Reason 2: Why build an Edsel?
Most external corporate web presences are over-designed monstrosities. I would argue that almost all businesses could easily survive with a more simplified, streamlined version that could be accomplished with most good blog software. Unless your business IS in business to sell products on the internet, and the website IS your brand, your website is overkill. This is where the consumer need-state comes into play. Your website is a conduit to the consumer's desire, but not the desire itself. Why are you paying an agency so much money to handle it?
Most corporate websites are painful reflections of their internal structure. They spend millions on revamping and solving problems, but in reality, they do not address the core issue. The agency model preys on this behavior. It is as if you built a shack that has had room after room bolted onto it -- kitchens, dining facilities, bathrooms, showers, etc. It may appear to be somewhat cohesive on the front end, but at what cost? This is not an agency problem but the client's unwillingness to make substantive decisions for their external web presence.
When you decide to redesign that shack, all of the extra detritus comes along for the ride. You may discard items here and there, but feature-creep somehow always results in another monstrosity being built, and you end up building an Edsel.
I recently advised a client who had switched from a traditional website to a standard blog template system using WordPress. The company designed the template adhering to its color palette and design philosophy, and for $100,000, the company ended up accomplishing what its agency had estimated would cost $500,000 to build. The end-product did more than what the agency was pitching, and it shaved an additional $200,000 a year off maintenance costs for the company. It also allowed internal staff to update the blog easily and communicate simply.
Another advantage of a switchover like this is that the search engines pick up all that new content much more easily than an overly designed Flash site. Remember, the majority of consumers now use search engines to navigate the web. So when you build a monstrosity of a site, the issue isn't just the cost of the build itself, it's the cost of maintenance, and the agency you need to employ because it wasn't designed for search engines to scan.
Design a system that is templated specifically for your needs, and the control goes back to your company. Isn't that where these decisions should rest anyway?
Reason 3: Scalability, production, and distributed messaging platforms
You used to be able to produce one TV ad and run in one market. If it resonated and helped move product, all you needed to do was scale the effort. The ad was already produced. You just had to spend more money. Same with print, outdoor, and many other traditional media. But with online, the playing field is so disparate that much of it is not as scalable.
You can produce a banner, but for some reason you always need to change it and produce more. Not to mention, you have to do it in four different sizes. Before too long, you have too many little snippets running in too many different places, and you find yourself myopically looking over analytics reports tweaking a tenth of 1 percent here and there. For what? The model is not scalable the way offline is. Sure, you can throw more media at it, but anyone in online media planning knows that with each new site, and each new format, you increase the complexity.
What most brands don't have is the willingness to run a single ad, test and control that one ad, and beat the hell out of it. Now that's efficient! The customization of messaging on the internet for each subgroup has created a cacophony of noise. So why not simplify? It's only a matter of will, and you can probably ditch the huge amount of production, media trafficking, and complexity you are creating for yourself in trying to find the one thing that works with your agency.
There will never be one banner ad that fundamentally changes your business and impacts the consumer in the way one TV ad could. It's the same with SEM. I watch company after company let their ad agency do their SEM ad copy. Are you serious? There is not going to be anything brilliant that an agency can do with 85 characters that you can't. Let an SEM vendor do it. Again, you're spending money on the wrong thing. If you're going to use an ad agency, use them for ideation, not wasting billable hours.
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, WordPress, blogs, email systems, and a host of other tools are available for you to extend your brand, so use them. Why build internally what other companies have spent millions building, tweaking, and supporting? And why have your agency build them? Look at Facebook the same way you view outsourcing any other aspect of your business. Facebook hosts it and deals with the IT and serving costs. You should be making the decisions, listening to those channels, and managing them.
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