Remember Razorfish?
Mike Manuel blogged recently about the sudden introduction of blogging practices appearing across the PR landscape. He makes the excellent point that…
...field-tested bloggers are behind these business moves and driving the adoption of these practices. And I think this point underscores an obvious, albeit essential fact that to really know and talk the game, you have to simply play the game. Period.
Mike’s exactly right about that. But I wonder about the wisdom of practices dedicated to any single aspect of communications. Not that I don’t wish those engaged in such practices all the success in the world. My podcast partner Neville Hobson is involved in just such a specialty practice, the recently-launched Blogging Planet, and I hope he and his colleagues make a ton of money. The same goes for Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion practice at Cooper Katz.
But as all these practices spring up around blogging, wikis, social networking, and RSS, I can’t help but remembering Razorfish and all the other Web development companies that littered the dot-com landscape in the mid-1990s. They focused exclusively on the Web, they charged huge fees, they attracted top-tier clients…and most of them are gone. Those that aren’t are significantly smaller than they were in their heydey.
The problem with the specialty-practice approach is lack of integration. I remember an excellent Web site created by one of these companies for Ragu, the Lipton-owned spaghetti sauce company. The site featured “Mama,” a grey-haired Sicilian grandmotherly type. She had attitude. Even legal disclaimer adopted Mama’s sardonic outlook: “This next part was written by Mam’s newpher Peter, the lawyer.” Mama was everywhere on the site. She gave lessons in Italian. She asked why you never wrote (allowing you to subscribe to an occasional e-mail update). For visitors to the site, Mama became the brand.
The only problem was that Mama was never incorporated into any other aspect of Ragu’s marketing or advertising. If I were a frequenty visitor to “Mama’s Cucina” (the name of the site—you got there at http://www.eat.com in addition to http://www.ragu.com), and eventually decided to buy some Ragu (maybe because I took Mama up on her offer to download a coupon), I’d be inclined to scan the store shelves for Mama. But Mama wasn’t there.
Today, the Ragu site reflects the same branding as the rest of marketing effort, adapted to the Web. If I visit the site and then the store, the product will be recognizable from the branding I saw on the site. That happened because the people behind Ragu’s marketing efforts have integrated the Web as an element of their comprehensive effort.
So it should go for blogs and the rest of the new new-media. Rather than turn to specialty practices that will produce efforts in isolation from the rest of the communication effort (e.g., Mama), account executives and others should learn how to incorporate these tools into their work. We all agree that blogs are tools; they should be part of the toolkit.
Mike’s right; we should have the work done by people who know what they’re doing. At Fleishman Hillard, for example, an interactive media group stands ready to become part of an account executive’s team when the AE determines interactive media should be added to the mix. But isolating the practice from the rest of our communications isn’t always the best approach. If it were, we’d have press release specialty practices, VNR specialty practices…and we’d still have Web specialty practices.
Like I say, I hope all my colleagues undertaking this approach do extremely well and prove me wrong in the long run. But I can’t help being skeptical. I have stacks of old issues of The Industry Standard magazines that gush about the many Web design and development companies that today are nothing more than memories. Come to think of it, the The Industry Standard is just a memory (although it has re-emerged as a Web site). I can’t help but wonder how long it will take for all these specialty practices to be absorbed into the regular businesses of the agencies that started them or to fade into the same memories where Razorfish is housed.
10/16/05 | 6 Comments | Remember Razorfish?