Driving to work yesterday I noticed a billboard that was hung upside-down. I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye and wondered if the outdoor advertising company hired idiots to hang their boards. Later that day, I saw the same billboard in another location, also upside-down. I felt sorry for the guys who had to hang it, because they probably have more sense than the people who told them how to do their job.

Advertising is effective when you send the right message to the right audience using the right method of delivery. The billboard in question is for a car dealer, and their message is OPEN SUNDAY. Outdoor advertising is the right medium because the signs are placed where people who drive will see them. The message was good, the delivery method matched the audience, yet they took a simple formula and screwed it up. They disrupted the delivery and damaged the message.

Outdoor advertisers struggle with the same problem that online advertisers face. How do you insure an ad gets noticed in an ad saturated landscape? Bright colors, drawing outside the lines, adding dimension, and yes, flipping things over are all effective ways of getting noticed. It is commonly recognized among the outdoor advertising community that turning a message upside-down increases its noticeability. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the brand. In theory, everything you do contributes to brand resonance. If a device for getting noticed doesn’t also reinforce the message, it’s not resonant; it’s disruptive.

Online advertising is chock full of attention-grabbing opportunities. In the end, it’s not about being noticed, it’s about being heard. And if the message resonates, it will stay in the mind. I got the car dealer’s message, but it didn’t resonate with me. It wasn’t persuasive, it wasn’t clever. It might have even turned me off a little. Mostly, it was a squandered opportunity to make an enduring impression.

Do something resonant, and your impression will endure. At the very least, make sure the message you want your audience to hear isn’t tripped while walking down the aisle.

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While contemplating how to pitch a long-standing client for new web services, I came to the realization that we need to convince them to kill off their current website. It’s a beautiful site, filled with many subtle touches. But it’s a Flash site, and as such, it has many limitations. You can add content, but not without changing the design and nowhere near as easily as if we just designed a new CMS-enabled site for them.

Because the Flash site wasn’t created to hold an ever-deepening well of content, it takes about 15 minutes at the most to exhaust anyone’s curiosity and you’re left with this toy that just sits there like an animatronic toy with limited behavior set. This site does not serve their brand nearly as well as they may think it does.

And since it’s a Flash site, we won’t be able to plug in our behavioral analytics tools to show them how users are interacting with the site. We will have a difficult time building a case based on hard numbers. Instead, we’ll approach the problem from another angle, the website as social media hub.

As a brand, it’s important that they reach their customers but they don’t get to pick the channel any longer. The day of the website as your channel to your customers is dead. Brands need a social media hub that allows them to update content for customer reach in one place, and broadcast that message to the customers where and how they want to be reached.

To explain what I mean, let me offer an example. You can reach my wife through email or Facebook, and maybe her Yahoo News page. My sister is only going to see text-based email. You can find me through several channels, but I’d prefer to have anything a brand has to say come through an RSS feed so that I can decide when I have time for it. I don’t want more email cluttering my inbox, and I probably won’t visit your website on my daily rounds. If a brand want to interact with me, they better give me choices.

It’s possible to build a social media hub in Flash but when I crunch the numbers on the development hours involved, it simply doesn’t make sense. Every new thing we come up with will both cost more and take us further from the simple and elegant design of a well-executed Flash site and more toward the web 2.o open source toolkit. It makes sense to just scrap the Flash site and start building fresh with the toolkit.

Now if only I can convince the client… I welcome your suggestions on how I can be the most convincing.

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