speaking in clicks

[April 16, 2010]

In developing creative concepts for any advertising medium, conflicts often arise between a client’s specific demands and the task of motivating consumers to take a desired action. This conflict is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the frequently protracted process of finalizing the copy.

Like most conflicts, this one is multilayered, affecting different aspects of the process at different times. It can be summarized under the general heading of perfectionism. Perfectionism itself, the compulsive pursuit of an unattainable idea, is plenty destructive on its own. Doubly so, since the criteria for achieving “perfection” are deeply irrational.

In the sphere of advertising copy, however, this compulsive drive to write, rewrite, or revert to “safe,” existing copy also has a disastrous impact on brand-building and ROI. Sadly, this particular type of perfectionism, this Anxiety of the Word, grows out of a fundamental misunderstanding about the way language works. No matter which marketing ideology you subscribe to, you must realize that what motivates people to action isn’t individual words.

What motivates is a clear, fresh message, based on a deep understanding of audience desires. That message is a promise, of reward, fulfillment, enhancement, of health or of wealth—but never a promise that only certain phrases will appear on the page. Why, then, devote so many hours to incessant word-picking, while relegating the real message, the promise to consumers, to a few trite phrases of marketing speak buried in the back pages of a creative brief?

Deluded by a deluge of diddly details.
Let’s go back to first causes and realize that language is a complex phenomenon encompassing far more than words on a page. Words are only a conduit for ideas pouring out from a specific point of view, in this case, a sales proposition. Layered on top of that is what should be a very carefully conceived brand persona—emerging from the total impact of the communication.

That’s because language communicates through a composite of word, rhythm, gesture, accent and honest emotion. In advertising, the core of this phenomenon is a promise of affirmation. We’ve all had the experience of being “sold” and, thinking back, the process involved a lot more than just reading a formulaic call to action. It consisted of a gradual matching of our personal attributes and goals to key attributes and goals of the brand and the specific product.

Now, as I see it, the key word here is “gradual,” and this is another reason why we need to stop fussing over individual words. For all this wrangling grows out of another delusion, deeply embedded in current practice: The idea that each communication with consumers must convey all and every detail of the product’s benefits and features.

Little words. Big picture.
Why does this matter? Because you can’t drive a message home just by repeating it verbatim. You must weave it into the very substance of your relationship with consumers. Take, for example, the message “I love you.” As most people would agree, that message takes time to express itself meaningfully. In a similar way every marketing message, to be credible, lasting and believable needs to be rolled out over a period of months.

So instead of trying to “fix” the words in a specific consumer engagement, you’d do better to put that pent-up energy into mapping out your brand promise in more depth, and deciding how to stage its communication over the course of a year, five years, ten years or more.

Once you start “thinking big” about language you’ll see just how futile, trivial and misguided a perfectionist obsession with individual words actually is. You’ll let Copy Creatives stop editing and go back to their real work: The intricate weaving of targeted idioms, brand messaging and deep structure that creates memorable, meaningful and motivating communication.

[April 13, 2010] 

[This post reflects the state of the sites discussed at the time. The issues raised are still relevant to the discussion of digital journalism in the US.]

Recalling the digital faces of major news outlets I’ve explored so far, I see they are, in essence, mere adjuncts to whatever’s happening on the main stage. “That’s the news. For more information, visit us online…” goes the refrain on many a news broadcast. Yet, often enough, what’s online is really an information dumping ground, a “newsfill” for everything squeezed out by commercials.

Such sites show no appreciation for digital space as a medium with unique capabilities and a global reach. For example, ever since “google” became a verb it has become the very exemplar of information gathering. In that sense, one indication that journalism might be faltering lies in its failure to address how people seek news in 2010. Should audiences discover they have a better chance of keeping up via Stumble Upon, the vultures will indeed begin their spiral.

A voice you can hear.
Still, as I see it, some news outlets do present news more idiomatically online. Reuters, for example, succeeds just by putting the emphasis on news itself. That’s “news,” by the way, as opposed to “news items,” “news stories,” let alone “what’s hot.” What stands out here is not the layout itself as a design statement, rather this layout’s power to delimit, edit and focus attention.

Like a trusted advisor, reuters.com greets users with an actual point of view. And in the end, that’s the difference between, “Communication Arts” and communication: Someone real to talk to. Brand personality here emerges as a consistent criterion for selection, an actionable model for what “news” means.

In a very different way, Time also establishes a distinctive voice, by creating a consistent frame of reference for what is and is not news. Contrary to expectation, the layout creates a sense or order and conscious selection by retaining much of the visual organization of a print magazine. Aside from a horrific Technology section, there’s a sense of proportion here, of higher level design and intelligence, effectively mimicking an encounter with a real person. The impact is palpable: The site has Presence.

Likewise, The New York Times uses the full repertoire of text, still photography, slide show, animation and video, to craft an editorial persona all its own. The true strength of its design, however, lies in how well it’s conceived to be read. After all, words matter in journalism. In terms of proportion, spacing, and font selection, nytimes.com has been thoroughly imagined as a digital space for absorbing news as text.

A stance you can take.
That it also incorporates many of the signature features of social networking—without walking one centimeter away from its heritage—surely suggests that journalism need not “die.” In fact, the examples I’ve chosen show that if anything is killing journalism, it’s not an emerging generation hopelessly addicted to social media. As with every other major dilemma a fictive, slanderously conceived “They” are not the source of the problem.

For if the Slogans of Doom are correct, this will not be a case of Murder by Media Revolution but—as evidenced by its digital face—a case of Suicide by Indifference. As the more successful news sites show, everything is in place to ensure journalism will survive. All that may be missing is the willingness of editors—or the media conglomerates that fill their water dishes—to keep journalism alive as a vital, dynamic and essential component of American culture.

[April 10, 2010]

[This post reflects the state of the sites discussed at the time. The issues raised are still relevant to the discussion of digital journalism in the US.]

Aside from the issues I’ve already discussed, my exploration of the digital face of journalism has also driven home to me the signature attributes of digital space as an emerging medium. I say “emerging,” because we don’t yet know what form it will ultimately take. Despite the squealing hysteria surrounding the iPad, even that sleek new device is only capable of displaying digital space as it exists today.

With that caveat, however, a few things seem clear. Digital space is, at a fundamental level, a multidimensional experience unfolding in real time. That means an effective, motivating Web site must be more than a tidy assemblage of image, text and motion graphics. It needs, through over-arching architecture and design, to simultaneously grow out of and inhabit its own unique world.

And on that score, the vast majority of sites devoted to delivering on the promise of American journalism fail miserably. That this is intimately bound up with the perceived demise of the field can be seen in every way the home pages of Fox News, C-Span, UPI and The Huffington Post are decidedly different from the iPad.

In a promotional environment where the iPad could sell out Yankee Stadium if it chose to give a concert, it’s hard to imagine these sites are reaching more than a fraction of their intended audiences. That is, assuming the goal of journalism is not to appeal only to a narrow band of obsessive-compulsives, market researchers or ideologues on holiday.

Stacked like hotcakes…
The problem, again, is partly one of organization. While all four of these sites do create some sense of hierarchy at the top of their templates, each quickly loses definition. The category labels at foxnews.com, do no more to guide or motivate users than a conventional coffee shop menu.

At c-span.org, the labels “What We’re Covering” and “Featured Links” are too generic. In the first instance, the heading reduces the site to the status of a help menu for c-span broadcasts. Equally important, these neutral demarkers, like their “just the facts” cousins in digital and direct marketing, are not motivating. “Great,” says the user, “I’ll check out the Featured Links after I find the news stories I’m looking for.”

By the same token, given UPI’s heritage of excellence, I can’t understand why it would take so little care of its digital footprint. With an information flow far below the standard set even by Flickr, upi.com can only be navigated by ESP. Finally, huffingtonpost.com consists solely of a welter of topical articles, blog posts and images stacked like hotcakes in a rural truck stop. The disarray is further compounded by a cluttered navigation.

…and served up with indifference.
In each case, the effect is analogous to that of a landscape architect dumping hundreds of pounds of sod, seed and fertilizer on a vacant lot and calling it a “garden.” Like a well designed park, a Web presence needs to exist to serve its regular visitors, by offering different paths through it, providing areas of rest and recreation and creating a welcoming environment.

Because when someone arrives at a news source—whether via the latest technological heart-throb or a battered CPU running Windows 98—the one and only reason they’ve come is to be enlightened, informed and, yes, reasonably entertained. In my next post I’ll discuss sites I believe achieve those needs more successfully.

[April 6, 2010] 

[This post reflects the state of the sites discussed at the time. The issues raised are still relevant to the discussion of digital journalism in the US.]

As I continued to search the digital face of American journalism, for signs of its impending demise, I discovered more evidence that—in an effort to be more “relevant” to a badly drawn portrait of the digital audience—digital news editors had walked even farther away from their heritage than their on-air counterparts.

At least on a traditional national news program, we feel the weight of an achoring personality. This is someone who lends the proceedings some sense of perspective and authority. No doubt today’s audience has no stomach for the somewhat paternalistic tone struck by Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Peter Jennings. The only thing about “the old days” less likely to recur is the use of music by Beethoven as a theme song for a nightly newscast.

Yet even in the aftermath of the broadcast Reformation that followed the now-mythic 1960s, personalities like Katie Curic, Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams still offer viewers a point of orientation. Online, anything like a unifying perspective at sites serving the major broadcast news outlets is conspicuously absent. Accordingly, my visit to ABC News and MSNBC turned up only slight variations on the themes I discussed in relation to cbsnews.com in my previous post.

Trivial pursuits.
As it appeared on April 5, 2010, the abcnews.com homepage presented users seeking the big picture with a dizzying array of disassociated design elements. At the top of the list was a thumbnail crawler offering a random sampling of the day’s most titillating gossip. Is Tiger back in the swing? Did Whoopi have an affair? Will Erykah Badu apologize?

What follows on the home page is a patchwork of links and associated thumbnails raining down on our consciousness at random. In mild contrast to CBS, ABC puts slightly less emphasis on its broadcast news menu, but that hardly matters. Far from being about “the news,” abcnews.com is a free-for-all of information overload delivered in no discernable order.

Like the Facebook page it emulates, it’s a list of lists, offering no center of gravity, no focal point and no interpretation of the day’s events. Even within the category headings further down the page, the rationale for grouping these stories is not at all clear. Ironically, this confusing visual experience is not only discouraging to anyone seeking perspective on the news, I also have a hard time believing it serves the needs of the gossip-addicts it panders to.

Demotivating clutter.
MSNBC’s more sober approach has many payoffs, if for no other reason than that the layout gives the users’ eye somewhere to rest. Beyond that, the categorization of news items begins much higher up in the layout and, within each subsection, there’s a clear hierarchy of attention. By whatever criteria the stories are grouped, it’s easy to see what the editors intend me to focus on.

While I may not agree with their choices, the resulting frame of reference makes the site much more readable. That small accomplishment alone lends this site at least the aura of authority, a sense that one might reasonably expect something that YouTube or your BFF can’t offer. Even given that aura, however, the site’s cluttered appearance is still deeply demotivating.

In my next post, I’ll look at a few more familiar players then visit sites orbiting outside the gravitational pull of network broadcast news.

[Aptil 2, 2010] 

[This post reflects the state of the site discussed at the time. The issues raised are still relevant to the discussion of digital journalism in the US.]

In an attempt to understand what impact the digital face of major news outlets might be having on the declining state of American journalism, I started by taking a close look at CBS News. As I mentioned in my previous post, this site shares with many of its competitors a rather lifeless, by-the-numbers approach to design and architecture.

That is, it’s merely functional. Yes, users can conveniently access news stories. There’s a lot more to a motivating Web presence, however, than access. Users also need a point of orientation. At cbsnews.com, however, the editors have completely leveled the landscape. There’s no hint of expert opinion signifying which stories might logically claim our attention, as adults concerned about the state of the world. Instead of meaningful orientation, the site offers only an incoherent wall of noise.

Hence, on the home page for April 1, 2010, a story about Apple’s iPad jostled for attention with a profile of celebrity sex addiction, with recipes for Easter, with a story about P. Diddy and with a disturbing announcement of a potential beheading in the middle east.

Can’t spell “press” without “PR.”
More unrelated items followed, grouped by the program they air on. To me, this signals a serious confusion of intent. Does the site exist to promote journalistic values—the press freedoms at the core of the American experience—or does it exist to create PR for TV shows? A look at the top navigation, a catalogue of CBS news programs, confirms that PR is a deep-rooted value here.

Granted, there’s nothing wrong with CBS promoting its news products on its digital news hub. Sure, broadcast media needs a revenue stream. But giving these links pride of place begs the question: If we’re meant to lament the imminent Death of Journalism, isn’t it reasonable to expect that Journalism might actually exist outside the realm of entertainment?

In fact, only a small portion of the content at cbsnews.com confirms the existence of a proud journalistic tradition.Steamy slide shows don’t count as news—unless it’s actually news to you that America has a burgeoning sexual subculture. Is there news analysis in the traditional sense? Keep scrolling and you’ll find an array of Facebook-like jpeg-and-caption modules indexed by category, like a lack-luster offering to appease discredited gods.

Welcome to the salad bar.
Clearly, if people are unwilling to swim in this ocean of information, it’s due to the fact that, in yet another triumph of Marketing Anxiety, the site tries to be all things to all people. Ironically, CBS News shows little understanding of who these people are and what they want.

People don’t come to a supposed news authority for an all-you-can-eat buffet of information. They’re looking for expertise. After all, “salad bar” news service is available everywhere. You can find it on Oprah, YouTube, Facebook, in blog space or in the 1,000,000+ opt-in “newsletters” used as promotional tools by cause-marketers and cheese-merchants alike.

By refusing to stand for something more substantial, CBS News has equated itself with the lowest common denominator. Seen from this perspective, the issue is hardly the Death of Journalism, rather the Voluntary Abandonment of Journalism.

In my next post, I’ll take a similar look at a few more mainstream news outlets to see just how pervasive these issues have become.

[March 30, 2010]

As anyone knows who has followed the debate about American healthcare reform, we live in an era dominated by ideology. Whether grounded in fact or paranoia, a single phrase uttered in commercial media space quickly becomes a battle cry of uncommon ferocity—sufficient to motivate oceans of people to protest a bill they haven’t yet read.

Although conducted at a much lower emotional pitch, the current spate of lamentations about the death of journalism bear the same stamp of hypnotic allegiance to one-dimensional slogans.

As always, it’s a question of perspective. Surely, it would be more appropriate to say journalism is in the midst of a major transition. Not that there’s anything abstract or intangible about newspapers shutting down and people losing their jobs. That, regrettably, is quite real. Less real is the supposition that this alone signals the demise of an entire discipline.

Shift of inclination or simple decline?
Now, as I understand it, part of the reason some people are ready to measure journalism for a casket is the number of eager witnesses who regularly post cell-phone images to social space. There are, apparently, news editors who feel they’re being “scooped” into irrelevance by a generation they believe has stopped reading and stopped watching TV. Whether TV viewership is actually declining, however, is open to debate. But statistics aside, since when has journalism been defined as simply “reporting stuff?”

If mainstream news consumption is off, I doubt it has much to do with “millennial indifference” or the rise of social space as a permanent fixture. No, if people are tuning out, it’s more likely due to a decline in standards for objective evidence gathering and the gradual demotion of broadcast news to the status of an entertainment medium. Simply put, these two trends, for which the medium must take full responsibility, have eroded our trust.

A re-imagined medium…
As evidenced by the Web sites of many major news outlets, however, if the audience for traditional journalism is shrinking, there’s still one more reason: With only a few exceptions, these sites are a disaster. It’s as if, in their contempt for that new-fangled-Internet-what’s-it, competing news bureaus had all hired the same discount design vendor to get them up and running until the fad wore off.

Trouble is, it’s not 1999 anymore. If the major news outlets believe people have turned away from the tube and toward digital space, the only reasonable course is to set a new standard. In other words, to provide analysis and global vision no well-intentioned witness of the recent Moscow subway bombings could ever encapsulate by uploading camera phone clicks to social space—and do so in a new format re-imagined for digital space.

…or more poll-dancing?
But in a manner analogous to the behavior of our elected officials, professional journalism seems unwilling to take a stand against the societal forces aligned, we’re told, to seal its doom. With very few exceptions, instead of defining a new standard for the digital dissemination of news, many statistic- and poll-addicted news media executives, like many of their political counterparts, have become complicit in the Facebookization of their field.

In the next few posts, I’ll try to sort out the steps news services might take to regain credibility and reposition themselves—as more than just a click on the continuum between gossip and scandal.

[March 26, 2010]

Read a typical creative brief and, usually somewhere toward the end, you’ll find a slim, generalized description under a heading like “Voice and Tone.” Regardless of the branch of advertising you’re in, models for voice and tone conform to only a handful of prototypes, depending on business category. Often expressed as a chain of adjectives, a typical Voice and Tone summary goes something like this:

• Upbeat, conversational, youthful, affirmative, action-oriented.
• Serious, yet hopeful, empowering, empathetic.
• Confident, positive, authoritative, aspirational.

What concerns me here is the way these shallow descriptions of voice and tone are consistently mistaken for the real thing. Instead of empowering Creatives to craft a viable, branded voice for the project, these ritualized descriptions seek to turn an essential creative function into a mechanical process. That’s why, across the industry, voice and tone vary only by genre—despite detailed audience analysis and innumerable studies in generational identity.

Worse, each genre is endowed with a set repertoire of stock phrases. “Together, we can make a difference,” runs the concluding sentence of many a cause marketing blurb. “The kids will love it. Grown-ups, too,” drones the unctuous resort promotion. Shop-worn phrases like this pop up everywhere. Why? Because they bring with them the reassuring tick of the checkbox.

Presented with a string of commonplace observations (“Shopping for a new car can be confusing. With so many models to choose from…”) American consumers tune out. They’ve heard it before. In a 24/7 world drenched in media, message and marketing, that kind of talk couldn’t sell matches to an arsonist.

Stand for something real.
If you want to get a response, you’ve got to dig deeper, touch a nerve—and start a sympathetic vibration between the brand persona and the person you’re trying to reach. The first step is to actually establish that distinctive, brand persona. Only a fleshed-out personality can have a believable “voice,” can express empathy, motivate consumers to plan for their financial future, or captivate them long enough to sell them an overpriced vacation package.

Most of all, only a carefully crafted brand persona can speak directly to the heart, imagination and worldview of your audience, by embodying something identifiable, tangible and real. That can’t be done with a tagline or a logo alone. It can’t be done with a color wheel or a flash animation. A brand persona is a composite of language and image, something (or rather, someone) that emerges from the total environment we create for consumers.

And it all begins with a true, textured, layered and culturally relevant tone of voice. It’s the kind of thing your Copy Creatives are just itching to create for you, if only you’ll leave the tried and true behind and stand for something real. It’s not how much you say, but whether you make it memorable, meaningful and mesmerizing. Benefits? Schmenifits. No matter how many asterisked USPs you bullet out, your efforts are wasted without copy that creates a vivid, captivating experience for your audience.

[March 23, 2010]

In the last few years, a new copywriting sensibility has started to emerge. Despite the twists, turns and inconsistencies of this trend, it does have a common thread: An attempt to emulate the spontaneity, vitality and apparent honesty of user-generated content.

So far, this call for “authentic selling” has had few echoes outside the conference room. Cosmetic changes notwithstanding, the average Web presence still addresses its audience in a tone not too far removed from the used car lot. Whether this has more to do with strictures from the client side, or an addiction to bad habits, is still open to debate.

Meanwhile, the only real change in digital space is the inclusion of content from supposedly authentic sources—including bloggers making paid endorsements or consumers posting showy, flamboyant comments no more reflective of reality than the goings on at Survivor, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives or, for that matter, the WWE. Yes, there are important exceptions, but we can’t be so naïve as to ignore the recent “fakening” of reality in American culture—and assert that amateur writers are necessarily more authentic than professional ones.

So, OK, let your Web presence become a conduit for the voice of the public, whoever they are. Done right, you’ll earn repeat visits and acceptance as a brand open to consumer input.

You will, however, still have to sell your product.

Real, specific, local.
What should selling look like in the Web 2.0 century? Any attempt to sum it up neatly in a new paradigm would only repeat the mistakes of the past. There are, after all, 1001 product categories being pitched every day to 1001 audience segments. Very few “rules” apply equally well to selling toasters as to selling, say, healthcare reform.

For that very reason, we might be on safe ground if we agreed to define authentic selling in terms of how well it captures the specific, real concerns of a specific, real audience. While a broad-stroke national campaign might still be an effective way to map out the terms of the discussion, talking to consumers online would need to have a more local flavor.

One nation, obsolete.
If this sounds impractical, it might be essential nevertheless. As members of America’s major political parties have recently discovered, people in Texas, Maine and California (North or South?) are now as different in their attitudes as those in Alaska, Ohio and Florida (North or South?). More and more, the idea of the U.S. as “one nation,” from a cultural or ideological standpoint, is becoming obsolete.

So perhaps digital copy should vary by cultural geography, with key sections of each Web site, for example, swapped out by region. At a bare minimum, copywriting for this era needs to be global in a less generic way—evoking shared human experience in more depth and detail.

In that sense, sharing itself, the very thing we ask consumers to do, might be the most apt foundation for a re-imagined process of branded communication. Instead of pushing buttons, establish an appealing persona for the brand, share an honest appraisal of the product, provide an access number and say goodbye. Could it work? Ask yourself that the next time someone enticing scribbles their IM address on the back of your business card and walks away.

[March 19, 2010] 

One of the most amazing things about being a copywriter is the absolute blizzard of free and unsolicited advice available, online, offline, by e-mail, over the phone, one-on-one or at a full conference table. It’s one topic everybody has an opinion about.

You might even think it was important.

For the most part, that advice revolves around the statement and perpetuation of rules of thumb, tricks of the trade, and usually involves at least one reference to standing a pyramid on its head. The latter is derived from the sort of writing seminar exercises given out at continuing education centers. Nothing wrong with that, except to the extent that its evocation of geometry is the very emblem of formulaic thinking.

And that’s the problem. As useful as this kind of training might be to help beginning writers find their voices, as principles of professional copywriting they are absolutely useless. Formulas don’t communicate and, in fact, don’t even function that well as conduits for communication.

Psst. They’re on to you.
That’s doubly true today, when the advertising formulas celebrated by Mad Men are the subject of parody and fodder for pop-culture sampling. As far back as I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners people were already wary of the snake-oil cadences of American marketing speak. Today, as always, connecting to consumers means crafting a specific message for a specific context and then finding an idiomatic way to get it across. Idiomatic, that is, in the subculture of your audience, an audience made up of real people.

Write according to a sure-fire formula and you might as well pitch your wares to mannequins—not that this hasn’t been tried. Sure, Americans share cultural values, up to a point. But travel around just a bit and you’ll soon get an inkling of the simmering stew of attitudinal nuance bubbling just beneath the surface. No formula fits that, whether it’s a headline tip, a sentence tip or tips to make your copy more punchy.

An ear for compelling rhythms…
All of this is a complete waste of time. The craft side of copywriting comes from daily, hourly practice, coupled with a lifetime of voracious reading. You don’t learn copywriting in school and you certainly don’t learn it by downloading software promising “explosive headlines.”

The technical side of copywriting is something people with talent learn on their own. Talent is, in large measure, the ability to acquire technique and then adapt it to one’s own purposes. But copywriting talent is also something much more.

It’s a talent for observation, for empathy, combined with the ability to capture and reproduce the rhythms of everyday life. It’s the ability to compel, to motivate, to move people to tears or make them laugh—not because you’re clever, but because you’re true.

…and an eye for telling details.
So if I were to offer one little tip to copywriters I’d boil it down to this: Observe. Forget about market research, conversation studies, audience segments, Google analytics, household incomes, education levels—and just listen. What are people saying with their eyes? What can you hear them seeing in their speech? Who do they listen to and what do they listen for? What do they love, hate, cherish, lust after, yearn for and pray to?

This you can learn on your own: Down at the bus station, on line at the bank, in the frozen food aisle at the convenience store. Observe. It’s the only school of copywriting that can teach you anything about connecting with your audience. Because there is, after all, nothing punchier than the truth.

[March 16. 2010] 

Talk about building a branded Web presence and the conversation inevitably turns to drivers and distribution strategy. Typically, the talk goes to syndicating content out to the sites consumers frequent, curating the “best of the Web,” or continuing the quest for the Holy Grail—a banner someone will actually click.

Standing back from the process, I can’t help wondering if the effort to drag people to Web sites, or invade their social space with apps and ads is actually misplaced. If it’s really that difficult to engage our targets, the issues may run deeper than any slate of tactics can solve.

Maybe the problem isn’t with how people behave in digital space, but with the siloed, competitive way our media and advertising outlets coexist. If so, it’s time for a new type of media integration, something more coherent than posting up episode clips from a TV show and calling it digital marketing.

Rather, we must break down the barriers between all media and re-imagine them, in keeping with the current reality: Consumer time and attention is now “totally owned” by digital attractions.

One intent for one audience.
Ironically, it’s precisely here that offline media have an opportunity for renewed influence. That’s because, for all its hypnotic power, digital space is still a miserly master—which makes accessing its most valuable content a real challenge. Search engines are a highly inefficient tool for information retrieval. While the volume of results is often staggeringly high, their relevance and usefulness is often distressingly low.

To provide better access, imagine an offline magazine reconfigured to act as a filter. Each article would point readers to appropriate, branded online resources. At the moment, this only happens in a scattershot way, whenever a columnist just happens to mention a URL.

The difference here is that the articles would now be written from the outset as introductions to a wider, digital discussion. Instead of competing, print and digital content could act with one intent for one audience. An offline magazine could curate digital space as a whole, through the filter of its readers’ interests.

Adding more dimension than “3D” alone.
Along the same lines, a film, for example, would no longer be a theatrical experience that also sports a temporary Web site, featuring pseudo-documentary material or a (wishful-thinking) viral campaign. It would exist as a series of interlocking experiences: Some theatrical, some print, some digital.

Instead of thinking in terms of “licensing intellectual property for multiple media,” the entire project would be conceived as one seamless entity. To see the whole picture, viewers would engage the film on several levels. To access the digital experience, ticket holders might input a single-use access code they’d receive at point of purchase. Meanwhile, brand sponsorship of such sites by consumer brands would have a huge role to play.

Selling experiences to market satisfaction.
Regarding traditional advertising, the path to a truly integrated approach is still waiting for a machete sharp enough to carve it out. Many major brands simply “have a Web site,” often an e-commerce shell decorated with themes from their General Advertising campaign.

Driven online from re-imagined offline sources, fans of the Mazda Miata could be tempted to spend quality time interacting with the brand—not just collect another Facebook fan badge for its own sake.

Of course, brands would still have to reward users by continuing the momentum. They’d have to build on the exhilarating “Zoom-Zoom-Zoom” they’d created offline, by delivering intriguing details in an engaging package so consumers keep coming back for more. It’s every brand manager’s dream—and the kind of effect you can only achieve when you jettison traditional categories and color outside the lines.