While it looks cool and offers a lot of the sizzle that brand marketers often desire, an over-use of Flash (and other less crawler friendly technologies) can seriously diminish the effectiveness of a brand’s site. First, embedding valuable information within a swf (flash) file makes it a virtual certainty that that content will be ignored by all of the search engines. Problem. Second, an over-use of Flash can actually box users in rather than allow them to move where they want on the site when they want. Third, Flash developers oftentimes fail to incorporate even the most basic social media features and functionality like delicious bookmarks for example.
As someone who has worked on/for big brands, I understand and empathize with the need and desire to make a splash with creative. In addition to setting high goals for the creative, it’s imperative that the creative is designed and packaged in such a way that it can be easily viewed, navigated, and distributed by users.
One blog I follow for useful insights into UI/UX is Logic+Emotion.
Atlas’s increasingly aggressive promotion of their Engagement Mapping technology got me to thinking. The need to measure the accretive impact (or lack thereof) of repeated ad exposures over time is undeniable. In order to understand and quantify the true value of your campaign - effectiveness of the creative, the placement, the targeting - you need to measure and analyze these things.
What is ignored in all of this is the impact that “organic” touchpoints have on advertising effectiveness. David Armano of Critical Mass has a terrific article up on the subject of the proliferation of touchpoints online. The more consumers are in control of their media, the more rapidly and pervasively brand touchpoints proliferate. At Reach Machines, we’ve built a way for marketers to measure the spread of touchpoints, identify their position, and estimate their specific and cumulative value. In conjunction with the reporting marketers and their agencies receive through the ad platforms and networks, analyzing and assessing the value of your organic touchpoints is vital to optimizing the performance of integrated online marketing campaigns.
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