Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

The Internet is a strange and mysterious beast. Unpredictable and all over the place, you just never know what is going to start on fire and blow up across browsers everywhere. When it comes to the viral aspect of the Internet, there is no science. You think you know, but you don’t. Fortunes have been made and lost over trying to predict what will go viral on the net. Just when you think you’ve got a sure thing, a hamster or something equally absurd comes along and makes you shake your head with a collective – why??? Followed by a wish that you would have thought of it.

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Over at i [love] marketing, Ana Andjelic makes some valid and interesting points on the comparison of digital and traditional agencies in her post titled Why Digital Agencies Aren’t Ready to Lead. It’s an interesting issue to consider. With integration and convergence now more or less a no-brainer, you really can’t have a campaign span both traditional and non-traditional channels without providing a consistent experience (can you?).

Ana defines digital agencies as “focusing on experimentation”, spinning their wheels trying to out-create competing agencies by making bigger and more complex digital experiences, while traditional shops “thrive on exploitation”, leveraging their bag of marketing tricks. This equates to more of a typical business model – make it once and sell it over and over again. It’s true, digital shops are terrible at this.

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There have been many great duo’s over the history of pop-culture, fiction, and of course media. Henrik & Daniel, Laurel and Hardy, Jan and Dean, Simon & Garfunkel, oh and let’s not forget Siegfried & Roy. (hah!)

Well it looks like we’ll be adding another duo to the list of greats, since our very own Beck & Gallagher were included on an impressive list of young people leading the way in the marketing industry from 10 to an unprecedented accommodation of 11.

Beck & Gallagher, as in Stephen Beck and Richard Gallagher, both Founding Partners and Creative Directors here at Engine Digital, have been named to Marketing Magazines “Ones to Watch” list for 2009, or in this case, “two to watch.” Since one couldn’t be mentioned without the other in regards to the success of another benchmark year at Engine Digital, the folks at Marketing Magazine decided to include the pair in their exclusive list.

All of us here at Engine Digital get the opportunity to marvel at the expertise of these guys in action every day so it’s nice to have their efforts appreciated by, and along with, their peers in the industry.

Congratulations to all the other “Ones to Watch,” and especially Beck and Gallagher, who will be receiving complimentary lion taming lessons as a gift from the rest of the staff here at Engine.

Last-Click Attribution Bites the Dust

It’s sad, but true. The age of the “Click” and its cousin CTR (click through rate) is over. For 10+ years, almost since the advent of online advertising, the click has been the anchor metric of online campaigns. As several recent studies have shown, the click can no longer be cast as the hero.

What we’ve learned with the drop-off in click activity is that last-click attribution is a poor way to measure the value of display campaigns. Attribution is a wordy way of saying, “Who generated the sale? lead? conversion?” With every new study on display, global click-through rates continue to decline and the ad unit suffers another reputation hit. I’ll put my Obama hat on here so there is no misunderstanding. ‘Let me be clear. Exclusive examination of the click-through rate and its connected goals will lead you astray. You may credit campaigns when credit isn’t due. You might even fault your media planners or your creative agency without realizing that you’re looking at the wrong data.’

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Stephen and I made the misty mountain climb to the world of higher education and the picturesque campus of Capilano University in North Vancouver on a rainy Wednesday earlier in the week. We were scheduled to speak to a large group of students enrolled in the IDEA Program as part of Capilano’s mandate to give students access to industry professionals by way of 2 hour lectures and presentations. Everyone was assembled and waiting for our discussion about the role of the Digital Agency and the history of the Online Brand Experience, and I embarrassingly admit that some things haven’t changed since our school days, because we were a bit late! Still, things went off without a hitch and the students at Capilano were an attentive bunch that had some great and insightful questions after our presentation.
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