A Primer for the Traditional Producer
posted 02/16/08
What follows in this is an excepted version of the documentation that we used to teach a session at Boards U.[1] on interactive production for the traditional broadcast producer in 2006. It’s a bit dated, but still useful. If you find yourself new to this field in general, this might be a good place to start. Other content from this presentation has been worked into this document. Enjoy!
Introduction
Let’s talk about interactive advertising. Let’s start by asking ourselves what interactive advertising is. I like to think of interactive advertising as any advertising that a potential customer can interact with. The most well known type of this advertising takes place on the Internet. But this isn’t necessarily the whole story. It could be advertising on a mobile phone. It could be a kiosk on your sales room floor. It could be a billboard in Times Square that automatically hurls insults at anyone who walks by wearing Juicy Couture.
Though both these points are debatable, for the sake of keeping our class relatively simple, let’s say this: there are two things that interactive advertising is not.
First, interactive advertising is not people. If your customer is interacting with a person, that is a salesperson, a company representative, a buzz marketing agent or a sandwich board-wearing dude. Interactive advertising is not human.
Second, interactive advertising is not e-commerce. E-Commerce is the field of actually buying and selling things on the Internet. Money changes hands, good are shipped out, and customers open boxes at work on their lunch break. This is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about advertising, not sales. A customer sees a banner, realizes she wants a Buick, clicks on the banner, realizes she REALLY want a Buick, so she goes to the dealer and buys one. If you’re charged with the task of actually selling things on the web, it is my strong recommendation that you chuck this document out the window, go look up what interactive agencies your holding company owns, and give them a call.
Another note before we get started. We should talk about the in-house interactive shops. It is our deeply-held belief here at the Barbarian Group that the agency-owned interactive shop is a dying breed. We could wax philosophical on this for hours (and elsewhere on this site we probably do), but the main crux of the argument revolves around the scarcity of world-class interactive designers, and the type of work they like do to. Would they rather work at an agency, never doing anything but one client’s website, or would they like to work at a cool hip shop where one day they’re doing a crazy new banner and the next day they’re making a game involving monkeys?
After the great rise and fall of the agency interactive shops in the 90s, we believe that the industry is settling down into a mode roughly analogous to broadcast production: the agency controls the brand, the agency controls the strategy. The agency comes up with the idea. The agency hires the right people for the job to actually produce the spot. Directors don’t work at agencies. Neither should your Flash guru.
In the same way that most agencies have an AV Department with some basic editing and effects skills, it’s useful to have a few interactive studio types around for the odd banner resize or content update. But in general, when talking about world-class interactive production avoid agency interactive divisions like they are the plague. Okay, perhaps that’s too strong – we like Ogilvy a lot, for example. Again, if you’re trying to do some e-commerce, these people are your friends, but for advertising purposes this holds true. This point isn’t completely settled yet, and several agencies seem to be trying to buck the trend and implemeneting in-house shops, and a few others seem to be settling into hybrid models where some interactive is done in house, and some isn’t. Like all good rules, it can be broken once in a while, but always bear it in mind.
Interactive vs broadcast production
In this day and age, interactive production is characterized by a peculiar conundrum: everyone recognizes its importance as a must-have media channel in any advertising campaign, but at the same time almost no one ever has enough time and money to execute the interactive strategy they envision. Sure, you’re thinking “hey, it’s advertising, no one ever has enough time and money,” and I’d say “true enough,” but this seems doubly true in interactive. And while as a producer you might not have too much control over the budget, one thing that a good producer can most definitely affect is the timeframe. This leads to the golden rule of interactive production for the mid-oughts: start thinking about your interactive as early as possible. A good producer can always find a way to execute a decent interactive strategy even if they only have a week or two. But with more time comes more options, and with more options comes the increased chance that you can find the most effective approach.
Interactive is a strange beast here at Boards U. Unlike most everything else here, it’s a descriptive term for an entire family of media channels rather than a component of video production. The interactive strategies for advertising campaigns can vary wildly: a banner campaign, a website or a viral campaign are all possible components of your interactive strategy, and each has a wildly different production process. This in and of itself is an important point and leads to our second golden rule: interactive is more than banners and websites.
This is an important point. Unlike broadcast production, when you start a project as an interactive producer, you may not yet know what you’re going to produce, which is the early challenge in any interactive strategy. This is obviously outside of the producer’s purview, and if you have awesome creatives and account people and “Internet Strategists” at your agency, this will go much better, because early on in a campaign’s planning stages, they’ll be sitting there with furrowed brows thinking about the Internet and how to leverage its unique characteristics to further their goals and enhance brand equity. They’ll use terms like that, too. If all goes swimmingly well, they’ll come to you and say something like “We want to do a minisite, some banners, and a game for this campaign,” and then you have something you can actually produce.
What’s more likely to happen, though, is that no one will even think about interactive until the spots are in the editing suite (ed note: hot nicely this has improved since 2006!). And this is where as a producer you can help this process along. Remember the Golden Rule of Internet Advertising in the Mid-oughts. If your creatives and account people aren’t thinking about interactive yet, and your agency is curiously bereft of Internet Strategists, you can poke them and remind them that they should be thinking about the Internet too. With luck it’ll be one of the 54% of creatives in the US2 who already cares about the Internet. If not, tell them that it’s easier to win a Lion or a Pencil in interactive than it is in broadcast. That should get them motivated. Don’t be surprised when they forget to thank you in their speech.
Because you can’t really begin doing what you do best (producing) until the plan has been decided, this is pretty much where you can focus all your efforts until the plan’s been made: nag nag nag everyone to make a plan.
Interactive advertising strategy 101
A whole book could be written about interactive strategy (and I’m gonna write it one day, mark my words), but we’re talking about production here, and strategy is ostensibly not part of the producer’s role. But we at the Barbarian Group have always believed in a holistic approach to strategy, if for no other reason than everyone uses the Internet, and other people at the company make a good first test group. So even though it’s not part of our course here, I’m gonna leave you with a few personal insights about developing an interactive strategy. Some of these are probably contentious, but that’s what strategy’s all about.
- Unless your strategy is the most brilliant thing you’ve ever seen or done, hype does not take off on its own. It needs a kick-start. Once in my career have I done or seen something that I knew would just take off on its own. Even if you’re making an amazing game or the funniest viral movie ever made, plan to allocate some resources to getting the word out.
- Buying banners on the big sites always boosts traffic. Even us peeps here at the Barbarian Group, obsessed with a utopian future of interactive media agnosticism and things like artificial intelligence and electronic clothing, sometimes forget that banners are an effective, affordable, quick, and more-or-less guaranteed way to get the word out and generate traffic.
- Don’t get overly obsessed with analytics/traffic software. There’s a whole posse of “Internet Strategists” out there that get totally turned on by traffic reporting. They’ll talk to you about unique visitors, total hits, time spent on the site, home page abandonment and the like. Unless you’re selling something on your site, do not freak out about this. And again, if you’re selling something on your site, you should not be listening to me. Analytics in interactive advertising is akin to analytics in regular advertising. They are a useful tool but only tell you part of the story.
- Mobile phone marketing is really cool, but don’t freak out if you don’t have an angle on it yet. It’s in its talking head phase, no one’s done anything super awesome with it yet, and unless you’re actually selling mobile phones, you don’t absolutely need to do this. Yet.
- Remember that interactive advertising is the one form of advertising that the customer initiates. Do not ever forget this. Why is the customer there? Why have they come to your site? What is their motivation and how do you shepherd them from that mindset to the mindset you want them to be in?
Not to get all 360 on you, but remember that the real world is a pretty powerful place, and anything you can do to link the real world with your interactive strategy is a good thing. Though 95% of the time, the answer will be “no,” never stop asking questions like “can we put the URL on the package” and “can we do an ad in print that ties in to the website?” - The wise man Ewen Cameron once told me that it doesn’t matter where an idea came from if it’s good. He probably says it all the time, and in other contexts, but in that particular context he was saying it in relation to chillin’ with his Barbarian friends and having them in on the strategy planning. If we take our golden rule from above – start thinking about your interactive as early as possible – and we take it to its logical conclusion, you’d choose your interactive shop early enough that they can be in the strategy and planning. They may even come up with your whole strategy and creative ideas if you ask them nicely.
- A lot of times you’ll find yourself in a chicken-and-egg scenario. You need an interactive strategy, but you have no budget to work with, but to get a budget, you have to have an idea, etc. etc. Account people are really helpful in this situation, and so are your Barbarian friends. Most interactive shops will help you develop an idea from the get-go and help you pitch it to the client to get signoff.
- Have a Google strategy. We don’t talk too much about search engine marketing in here, as thus far it hasn’t required highly complex visual creative work. But this is changing.
- Interactive Strategy should be a part of the whole strategy and not isolated/created in a vacuum. And, to be most effective, it should be created in conjunction with the primary channel’s strategy and not afterwards. This is a good opportunity for the producer to be be the champion of the multi-channel mindset, as those who are the leads of the other channels often forget about Interactive until the end.
Whew. That was enough for now. You get the idea.
Technology and the Interactive Producer
Now we know we sold this class as an “interactive and mobile technology” primer, so we better talk about technology, right?
All right. Think about the 1980s and their obsession with “special effects.” Started with Star Wars. Star Wars came out and every agency under the sun felt like they needed some crazy special effects. Next came the Genesis Effect in Star Trek 2, and everyone wanted to use a computer. Tron came out, and it got worse. This kept going right on through Kyle Cooper, R/GA, the Matrix and Toy Story. Sometimes spots that used these technologies were dead on brilliant (Apple’s 1984 stands to this day as a masterful spot and you don’t even think about how special effects made this possible). But for every 1984, there was some agency making an incomprehensible jumble of special effects because they could. For me, the early HBO bumper comes to mind. Why again was that giant, silver metallic HBO flying over that computer-generated city? And what was WITH those horrible, animated clips that we had to sit through in movie theaters all through the 80s?
This is what interactive technology – and especially mobile – is like now (ed note: on the flip side, it’s heartening and hilarious how true all of this is now, just as in 2006).
There’s almost a state of panic out there, right now, involving mobile technology. In our 360-obsessed advertising climate, as soon as a new advertising medium bubbles up to our consciousness, it is hard to resist immediately delving in. It’s easy to feel like your client or your agency is missing the boat on some awesome new advertising opportunity.
To some extent this is true, but it’s important to keep in mind that without a logical application of your overall brand strategy, the whole point is moot.
Applying technology to great creative advertising is a personal judgment call of the art director working on the project. Some creative teams will focus in on a new feature available to them and make a new, fascinating creative work that leverages this. Others will continue steady as she goes. There was no groundbreaking technology in the Subservient Chicken. The last piece of the technology puzzle that we needed arrived with the advent of the Flash 6 player, maybe two years earlier. It worked because the Ben and Jeff3 had a good grasp of what was possible, and applied his creative thinking within the limits of that and didn’t try to push it.
buddy lee staring contest
I guess what I’m saying is “don’t freak out.” Don’t believe the hype. Well, believe it a little bit. Believe it like you want your 13 year old to believe in Santa Claus when you also have an 8 year old.
That’s strategy talk, again, though, and as a producer, let’s assume you have a project to do.
Let’s talk a little bit about the producer and technology. As an interactive producer, you are going to encounter loads of technological terms, processes and solutions that you may not be familiar with. This is okay. We provide a rough overview of much of this in this document, but in general even the best interactive producers encounter technological concepts that they don’t fully understand all the time. This is not a problem, necessarily, if the producer stays mindful of her role, and honest about her level of understanding.
What can be a problem, however, is when a creative concept hinges on a technological “solution” that may or may not be possible, without definitively ascertaining that the technology exists. Let me offer a case study example.
Right now, mobile is hot. More than one agency has called us and said “we want to be able to have the user make an MP3 on the website, and then we email that MP3 to the user’s phone, so they can use it as a ringtone.”
While not completely technically impossible, this deceptively simple sounding idea, for various technical reasons, is wildly ambitious and expensive. As a producer, you have two options. You can undertake to sell through a multi-million dollar concept, develop the partnerships with the mobile companies, etc., and shoot for doing something totally new and huge and amazing, or you can go back to the concepting and modify things a bit. Synthesized MIDI ring tones, for example, made from a song that the user composes in some manner, might be doable.
The problem for the producer, and the creative for that matter, is knowing what’s possible at all. The more you can learn the better, of course, and we’ll provide you with a few top-level rules in a second. What also helps, of course, is a technology partner of some sort. A person in the agency who knows what’s possible, or an outside vendor such as the Barbarians, who you can bounce ideas off of, before they get too far down the road. Both of these approaches are popular and viable solutions.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that in the 21st century, everything’s possible. And many things are indeed possible. Yet sometimes they’re only possible for five million dollars. Now, if you just read that sentence and thought, “that’s cool, I have five million dollars and I wanna do the impossible,” then I’d like you to give me a call right now. Thanks.
We think you probably have a pretty good idea on the basics of Internet technology – the World Wide Web, HTML, Flash, hosting, etc. We outline production processes in this document that hit on most of this, and include a fairly comprehensive introductory glossary at the end for your edification.
Anyway, all of this is useful to keep in mind when you’re developing your interactive strategy. The important point is to remember to have someone technologically knowledgeable in the room as early as possible. It’s always painful to see an art director get incredibly excited about an idea that he can’t, in fact, create. And remember, not to dissuade you, but if you think you’ve just thought of some amazing new thing no one else has thought of, odds are about 92% it’s been thought of before and is either impossible or such a daunting logistical challenge that lesser people have abandoned the quest. So if you’re still attached to your idea, the odds are either you’re going to have to change what is possible, or completely shake up how people work.
Executing the plan
Okay, so once you HAVE a plan, then what? For the sake of this discussion, and to hit some of the hot interactive buzzwords du jour, let’s say your interactive strategy calls for the following:- An online game where you whack a monkey on its head whenever he tries to eat a banana (monkeys are hot these days). If you fail and the monkey eats too many bananas he will explode (explosions never go out of style).
- The game has some postcard-ware (the “send to a friend” thing you see on many sites) to help spread the word about the game (and hence the brand).
- The game also has a cool feature where you can hit the monkey on the head from your phone whenever you like (mobile’s hot these days too, right?).
- The general goal of this campaign is to spread word about the brand, so right there on the game is your logo real big and bright. You’re going for general brand awareness, not driving traffic to your main website, but of course it would be silly to not let people visit your site, so that logo is clickable through to your website.
- Finally, you’re gonna spend a few days hitting the message boards and the like to get a buzz going about your game, and there will be a small media buy and banner placement on key sites (Yahoo, MSN) to boost traffic.
Okay, so now we have something we can actually produce. So how do we tackle this? There’s a lot of components. If you’re lucky, you’re dedicated full time to this project, but in reality you probably have a few other projects to deal with, and perhaps even the entire campaign, broadcast and all. Judging from the size of this binder you’re holding, that’s a lot of work. And on top of that now you gotta do a game, a mobile implementation, some postcardware and figure out things like hosting, server environment, whether or not to use Flash, and what the hell is JSP?
Do not panic.
It is perhaps useful to introduce the metaphor of the Chief Marketing Officer here. I don’t know if anyone’s ever used the Chief Marketing Officer in a metaphor before, but we’re ad types, so it might just work. Anyway, I’m sure you noticed that there are basically two types CMOs out there – the meddler and the designator. The designator hires someone like WPP or Havas do manage all aspects of their brand, from PR to Interactive to broadcast to their Brazilian strategy. She finds a person at the agency they like and basically anoint her as the Person in Charge and that’s that. Some regular meetings and approvals occur, but that’s pretty much it. The meddler, of course, meddles. He probably bids out every piece of the marketing pie individually – separate pitches for creative, interactive, media, PR, etc., etc. He custom-builds his team to his own needs, and runs it. He mandates to the media agency, for example, to get along with the creative agency, even if they’re in separate holding companies. I’ve always been fascinated with this division within CMOs, but I digress. Here we’re using it as a metaphor.
In tackling your interactive production tasks, you can be a meddler or a designator. If you “designate,” you will find a shop capable of handling the whole task (like, say, the Barbarian Group). If you “meddle,” you will need to find, in this case, an interactive designer, a game designer, an illustrator, a sound designer, a telephony technology company, a backend developer, a viral-booster, and a hosting company.
This is your first big decision. Several factors are at play here. The key factor is whether or not you could have even made the list of resources that will be needed. If not, that’s totally okay, but it does that your best approach is to hire an interactive shop instead of a bunch of contractors. This leads us to our next rule: a good producer can produce interactive even with no experience if they have the right people on the project.
Other than that, though, there are pros and cons to each approach. With an interactive shop, you may not get exactly who you want working on every aspect of the project. It also might cost a bit more, because you’re getting a producer on the other end to handle much of the work. With the freelancers, you will save some money, and get exactly who you want, but the workload is exponentially higher; interactive freelancers are a notoriously surly bunch (developers especially), and they always want you to pay them right NOW. Still, though, if you’ve got steel nerves and plenty of time, this can make for an excellent product. Some of the best interactive artists on the planet are reclusive freelancers living in random places like Australia, Napa Valley, and Virginia. They work from home, they choose the projects they want to work on, and they do consistently amazing work. Tapping into that scene is a fun adventure.
But we’re not gonna talk about the “meddling” approach today. We’re not gonna talk about it for three reasons:
First, it really is ill-advised to try that approach on your first interactive project, especially if it’s one of the complexity we’re discussing here. Later on, as you get the hang of things, you can try this approach. Once you’re ready, you’ll pretty much know it and won’t even be worried about it anymore.
First, it really is ill-advised to try that approach on your first interactive project, especially if it’s one of the complexity we’re discussing here. Later on, as you get the hang of things, you can try this approach. Once you’re ready, you’ll pretty much know it and won’t even be worried about it anymore.
Secondly, we have our work cut out for is both with this project and in this document, even WITH a full service shop helping out.
Third, we didn’t put all this work into this document to tell you to not hire someone like us.
Okay, so at that point, you’ve made some decisions. You need to find a shop now. The creatives often have opinions on this, and it’s generally a good idea to try and hire who they most want to work with. Your art director will hopefully say something like “I really want to work with the Barbarians on this one,” and then you call us up and we hopefully say something like “yeah totally, let’s do it.” If you really want to do your producerly duty, you should work up a list of everything you want your site to do, throw in all the other info you know about the project and fashion it into a request for a proposal. A REALLY proper producer will then triple-bid the project, but what kind of fun is that? You’re a producer and you know the drill on this whole contract negotiations thing. The one thing we should point out here is to beware of the intangibles: how big is the company? If someone gets sick or someone’s grandmother dies, can they still handle the project? Are you comparing apples to oranges? Does one bid include things that the other one does not? Some shops are much more customer-service oriented, and inherent in their pricing is a level of attention to your needs that other shops may not match. Some of this you’ll have to learn the hard way, learning the quirks of each shop as you work with them. And because of the creative’s say in choosing whom they work with, more so than with broadcast you could end up with a pretty varied level of service from the shop.
And, now, we can finally get to something like a step-by-step list.
- Ask your shop what experience they’ve had in the tasks at hand. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if they haven’t done a certain part of it. In our example above, there’s a good chance the shop you’ve chosen doesn’t have a mobile technology division in house, or perhaps a media division. In choosing the full-service route, however, it’s not unreasonable for you to ask that they figure everything out and you pay one bill. Alternatively, if you’re so inclined, you might mandate the use of a specific media company (if you have one in-house, for example). Each engagement will have a slightly different combination of parties involved. When trying to decide between two companies – one who has awesome creative but doesn’t do telephony in-house and one who can do everything but the creative isn’t as strong – choose the creative one, every time.
- Understand that the bid you got from the shop prior to start of work is probably a rough guess. It’s best to accept this right up front. That cost will change, and it will probably rise. If it absolutely CAN’T rise, be honest about this with your vendor, and let them take the reigns on what can and can’t be accomplished. Conversely, if you’ve got some wiggle room, don’t pretend you don’t. Your creative will suffer for it.
- Suss out who else will be involved in the process on the interactive side. This is a very important step. Clients can have all sorts of other parties that are involved in the project: IT departments, interactive agencies, hosting companies, they will all want to be involved. Navigating this sea of companies is misery defined. No matter what, it’s gonna suck. The holy grail technology solution for a viral marketing initiative such as this is to get it hosted outside of your client’s hosting infrastructure. There is a temptation to think “oh, they already have a website and pay for hosting. It’ll be easier and cheaper to use theirs.” Do not believe this. It is never easier, and almost never cheaper. Go spend ten minutes with your company’s IT department to see just how protective companies are of their networking infrastructure. Costs to develop and deploy your project will increase exponentially if your friendly Barbarians have to have weekly status calls with seven different parties and develop the backend code for their monkey game in some random programming language because “That’s what’s on the servers.” The trick here is often to present two prices – one where we all “build it in tandem with your interactive agency,” and one where we “just get a separate box and link to the site.” If the prices are accurate, the latter will always be less, and that’s usually enough to let the client agree to let you handle this on your own. If you do have to work with a client’s IT department or interactive agency, it’s usually best to let your friendly Barbarians handle that connection for you, and remember: while we’re not saying to be mean to them, keep in mind that just because IT Manager X works for your client, it does not actually make her your client. Her goals and roles are almost diametrically opposed to yours, and trying to cater to her seemingly random concerns is a sucker’s bet.
- Figure out how hands-on your creatives want to be. Do they want to make detailed comps of how the site should look, or do they want the interactive guys to do that? The whole “storyboard” metaphor, so consistent in broadcast, is not as solidly entrenched in interactive. Some art directors supply their interactive peeps with detailed comps, exact down to the pixel. Others hand us a sketch on a napkin. Others get drunk with us and slur out a rough story. A good interactive shop will happily accommodate all of these, but it affects the amount of work and, hence, the price. It’s best to figure this out right away.
- Prepare a contract for the project with the shop, or have them prepare one for you. Most shops are happy to write one up, and will also sign one you prepare. Allocate a few days for this – maybe even a week or two, if your agency hasn’t done it before. The first one’s always hard, and lawyers are inevitably involved. Do it with a mind toward getting a standard one done so that you won’t need to involve them every time.
- Agree upon a realistic timeline. Remember here the next rule: your interactive project can be amazing, cheap or built quickly. Pick up to two. If your timing is flexible, be sure your vendor knows this. Rush fees in the interactive world can be brutal, so ask yourself if you REALLY need it rushed. Many times people choose their timeline based on the first ads running in other media. This is usually some random pub that happens to have a different schedule for some reason. Ask if it REALLY needs to match that. If the URL is in the ad, the answer is probably yes, but it’s good to double-check.
- Do not try and make your interactive timeline like your broadcast one. Work closely with the people doing the work to make sure the time is where they need it. Interactive has a characteristic that sometimes many days, weeks, or even months need to go by, up front, before you can see anything. Don’t ask your vendors if you can see something the next day, every day.
- Get the contract signed with your vendor and do everyone a favor and put the invoice in to billing right away. Not only will your vender love you for it, but it’s doing yourself a favor too. The best shops in the business absolutely have a bias toward their promptly-paying customers, and the work can’t help but reflect it. Additionally, the interactive industry is young and does not have the structured traditions of the broadcast industry. Payment terms from vendors vary wildly, and some vendors will hold back delivery of your site if they haven’t gotten at least partial payment. You do not want this to happen.
- A note on licensing: the Internet is a special place and a lot of the industry-standard rules you’re used to are not necessarily applicable. You may not have the rights to use your photography online if you did not ask for it. Ditto for a song you’re using in your broadcast commercials. If your agency has a specialist in rights on the Internet, work with them to ensure you have all the rights you need. If your agency doesn’t, make a point to get this all worked out. Learn to negotiate Internet rights up front before you even know what you’re going to do with it. If you haven’t got them, though, and you can’t get them for the sake of this project, it’s best to know at the outset, so alternative imagery, music and characters can be developed.
- Once you get to this point, the job is actually going! Nice! Focus on getting your shop what they need in a timely manner to hit the first milestone. Do they need assets from you? A company logo? Copy? Layouts? The media buy? Most contracts stipulate that these things need to be at the vendor by a specific time or the timeline will slip. Don’t let this happen and miss your first milestone.
- Once the shop is ready to present something, get everyone together and review the work. Don’t feel obliged to approve it right away on the phone, but do make a point of getting feedback, and hopefully, approvals to the shop as quickly as possible. If your team has problems with what you see – the creative isn’t grabbing you or the monkey shouldn’t be red – be forthright about them and don’t panic. Give the shop an opportunity to fix it.
- Repeat this process through all your stages of approvals. In our example, a likely rough rundown of stages will probably be something like:
- Creative execution – static comps of what the game will look like, what the postcards will look like, and what you will see on your phone and what the banners will look like.
- Information Architecture – This is where you’ll see a set of documents outlining how the project will work together. What content will be on the site? What will be a typical user path? What parts of the game interface with the postcardware? What parts of the site interface with the mobile solution? The most common types of IA documents are sitemaps, wireframes and user flows.
- Technical architecting – a document defining how the technical implementation will go down. What architecture will the server be running? Where will we host the site? How will the postcard functionality operate? Where does the game interface with the telephony company’s stuff? What protocol will it be? If you have successfully freed your project from the evil clutches of your client’s IT department, and you trust your vendor, you can basically look at this and go “yup.” Some agencies have an in house technical guru to make sure this stuff all’s up to snuff. If you have one of these, count yourself lucky and have her look it over. If you did not succeed in Step 3, this is going to be a miserable process and one you can probably just ignore and say “Barbarians, work this out with the IT guys.” As a producer, you can not worry about this unless someone disagrees somewhere along the line, then play the role of mediator. Even if you don’t think you need such a document, ask for it. I’m tempted to not tell you this, because we hate writing these up, unless the evil IT people are involved, then we insist upon it. As a producer, however, it’s in your interest to have this.
- Media plan – A presentation of what media we are going to buy, based on our media planning, budget and overall strategy. This is usually an ill-formatted Excel doc, with a list of every media outlet and what type and size of file they require for their banner placement.
- Functional prototype – This will be a rough version of the game in a more or less playable form. Do not panic if this doesn’t look like you want the game to look like. Don’t worry if the illustrations aren’t final, if there’s no sound. Focus primarily on whether or not the game’s playable. If even the slightest smile comes across your face, that’s probably a sign things are going okay.
- Initial banner presentation – we usually build one banner (which we call the prototype), and get approval on that one before we move on to all the resizes that the full media buy requires. Sometimes we will show up to three – tall, wide and square – to ensure the different layouts are acceptable to your creatives.
- Beta version of the game – the first version of the game that should basically look like it’s going to.
- Functioning postcardware – a working version of the postcardware, and integration into the minisite
- Functioning telephony – a working version of the phone functionality, and integration into the game and minisite.
- Banners final approval – final approval on the banner creative, including all resizes.
- Post QA build – We call this “Release Candidate 1.” The first version anyone seriously considered being launchable. This is really your last chance to find anything wrong.
- Launch – Hurray!
- Viral boosting – the couple of days we spend getting the word out about the game on the message boards, etc. The deliverables from this is usually a document outlining what we did, including screenshots of some of the boards, the response from the public, and statistics on how it affected traffic levels.
- If you can at all help it, avoid the “grand opening” mentality with your interactive campaign. Shot for the “Soft opening” mentality, called, actually, the soft launch. soft launches are good. Launches where 2 million people are hitting ‘refresh’ waiting for your site to go live are incredibly nerve-wracking experiences and not for the faint of heart. This is one secret bonus of producing for viral marketing, like our example, as opposed to traditional website development. Apple, for example, launches major updates to their site seconds after Steve Jobs announces a new product and walks off the stage. Millions of people visit the site minutes after Job’s speech ends. It’s a masterful process, one of the most sophisticated interactive executions I know of. It’s also insanely complicated, potentially expensive and fraught with risk. If something’s going to go wrong with your website in the first twenty minutes, personally I’d rather have only 20 people notice instead of a million. This is not to say it can’t or shouldn’t ever be done – we’ve had good success doing something like this with Discover Card and Goodby the last two holiday seasons. Just bear in mind that it’s risky, and ask everyone involved if it’s worth that risk.
And there you have it. Whew.
Pitfalls and solutions
Pitfall: Treating your interactive timeline like your broadcast one
Keep in mind our warning above regarding the differences between an interactive timeline and a broadcast one. Also, be aware of any potential conflicts between the timelines. For instance, many times we have been asked to produce a site in the same timeline that the broadcast spots are being produced, except the concept at hand requires us to use imagery from the broadcast shoot that we can’t use because it’s not done yet. If you plan any sort of integration between broadcast and your website, be aware this could make timing longer. We often ask agency producers if we can be at the shoot for print or broadcast, or if we can have our own shoot. Nine times out of 10 it’s too late, and the producer can’t make it happen. Nine times out of 10 it would have been better if we could have been there. Also, do not pass a timeline to your interactive shop that has things like “shoot,” and “prepro” on it – they don’t know what those are, and their project will not line up with your broadcast project. Timeline it out with terms such as those in the approvals process outlined above.
Keep in mind our warning above regarding the differences between an interactive timeline and a broadcast one. Also, be aware of any potential conflicts between the timelines. For instance, many times we have been asked to produce a site in the same timeline that the broadcast spots are being produced, except the concept at hand requires us to use imagery from the broadcast shoot that we can’t use because it’s not done yet. If you plan any sort of integration between broadcast and your website, be aware this could make timing longer. We often ask agency producers if we can be at the shoot for print or broadcast, or if we can have our own shoot. Nine times out of 10 it’s too late, and the producer can’t make it happen. Nine times out of 10 it would have been better if we could have been there. Also, do not pass a timeline to your interactive shop that has things like “shoot,” and “prepro” on it – they don’t know what those are, and their project will not line up with your broadcast project. Timeline it out with terms such as those in the approvals process outlined above.
Pitfall: The budget gets blown
This is one of the most common pitfalls of an interactive project. It’s vitally important that both parties understand exactly what is included in the scope of the project. For instance, if it doesn’t explicitly say “sound design” on your statement of work, when your art director says “can we get a bling sound right there?” it’s going to cost you money. Additionally, if you schedule a presention with your interactive shop and your ECD must approve their work and he’s in LA for a week on a shoot and you blow your schedule, this will cost you money. If you have a specific budget amount for the project – an exact dollar amount you can’t go over, be honest about this with your vendor, and let them take the reigns on what can and can’t be accomplished. Conversely, if you’ve got some wiggle room, don’t pretend you don’t. Your creative will suffer for it.
This is one of the most common pitfalls of an interactive project. It’s vitally important that both parties understand exactly what is included in the scope of the project. For instance, if it doesn’t explicitly say “sound design” on your statement of work, when your art director says “can we get a bling sound right there?” it’s going to cost you money. Additionally, if you schedule a presention with your interactive shop and your ECD must approve their work and he’s in LA for a week on a shoot and you blow your schedule, this will cost you money. If you have a specific budget amount for the project – an exact dollar amount you can’t go over, be honest about this with your vendor, and let them take the reigns on what can and can’t be accomplished. Conversely, if you’ve got some wiggle room, don’t pretend you don’t. Your creative will suffer for it.
Pitfall: Missed deliverables, blown timeline
This is the No. 1 killer of good projects. More times than we can count on all the Barbarians’ fingers and toes (which is 580 fingers and toes, by the way, not counting interns), we have seen this kill a project. It is amazing how often timelines are completely blown before they get off the ground because we can’t get copy from an agency, or they never send over a photo of the product. If there’s one place you want to expend the bulk of your energy as a producer, this is it. Work diligently to make sure everyone has everything they need to get the job done. A good interactive shop will constantly remind you (we try not to call it “nagging”) that items are needed and let you know when the timeline is being threatened, but many freelancers will not. You’re not paying them to do that, and they figure when you need them, you’ll call them. In the meantime, they’ll just sit there playing their Xboxes and when you call two weeks later, when you expect it to be done, they’ll say “oh, you never gave me that photo I needed, so I haven’t started yet.” You will want to hit them, but violence is wrong.
And here we come to another important point. Most shops have contracts that limit the number of revisions that are included in the bid. For reasons we won’t go into, there is a breed of art director out there that can’t help but go beyond this. They forget that what they are seeing is the product of several hours of programming, and it isn’t like moving things around on the canvas in PhotoShop. They’ll ask if they can make things bigger, then smaller, then bigger again, and then blue, and then red, and then no, back to blue. Most shops will do their best to accommodate this up to a point, but as a producer it’s good to see it coming before it gets out of hand. There are shops out there (we’re not one of them) that will include the costs for this sort of fiddling in their fine print and will simply present you with a bill for several thousand dollars after the fact. You could also end up having the shop hate your agency because of the predilections of one random art director.
This is the No. 1 killer of good projects. More times than we can count on all the Barbarians’ fingers and toes (which is 580 fingers and toes, by the way, not counting interns), we have seen this kill a project. It is amazing how often timelines are completely blown before they get off the ground because we can’t get copy from an agency, or they never send over a photo of the product. If there’s one place you want to expend the bulk of your energy as a producer, this is it. Work diligently to make sure everyone has everything they need to get the job done. A good interactive shop will constantly remind you (we try not to call it “nagging”) that items are needed and let you know when the timeline is being threatened, but many freelancers will not. You’re not paying them to do that, and they figure when you need them, you’ll call them. In the meantime, they’ll just sit there playing their Xboxes and when you call two weeks later, when you expect it to be done, they’ll say “oh, you never gave me that photo I needed, so I haven’t started yet.” You will want to hit them, but violence is wrong.
And here we come to another important point. Most shops have contracts that limit the number of revisions that are included in the bid. For reasons we won’t go into, there is a breed of art director out there that can’t help but go beyond this. They forget that what they are seeing is the product of several hours of programming, and it isn’t like moving things around on the canvas in PhotoShop. They’ll ask if they can make things bigger, then smaller, then bigger again, and then blue, and then red, and then no, back to blue. Most shops will do their best to accommodate this up to a point, but as a producer it’s good to see it coming before it gets out of hand. There are shops out there (we’re not one of them) that will include the costs for this sort of fiddling in their fine print and will simply present you with a bill for several thousand dollars after the fact. You could also end up having the shop hate your agency because of the predilections of one random art director.
Pitfall: Producer-block
It is, of course, gospel that all communication in normal projects goes through the producer. In general, this applies to interactive production as well, but we want to raise your awareness of a potential risk to this: producer block. This is the situation where a producer insists on being on every single phone call, even mind-numbingly boring ones about why the XML parser isn’t working, and maybe we should use more Attribute Tags instead of individual Nodes. And not only do they insist on being on every call, they insist on RUNNING every call. This leads to an embarrassing situation where the producer is slinging around terms and getting everything slightly wrong, and confusing everyone in the process. Funny techno-malapropisms like JSP Parser or FlashScript arise, and no one can figure anything out. It is my belief that that there are some types of calls that a producer can skip, but if you’re not of that persuasion, it’s recommended to remember that your role is a facilitator. Listen in to the call, answer questions about things you know about, and let them work it out. Ask for a summary in email at the end. Do not try and relay technical information from one party to another. This leads us to another type of producer block: pretending you understand the technology. Like we said before, it’s our belief that a good producer does not need to know anything about Unix or .Net or what Rails is beyond the Acela. Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know. This is more than a friendly piece of affirming advice. A producer pretending they grasp complex technical processes that he doesn’t is a dangerous thing. If you understand something, great, but if you don’t, be up front about it. Your project will be better for it.
It is, of course, gospel that all communication in normal projects goes through the producer. In general, this applies to interactive production as well, but we want to raise your awareness of a potential risk to this: producer block. This is the situation where a producer insists on being on every single phone call, even mind-numbingly boring ones about why the XML parser isn’t working, and maybe we should use more Attribute Tags instead of individual Nodes. And not only do they insist on being on every call, they insist on RUNNING every call. This leads to an embarrassing situation where the producer is slinging around terms and getting everything slightly wrong, and confusing everyone in the process. Funny techno-malapropisms like JSP Parser or FlashScript arise, and no one can figure anything out. It is my belief that that there are some types of calls that a producer can skip, but if you’re not of that persuasion, it’s recommended to remember that your role is a facilitator. Listen in to the call, answer questions about things you know about, and let them work it out. Ask for a summary in email at the end. Do not try and relay technical information from one party to another. This leads us to another type of producer block: pretending you understand the technology. Like we said before, it’s our belief that a good producer does not need to know anything about Unix or .Net or what Rails is beyond the Acela. Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know. This is more than a friendly piece of affirming advice. A producer pretending they grasp complex technical processes that he doesn’t is a dangerous thing. If you understand something, great, but if you don’t, be up front about it. Your project will be better for it.
Pitfall: Slavishness to generally accepted web design processes.
The flipside to the producer who doesn’t know anything about interactive production is the one who came from what we call “the web world.” It is, of course, a good idea to hire interactive producers who have extensive experience producing websites. The pitfall, though, is forgetting that this is interactive advertising. While we do follow a process that is generally akin to those laid out by the leaders of the web world (check out Project Calibrate and The IA Institute if you’re curious about this), there are some differences. Because of the ephemeral nature of Internet advertising, stringent pre-build usability testing is rare. It’s not to say it’s a bad idea, it’s just that when a site’s only going to live for 3 months, and all it does is let people hit cartoon monkeys on the head, there’s probably a better place to spend your money than blowing $20,000 on proper usability testing. The same is true of Quality Assurance (QA) testing. In the real web world, teams of 20 people test every portion of a website in several browsers on several operating systems and take detailed notes of every issue, and track them until they are fixed. We offer both comprehensive usability testing and QA at the Barbarian Group, but we do not recommend you spend your money on them unless e-commerce is involved. It is better used elsewhere, and the world won’t end if there’s a bug in the monkey game for a day or two.
The flipside to the producer who doesn’t know anything about interactive production is the one who came from what we call “the web world.” It is, of course, a good idea to hire interactive producers who have extensive experience producing websites. The pitfall, though, is forgetting that this is interactive advertising. While we do follow a process that is generally akin to those laid out by the leaders of the web world (check out Project Calibrate and The IA Institute if you’re curious about this), there are some differences. Because of the ephemeral nature of Internet advertising, stringent pre-build usability testing is rare. It’s not to say it’s a bad idea, it’s just that when a site’s only going to live for 3 months, and all it does is let people hit cartoon monkeys on the head, there’s probably a better place to spend your money than blowing $20,000 on proper usability testing. The same is true of Quality Assurance (QA) testing. In the real web world, teams of 20 people test every portion of a website in several browsers on several operating systems and take detailed notes of every issue, and track them until they are fixed. We offer both comprehensive usability testing and QA at the Barbarian Group, but we do not recommend you spend your money on them unless e-commerce is involved. It is better used elsewhere, and the world won’t end if there’s a bug in the monkey game for a day or two.
Pitfall: Too many cooks syndrome
People often ask us “how can we make a subservient chicken?” Aside from the fact that we kind of roll our eyes and believe that there are other cool things out there for us to make, the answer is this: get everyone – everyone – out of the way. Send your creative over to have drinks with us, and let the ideas fly. Then do not take input from anyone, no matter what. Don’t let the ECD say “it would be funnier if that button was green.” Do not let the CEO say “can we put the logo on that car?” and do not say “it would be funnier with music” yourself. Every pair of hands that touches the project will make it less funny, and therefore less effective. This is not for the faint of heart. Generally speaking, only luck or outright deception makes this possible. Most companies do not have it in them to let go completely and say “geronimo” and let you mess with their brand in a wholesale manner. I’m not saying I blame them – lord knows I wouldn’t do it with my company – but this is what it takes. There’s no way around it. Don’t try and pretend you can work around it. You can’t. It’ll be funny, but it won’t be as funny as you’re hoping, if more than maybe 5 people touch it, including you.
People often ask us “how can we make a subservient chicken?” Aside from the fact that we kind of roll our eyes and believe that there are other cool things out there for us to make, the answer is this: get everyone – everyone – out of the way. Send your creative over to have drinks with us, and let the ideas fly. Then do not take input from anyone, no matter what. Don’t let the ECD say “it would be funnier if that button was green.” Do not let the CEO say “can we put the logo on that car?” and do not say “it would be funnier with music” yourself. Every pair of hands that touches the project will make it less funny, and therefore less effective. This is not for the faint of heart. Generally speaking, only luck or outright deception makes this possible. Most companies do not have it in them to let go completely and say “geronimo” and let you mess with their brand in a wholesale manner. I’m not saying I blame them – lord knows I wouldn’t do it with my company – but this is what it takes. There’s no way around it. Don’t try and pretend you can work around it. You can’t. It’ll be funny, but it won’t be as funny as you’re hoping, if more than maybe 5 people touch it, including you.
_Pitfall: Viral marketing is neither e-cards, nor is it an add-on. _
All too often potential clients want to cover all the bases with one interactive initiative. They want to build what they think is a robust site, and then simply tack on some e-cards to it, to give it a viral component. Always remember: there has to be a compelling reason for the user to send around a link or a site: The ability for a user to spread the word does not equate with a reason for him/her to bother.
All too often potential clients want to cover all the bases with one interactive initiative. They want to build what they think is a robust site, and then simply tack on some e-cards to it, to give it a viral component. Always remember: there has to be a compelling reason for the user to send around a link or a site: The ability for a user to spread the word does not equate with a reason for him/her to bother.
Pitfall: Your agency is getting a bad rep in the industry
There are perhaps 2,000 world-class Flash designers over 18 in the US, and maybe 10,000 in the world. There are maybe 20 firms like ours worldwide. And most of us are friends. If you do not pay on time, the industry will hear about it. If you steal an idea, they will hear about it. If you forget to credit someone on your awards entry, they will hear about it. If you’re one of those agencies who doesn’t let people talk about the work they do from you, make it clear up front. Interactive shops and freelancers alike will take work they must be confidential about (and we have some huge confidential clients we never mention), but they do not like to be surprised about this after the fact. Do not try and steal employees from interactive shops while they’re working on your projects. You will get away with these things for a while, but eventually you literally won’t have anyone to do your projects, and you’ll have to start hiring a bunch of kids right out of school, and they will work for you for a year and then go somewhere else. It will be an awful experience for you and your agency, and if this sounds familiar, you probably should just jump ship now. Not only is this good karma and solid ethics, it will make your projects better. A project can only suffer if only one shop in Brazil will work for you.
There are perhaps 2,000 world-class Flash designers over 18 in the US, and maybe 10,000 in the world. There are maybe 20 firms like ours worldwide. And most of us are friends. If you do not pay on time, the industry will hear about it. If you steal an idea, they will hear about it. If you forget to credit someone on your awards entry, they will hear about it. If you’re one of those agencies who doesn’t let people talk about the work they do from you, make it clear up front. Interactive shops and freelancers alike will take work they must be confidential about (and we have some huge confidential clients we never mention), but they do not like to be surprised about this after the fact. Do not try and steal employees from interactive shops while they’re working on your projects. You will get away with these things for a while, but eventually you literally won’t have anyone to do your projects, and you’ll have to start hiring a bunch of kids right out of school, and they will work for you for a year and then go somewhere else. It will be an awful experience for you and your agency, and if this sounds familiar, you probably should just jump ship now. Not only is this good karma and solid ethics, it will make your projects better. A project can only suffer if only one shop in Brazil will work for you.
Pitfall: Translations
It is vitally important that if a site is every even potentially destined for translation into another language that this is known up front. Many times, we’ve built a whole site only to be told after the fact that it’s going to be translated into several languages. Translation preparation is very easy to do on a site as it’s being built. But retrofitting a site to make it ready for translation later, however, is a time-consuming and expensive process. There are specialized firms out there that make this process easier, but they aren’t cheap. If you think it might be translated, play it safe.
It is vitally important that if a site is every even potentially destined for translation into another language that this is known up front. Many times, we’ve built a whole site only to be told after the fact that it’s going to be translated into several languages. Translation preparation is very easy to do on a site as it’s being built. But retrofitting a site to make it ready for translation later, however, is a time-consuming and expensive process. There are specialized firms out there that make this process easier, but they aren’t cheap. If you think it might be translated, play it safe.
Pitfall: Asap-it is
You need it as fast as possible. But do you really? What does that mean? Do you want to pay $12million when you could wait four days and get it for $1million? ASAP is good for initial conversations, but it needs to be tempered. It needs to be elaborated upon. Much, much more is possible than we are generally willing to undertake.
You need it as fast as possible. But do you really? What does that mean? Do you want to pay $12million when you could wait four days and get it for $1million? ASAP is good for initial conversations, but it needs to be tempered. It needs to be elaborated upon. Much, much more is possible than we are generally willing to undertake.
1 Boards U
fn2. This is a completely fabricated number.
fn3. Jeff Benjamin, our client at Crispin on this project
