We are working on a new fancy website for another advertising agency. Yes, that’s how good we are as an agency. Other ad agencies even hire us to develop their brand. This particular agency wants a website like all their competitors and we totally understand. After all, to stay competitive you need to mimic the competition.

I put together some notes on what I think it takes to mimic the competition. This will serve us well as we move forward to give our client the website they want. As always, at iUC we thrive on your feedback and always consider it before we move forward on any project. I’m listing my notes below and counting on you to let me know if I’m missing anything that it takes to have a typical agency website.

Initial Notes on how to construct an Ad Agency Website:

– Splash Page: include this with a large rotating image accompanied by some initially intriguing, but repetitive and eventually annoying music. Put the skip intro and sound off button in a discreet location so the user has to spend an average of 30 seconds trying to locate these buttons so they can skip the lengthy intro and turn off the annoying music. After all, one of the goals with creating a successful website is creating one that people stay on. Plus, the longer the end user stays the better it makes us look when we review website analytics with the client each month.

-Music Selection: One of my favorite strategies for making music for the background of a website is to create a track that can blend in nicely with whatever music the end user may happen to be listening to on their iTunes. The goal is to distract the user to think “wow, I never noticed this great ambient soundscape in this Radiohead song. Is this a remix?” Dealing with this process usually ads at least 60 seconds to the end users web visit. Great for client analytics!

-Color: What’s in right now is obviously white and blue. Use it or watch your business suffer. It doesn’t matter if your companies’ colors don’t go well with blue. Find a way to get it on your site. A white background with blue text is a good place to start.

-Blog: Your site should have a blog. Who cares if you only post every 3 months and if what you post is just some entry about your mundane life or stories about your annoying little spoiled snotty-nosed kids? The point is not what you post. The point is that you need a blog. Your clients will always ask you if you have a blog. If you answer no, then they will lose all respect for you and determine that you are behind the times. They may even change agencies. If you can manage to post at least once a month, you should make the blog your home page. Once again, don’t worry about what you post. Clients just want to see that you have an active blog. No one is going to read it anyway. Just focus on the entry titles and the frequency of posting. People only read titles and look at your archive to make sure you’ve posted on a regular basis. If you can write great entry titles frequently and a good first sentence you can have a very successful blog.

-Social Media: You’ve got to engage in social media if you want to stand a chance at being relevant as an ad agency. To truly convince your clients you support social media, your agency should have a presence on social media. At minimum, you need to be on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Your website should have links to your social media groups so people can easily join your network. The first step is for your agency to make a “Facebook Group” or better yet a “Facebook Fan Page.” Once again, don’t worry about how much work this is going to be. Once you set it up you don’t have to actually do anything with it. Simply make your “Fan Page” and send an invite to your 400 facebook friends you haven’t talked to in person since high school and you can get a pretty good following. This takes minimal effort, but can get an impressive return. 1000 fans is a good benchmark for impressing your client. The point is just to guilt people that know nothing about your company in to accepting the request to become your fan. After that, you’ll just clutter up their facebook profiles with all the other fan and group and cause invitations they’ve accepted and you’ll never have to do anything else with your account again.
P.S. It’s free.

I feel like I’m still missing something. Is there something else I need to include to have a typical advertising agency website? Please, do tell?

If you happen to be a member or non member for that matter of AAF Greenville I’ve got a little something to talk about. Back in July I was asked by a person on the AAF board to submit a design for their yearly calendar (of course they wanted me – you can’t do any better in Greenville). The only restriction was that I had to fill in the blank in the statement “One Big _________ Family”. For which I chose “Confidence-Boosting”. After that it was free range – at least that’s what I thought. My idea was to evoke peoples imagination. You know since we are filling in the blank – how about the viewer fills in another visual blank. See image below.

Too Provacative?

Yep, that’s it. A mannequin with a black bar placed in the appropriate place. F-ing brilliant. Before I go on let me say that I knew this might be a little provocative for my grandma – maybe my mom, but never people in advertising? Advertising was built on sex and provoking reaction. That’s the point, grab ’em by the balls and feed them your line of shit. Maybe just maybe they will like it.

It came to my attention that at one point my page was actually taken out of the calendar. Too “crazy”. Really? It’s not even a real person. My instant reaction was one of anger, but then I realized that “hey this is Greenville, South Carolina”. I guess in a way I wasn’t expecting it to be a walk in the park, but I would have liked to at least seen people that work in advertising standup and shout “this is art, this is genius, we can’t censor this amazing interpretation”. Well, somebody must have stood up and said something, because a couple of weeks later I heard it was back in. I can only hope that it really is in. From what I hear it’s been out then in more times then Jenna Jameson. I guess tomorrow I’ll find out at the kickoff party. If they took it out so be it. Greenville needs a boost of creatives pulling together and visually shaking up the community. Give people something to think about. Show the creative world that we can be on the map for all the right reasons. Not just because we had a really nice real estate client that was willing to spend $200 per piece on a promotional item. Can you imagine how provocative we could be for $200 per unit.

So, I’d love to see some variations on the black bar. How different can an image be just because it has a black bar on it. Something could take on a whole new meaning, but does that change the original intent? It’s kind of like painting a house – you can keep it nice and neutral, but the minute you paint pink polka dots on it you can just forget it. It’s still the same house – the contents are the same and so is the structure. Maybe we all just need the balls to piss someone off. Maybe we all just need to really look at what we are seeing. It might work better then grabbing your panties and wadding ’em up until tears roll down your face. We aren’t in Kansas anymore Dorothy so put your little blue dress away and start creating from the gut.