of your staff – junior, mid range, senior? How and where did you gain your experience?
• Metric/Capacity: Do you have enough staff? Do you have different office locations to both defer risk and service national/international engagements? How many similar clients do you have in the industry (think FMCG, Manufacturing, Banking & Finance, Government etc)
• Fiscal: Do you offer value for money? Are you too expensive? Are you too cheap? (not representing value and experience), How financially stable are you to maintain liquidity and viability in tough times?

However, I think the one that gets absolutely and totally underrated, misjudged and overlooked time and time again is the very basic question: Do they get along with you? Broken out this can include:

• Personal: Do they like you? Do you get along with them? Are you their type of person?

The cold hard facts are thus: If they don’t like you, they most certainly don’t want to spend their companies money with you, because it is likely the decision in web agency that is being considered will be scrutineered at the highest levels of the business read: board, C-level, head of division etc. Liking you can encompass any number of measures: Appearance, mode of speaking, body language, race (even though they will never imply this),  social upbringing & background, what sort of clothes you wear,  what sort of car you drive, whether you are a Mac or PC user…. Unfortunately, it can even extend to your character and way you present things – it is such a personal and intangible aspect of new business engagements, it needs to be considered closely and kept in mind at all times.

A very basic metric I always put in front of someone when I first meet them and am considering working with them – “Would I have a beer with them outside of work?” If it’s a no, then I find, perhaps through pre-programmed predujice, we tend not to win the job. I adopt the position that if I don’t get along with them, then it isn’t very likely the team I represent will likely get along with them either. I consider my work colleagues with a deep level of respect and admiration for the work they do and subsequently I count them as friends because, I always have a position where I admire my friends and their achievments and value systems.

Why on earth then, would I want to afflict my work colleagues/friends with a client who I assess as someone I wouldn’t want to have a beer with?