Website Reviews 23 Aug

Volkswagon - The People's Reviewer
http://www.thepeoplesreviewer.com/

The People's Reviewer is a microsite developed by Volkswagon to show off it's new mini-SUV, the Tiguan. The microsite has an attractive home-made quality about it, though no doubt some designers spent a very long time achieving the 'under-designed' effect. The Tiguan microsite and subsequent landing zone on Volkswagon's UK site gives an enjoyable customer journey that is a nice addition to the UK automotive digital library. With a few exceptions, such as this Volkswagon site and the generally excellent Mini activity, this body of work takes itself a little too seriously and offers rather pedestrian customer experiences (see what I did there?).

So what's so special about The Tiguan activity? Well, it showcases the vehicle in mostly positive terms without resorting to the usual automotive cliches: sharpe angles, long twisty roads and heavy production. The Tiguan activity has taken a nice approach of putting the product in the hands of the people and letting them review it (hence the url). Armed with a new Tiguan and a digital movie camera, members of the great British public take an extended test drive and record their live experiences. These are then downloaded and the best one's shown on the website.

A voting mechanism is added to make it more interesting for site visitors, though this is my least favourite part of the experience. Whilst I enjoyed watching one video, and quite liked the second one, it all got a bit long for me. To revisit the site week after week voting on videos of several minutes is going to take up a rather larger part of the week than I am prepared to give up. Perhaps others feel differently but this seems to me to be asking too much of the audience. OK, there is a Win a Tiguan for three months competition, but that's not enough to get me playing all the videos and returning every week. What I'd have liked to see was a library of real people doing stuff with the car, like weekly shopping, picking up kids, changing the rear seat configuration, the car parking automatically (which features in some of the videos to great effect). Seeing how lots of real people enjoy (or otherwise) doing the stuff that I do every day would have been good. The site kind of offers that but it's organised to suit the competition rather than be organised to suit different uses.

No doubt Volkswagon know what they're doing and plenty of research drove (see, did it again!) their decision making in this direction.

When you click through to the main Volkswagon UK site, the Tiguan landing page opens nicely with the car driving into the frame and then parking itself. It's a really clever way to continue the customer journey and I particularly liked the vehicle going almost completely out of frame before reversing back into full view. So good. It nicely showcases the product and the killer feature (self park).

It remains to be seen whether this promotion captures the attention of suffcient numbers of target buyers and persuades them to try the car, however I think Volkswagon have done a lot right here. By using members of the public and providing a low-key video production, the statements made in favour of the vehicle by the test drivers achieve authenticity - very hard to do and extremely valuable.

Website Reviews 17 Aug

Fly Baboo
www.flybaboo.com

Baboo is an airline based in Geneva, Switzerland. They fly a couple of dozen routes, mainly south of Geneva. I noticed advertising for the airline whilst I was in Geneva airport last week. The thing which struck me first was the logo, shown here, which has neatly incorporated the Swiss national image (logo?) into the corporate logo. The 'B' of Baboo has been resolved with the cross of the Swiss flag in the cross of the first letter of the corporate name.

Some attempts at logos look contrived, particularly when a message is intended from the logo. Baboo, however have managed to neatly create an original logo whilst noting their relationship to Switzerland, without looking forced.

Having never flown with Baboo I can't report on their service quality, however looking at their website my impression is positive and I'm pretty sure this will carry through to their service delivery. The site is clean, neat and contains pretty well everything you need. One thing it does have that many more airlines could add is carbon offsetting in action. Baboo have added a 'baboo forest' section to their site which shows, in some detail, the levels they have gone to in offsetting emissions. In partnership with a site called Aquaverde they have arranged to plant around 7,000 trees (so far) in a designated area of the Amazon Rain Forest, in a concerted attempt at reforestation, working with local communities deep in the Amazon.

This is a nice touch and demonstrates tangible, proactive moves by the airline. Contrast this with the rather poor efforts of many (most?) other airlines. EasyJet, for example, it seems to me, are in denial about the impact of emissions and have filled their site with content about how little their planes pollute (compared to other fleets) and the contribution to global warming accounted for by air travel (small according to EasyJet). To me this rather misses the point and I'd far rather fly with an airline that was serious about doing something about emissions, rather than take the 'we're not as bad as some' approach. Is there anyone left who thinks another 1000kg of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing?

So, well done to Baboo, firstly for the emissions being front and centre, secondly for a nice site and thirdly for a great logo execution.

By the way, if you find yourself in Geneva airport, great food and drink can be had in the Montreux Jazz Cafe. That's 'Rob's Top Travel Tip' for today!

PS. At some point I will return to logo design and in particular 'Suisse' Design, as advocated by, among others, Josef Muller-Brockmann. In the meantime, here's a link to a top designer influenced by Suisse Design - Suisse Studio www.suissestudio.co.uk.

Website Reviews 31 Jul

Mini USA Motoring Citations
www.miniusa.com

Despite strong attempts to engage digitally, motoring sites have a sameness about them (a few notable exceptions - current VW activity in the UK seems particularly good). Sites share common attributes: high quality photograpy (from offline activity), 'build your vehicle' and get it priced, specifications and dealer finders, etc. A large number of sites also try to inject a sense of fun into their digital engagement strategies. Trying to be fun is hard, however, particularly if this is not an attribute generally associated with the brand. If 'fun' is a digital-only stance, it likely misses the target.

Mini succeeds digitally with 'fun' because fun is wrapped round the entire brand. For Mini, it's not an add-on to be cool online, it's part of the everyday presentation of the product portfolio.

The Mini USA site is very attractively designed and engaging. There are plenty of fun expressions of the brand and products, one of which particularly caught my eye - the Motoring Citation. This is a download-and-print-out pdf to place on other motorists vehicles. Designed to look like an official citation (of some motoring wrong doing) the citation in this example is actually a positive one. Commending the driver on good parking, smart wheels, real mud on a 4x4, etc. It's a bit of fun and nicely engages visitors and not a vehicle specification in sight. Even if one doesn't use the citation, it does, at least to my mind, secure in the visitor's mind the fun positioning of the brand.

It's hard to generate separation for products online, but this type of activity is a nice way to try.

Website Reviews 30 Jul

67 Days
www.orlandoinfo.com/67days

67 days is an idea thought up by Orlando Info, to promote the range of fun activities Orlando has to offer. They calculated that 67 days is how long you need to try everything entertainment-wise that Orlando has to offer. The competition is to find two people to spend 67 consecutive days entertaining themselves in Orlando. The lucky winners are required to visit the parks, stand in lines, ride the rides, see the shows, etc. and blog and tweet about their experiences. The lucky pair will start their visits on 27th August, under the rather cheesy title, "67 Days of Smiles in Orlando"

Presumably, the shine will come off Orlando even for the most enthusiastic visitors after something less than 67 days and it will be interesting to see how their spirit changes as the weeks go by. You can follow the activities via Facebook, for example, and see if their smiles remain fixed for the full 67 days.

The construction of the promotion is interesting as it taps into two great themes for online success - social media and online pr. The idea of two people blogging and tweeting their days away may not hold universal appeal but it will create an interesting body of content which hopefully achieves an authentic air - 'authentic' being one of the key attributes of social media in order to engage. At the same time, the promotion execution and the winners experiences are hugely pr-able. Instead of reading some dreary facts in a brochure about 117 roller-coasters in Orlando, you can read (and watch?) the winners as they experience roller-coaster 24 of 117, etc. This type of content and approach to publishing should generate plenty of links and consequently traffic. Plus there are signs of participation initiatives to keep followers engaged. As the promotion goes live, expect more options to get involved with the winning couple - from simply posting comments to (perhaps) building wish lists, ticking off places already visited, taking part in competitions, etc. These, if executed well, should ensure online success.

For the winners, it's a fantastic shop-window for a future career in travel journalism - 'have you any experience writing about travel destinations?', well, yes, 67 days of it, actually, generating 27 kajillion page views. It's a great launch pad for the lucky winners, if they decide to pursue this line.

Overall, a great promotion and smart use of online media. Doesn't take a big budget to execute but likely generates significant coverage.

Website Reviews 07 May

Lavish & Lime
www.lavishandlime.com

Lavish & Lime is a Canadian online retailer with a simple online catalogue. The design is fresh and easy to navigate. What makes Lavish & Lime particularly noteworthy is that they have become an early signer-upper of a "Name Your Price" service provided by a firm called Price Whispers. On the right hand side of the screenshot, the new service is right under the "Add to Cart" action button.

This is a neat idea to give consumers another purchase route. By letting a retailer know at what price a consumer would be prepared to make a purchase, the retailer gains some new information. How they act on that information would depend on a number of factors - item popularity, stock availability, discount implied, margin, etc but it is a new way of looking at pricing. As a launch retailer, Lavish & Lime probably gain some positive PR and attract some new customers, but beyond that, only time will tell if it works for the retailer. What criteria might be used to assess the scheme - rate of sale, average basket size, profile per customer, are some that come to mind, but perhaps other benefits will accrue such as higher email sign-up rates (or fewer opt-outs), less reliance on obvious deep discounting (which is generally communicated to all customers) and perhaps less reliance on couponing. So, overall, tactical discounting could net some nice gains to the bottom line.

When constructing a digital strategy, there are so many components to consider - channels to the customer, segmenting and targeing customers, managing propositions, managing campaigns, and so on. This potentially adds another variant to the mix. Keeping communications clear whilst engaging customers, turning browsers into buyers and improving overal marketing ROI are challenging. Only time will tell if this development makes that task easier or more difficult.

Website Reviews 16 Apr

National Lottery
http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/

Searching for Reasons to be Cheerful, with a nod of appreciation to the late, great Ian Dury, I fix on the impressive technological innovation that goes into display monitors. Until quite recently moving to high display resolutions on large screen monitors was prohibitively expensive for most people. However the relentless march of technology has led to large screens for all except those on the most modest of budgets. Imagine having a monitor big enough to display a full browser session and a spreadsheet side by side. It's great if you have had to (and I have) laboriously transcribe data from the browser window into the spreadsheet. Tasks like this are easier with more screen real estate.

Viewing the National Lottery site recently, it struck me that the designers must have had large monitors and high resolutions in mind when they set about the task of refreshing this site. Laptop users, particularly those with the new ultra-portable ones, are poorly served by many sites and the National Lottery site is a prime example. There are some sites, newspaper sites, for instance where vertical scrolling goes with the territory, so an hour spent on guardian.co.uk or timesonline.co.uk is an hour spent scrolling. That's fine - if you want to read the content, you have to scroll. The amount you scroll is related to the size of your monitor / resolution combo. There are other sites, however, where vertical scrolling is not part of the expected usage of the site - sites that perform a function and require a visitor to move between many different screens in order to complete a transaction. In these cases, excessive scrolling is a great inconvenience and largely unnecessary.

The National Lottery refresh is attractive in a corporate-take-no-chances sort of way, however it is very wasteful of vertical space. This causes repeated vertical scrolling as you are going through a transaction. Try topping up an account on this site, then buy a ticket. Observe how far down the screen the action button consistently appears. Move from screen to screen and the action button appears below the fold. If you're viewing it on a laptop with a couple of toolbars in your browser, forget trying to see the action buttons.

Generally, any unnecessary step you force on a user risks disengagement and that's not smart. When every visitor is precious, it seems odd that a major brand would create an experience so negative for a large part of their base. Of particular annoyance is when a field appears below the fold next to an action button: complete the field (say, number of weeks you wish to play) and before you can say "stop scrolling" the screen has scrolled up and you need to scroll back down to find the action button. I mean, really. It's because of a recaclulation, but there are better ways to deal with this.

I know that I can F11 and zap the browser headers but I shouldn't need 900 pixels of screen depth to fit in a "next" button, for heavens sake. Some sites, e.g. Amazon put action buttons above and below the critical content in the checkout process. On a recent visit to the National Lottery site I had to vertically scroll on all bar two pages through my transaction. Yet, the top of the screen is largely wasted. For the top third of the visible screen, there is virtually no content. What a Waste, as Ian Dury wrote.

Website Reviews 30 Mar

Gawker
www.gawker.com

When does a trend become a bandwagon? When does a scoop become old news? Answer: in the time it takes the average person to type 140 characters.

Yes, back on planet Twitter it's been a busy old week (and it's only Monday). It seems that Twitter has exploded and it's no longer a novelty to tweet (or twit as someone mistweeted themselves recently, to coin a phrase). Twitter is everywhere. Follow me on Twitter is this years must have accessory for all discerning websites.

Crossing over into mass media is no bad thing - it speaks to the utility value of the medium and the passion people have for it. Like text messaging, I predict this will run and run. It's unlike Mobile TV or Video Calling which are still clunky and expensive and never going to be mass market services, certainly not this year or next. Twitter is the new thing and here to stay. Let me tell you some highlights about my day on Twitter:

• An ex-colleague tweeted a link to a picture of himself following several hours spent in the icy hills over the weekend - not pretty.


• Another ex-colleague posted the following link with the comment - OMFG. I'll leave it to you to work it out, but the picture will give you a clue: London Underground Map (on a shirt). What were they thinking?


• The ever funny Mr Fry posted a picture of himself in a sarong about to enter a temple and a further pic showing sign next to the temple in wonderful Engrish stating the rules for entering the temple.


• There are endless celebrities Twittering and some have been shown to be less online than others, with stories of Tweet-by-proxy, whereby an assistant tweets the details of the star. Gawker on related topics is funny.


• And finally, again from Gawker, the home of all that is bitchy and clever, comes the story of Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team who was fined for slagging referees through Twitter and then used Twitter to post his further thoughts on the matter. I love one of the comments on Gawker: Mark Cuban is the guy I'd most like to punch in the mouth.

I really do love Gawker (and the twin publication Deasdspin) for their persistent pursuit of celebrity car smashes and the crazy members of the public in thrall to the cult of celebrity. But most of all, I love Twitter for bringing all of this stuff directly into my world. What does tomorrow bring?

Website Reviews 27 Mar

Buscando Nubes (Searching for Clouds)
http://www.buscandonubes.com/

This is a great social networking / competition site from Vueling, a Spanish airline. The promotional site is well sign-posted from the main brand site and also linked from other social networking environments. The idea is to take a picture in a city that Vueling flies to (more details of Vueling routes on skyscanner.es) and edit the picture to feature the Vueling "cloud" image. Post the resultant picture to the site and you might win. You can browse other visitor pictures using Google Maps, zooming into a city to see the locations of pictures taken so far. You can also add comments to existing posts.

The promotional site follows the design elements of the main site and is well translated into popular European languages. Originally I thought there were no Vueling flights to or from the UK, as the route map and list of Vueling cities does not include any in the UK, however using their flight search both Gatwick and Heathrow airports appear, so not sure what that's all about. In any event the site is well translated for English visitors and hopefully there are plans to extend their route network further into the UK.

This is a nice execution based on a very simple idea. What I especially like is the restrained tone that Vueling have adopted - there is no pressure selling on the site, it succeeds by being novel and engaging - it doesn't need reversed out "SALE NOW ON" messaging to make a point - it makes a subtle connection with visitors and that most likely has a more lasting (and more positive) impact. The site encourages you to experiment, to play and that might be enough to create some separation in a very crowded market.

I don't have access to the Vueling digital strategy but this is above all a happy experience, it brings a smile to your face and I hope it succeeds. Perhaps the strategy was that simple?

This post is dedicated to my Uncle Alex who died this morning. I think of him with a smile always on his face and a welcome always in his voice and this happy site is a good match.

Website Reviews 25 Mar

Ada Lovelace Day

Apologies for being a day late, but here's a thought for Ada Lovelace Day, thanks to The Guardian. It's a great story and has afforded an opportunity for the press to celebrate the role of women in technology. Personally I think the mere fact of celebrating this tells a story: that there are not enough women working in technology. Successful women in technology is still a noteworthy subject. You don't hear of a "Celebrate men in technology day", probably because it would actually be "Celebrate talking in code whilst wearing a Metallica t-shirt and camouflage trousers day". Personally I've worked with a number of very talented women in technology, from Digital Producers and Copywriters to Project Managers and Engineers. Generally the attention to detail and focus has exceeded that of their male colleagues, myself included. Now, where was I ...

Picking up on an earlier post on the wonder of Twitter (yes, I know many are still undecided, but go with it people, it really is the future), I followed a link from @jearle, a former colleague and a moderately good SysAdmin (OK, a bloody good SysAdmin) offering a link to the following blog N2Teaching. This seems like a fine resource but it does have a slightly odd voice-over "are you a teacher too" or something like that. My view on instant audio or video is that is should "polite-load" - make its presence known but never autoplay - let the user engage. Anyhoo, the article links further to Weather Pixie a neat little site offering weather reports from about a kajillion locations worldwide and serving them up as little characters (see picture). You can customise your Weather Pixie and grab the code to post on your website or blog. Neat. Oh, and built by a woman. Happy Ada Lovelace day everyone.

Website Reviews 17 Mar

St Patrick's Day
For marketers, St Patrick’s Day is an unofficial day of general celebration in a way that St Andrew’s Day, for example, is simply not. And how do marketers celebrate? With an offer! So for today, St Patrick’s Day, let me share with you a few opportunities taken by marketers.

Firstly we have a Cheapflights email announcing discount flights by aerlingus.com. The promotion is a good link – Irish flag carrier airline is an obvious partner. The Cheapflights logo also has a couple of shamrocks added, which is perhaps a touch too much, as the headline offer is probably enough to establish the St Patrick’s Day linkage. The rest of the email has no mention of St Patrick’s Day and it might have been nice to have a deal for Dublin in the Deals section. There is a further mention of aerlingus.com deal but at a different price to the headline banner – which seems odd. Still, nice effort though.

NFL Shop picked up on St Patrick’s Day too but with no obvious linkage. “It’s St Patrick’s Day so that’s another excuse to email you with an offer”, seems to be the approach here. The email opens with a few selected items from the shop and lots of links to the very extensive NFL Shop. It’s certainly a deep discount and a strong call to action but the St Patrick’s Day link is very contrived. I do like the strong subject line though: “St. Patrick's Day Special - Take 30% Off Orders - Today Only”, which I suspect generated very good open rates. On the main site, the theme is carried forward with the same offer leading the landing page. Also noticed that the last purchase I made has been used to inform the selected items in the "shop window" which is simple but effective.

MSN gets in on the act by offering a Who is the Greatest Irishman vote for visitors. It’s labelled “MSN battle” which may just be a touch of hyperbole for such an unscientific and utterly pointless poll. Still, simple works and the call to action is strong enough to encourage people to take part and drive traffic to the next page. Slightly off-putting is the focus on Irishman – as if women are not considered. Or am I reading too much into it? Anyway, on reaching the next page it is a surprise to find the results of the poll so far appearing under the “battle”, in my case Bram Stoker versus Dermot Morgan. It would have been stronger with a cast-your-vote-and-then-see-the-top-ten mechanic.

Skyscanner launched a new top level domain for Ireland, just in time for St Patrick's Day. There's no obvious shamrocking of the site as that would be blatent jumping, bandwagon-wise. Instead this site gives you flight options to Dublin and other Irish cities from anywhere you could posibly be. If there's an airline that flies to or from Ireland, it'll be on the Skyscanner site.

This was a highly selective list but it does show brands getting in on the act with topical content for 17th March. As far as strategy goes, it’s either good timing or simple opportunism - take your pick. Go on, go on, go on.

Website Reviews 28 Feb

Twitter
www.twitter.com

Thanks for checking out this issue of Digital Strategy Website Reviews. Only one site today - Twitter and not really a site review, more a few thoughts on some rather strange reports about Twitter that have recently appeared in the press.

The press seems to have suddenly gone all atwitter. Have you noticed the coverage recently? Twitter seems to have landed in the UK and the members of the press are paying attention. Boosted by the UK Twitter champion, Stephen Fry and his excellent tweets, the service has sky-rocketed recently. It’s a classic environment for network effects to drive adoption once critical mass has been attained and with annualised growth running at about 1000%, it’s safe to say critical mass has been reached.

Surprisingly, a lot of recent commentary has been negative, ranging from “I don’t get it” to “A waste of time” and even to “There’s something wrong with you if you follow people on Twitter”. We even have the rather odd situation of digital industry stalwart, New Media Age finding itself in Daily Mail territory reporting that Twitter is a “child safety and privacy disaster waiting to happen”. Really? Have the writers spent any time on t’interweb recently? Twitter is not opening up some new gateway to hell, a one-way ticket to a land of endless escort services, drug abuser, racists and pornographers. I am told that these people flourished perfectly well before Twitter came along.

For those that don’t get it, that’s OK, go somewhere else. For those that think it a waste of time, well apologies for distracting you from your contribution to more uplifting and worthy societal developments. For those that think we’re in some way damaged for “following” people online, I have a secret to share with you: It’s fun. We who tweet are not pestering or stalking, we’re sharing. Whilst you’re busy wringing your hands at the latest sign of the decline of standards, we Tweeters are in another place having fun. Is it OK if the open-minded among us indulge in some community chat that we enjoy? As Tom Petty sort of said, “You can’t hear us, but we’re laughing all the time”.

A good retort to those who want to rise up and save us from ourselves can be found on the Made By Many blog which recently addressed this very issue. As a side point, the Made by Many blog happens to be a tip top example of agency blogging – they pick topics, any topic that they find interesting really and write about it. Always well written and with many members of the team contributing, it’s produced to a high standard.

Anyway, back to Twittergate, I really can’t understand the fuss. It would, of course, be terrible if anyone came to serious harm as a result of a tweet, but how is sharing on Twitter that different to the internet in general, and the wider offline world we live in? Twitter did not invent the insult. Censorship is rarely merited and talk of such in reference to Twitter is ridiculous.

Update 2nd March: Doing a quick scan of Brand Republic shows a near daily update on Twitter articles. One caught my eye today - reference to an article from PR Week covering some research on the most prolific tweeting flacks. One was recorded as having tweeted 3,410 times in just 372 days. That does seem a lot and is perhaps newsworthy, but this is not a competition. Volume does not make value but it does seem to play to the point I'm making above - the media just discovering Twitter.

Update 4th March: Further evidence of the growing importance of Twitter - you know you've arrived when you're declaimed by Google, as reported in The Times. Pity the Google CEO got the number of characters in a tweet wrong! Again in today's Times a report on a failed attempt to rescue a lost skier using Twitter to spread the net.

Update 17th March: Read in NMA today that Debenhams had had their id squatted on Twitter: Brand identities at risk as fakers take their place on Twitter (can't deep link as you need a userid to read the full article on the site). Fortunately no-one seems to be publishing under the original Debenhams name, unlike South West Trains, where an unhappy SWT customer is recounting (poor) personal travel experiences on Twitter under the name of SWT. What action can a brand take? Not much it seems. Debenhams officially tweets under DebenhamsRetail. The brand protection part of a digital strategy just got harder - not just grabbing domain names in lots of markets but taking brand names out of circulation in all social media environments, across all markets - near impossible.

Website Reviews 02 Feb

Thanks for checking out another Digital Strategy Website Reviews. Today it's a real mix of sites - from a micro music publisher to a Prime Minister. A couple of holiday companies make up the set. All are interesting but have starkly different digital strategies - one is aimed at sellling on the site, one at communication of a political message, one at providing leads for a travel providers and one of the travel providers, trying to convert leads (browsing visitors) into holiday buyers.

Funky Frog Music
www.funkyfrogmusic.com

Funky Frog Music is the publisher behind Zootopia - a CD of songs for children. This is a great little site that has a simple objective – to let visitors sample the songs and direct them to the shop to purchase. The songs are delightful and each one can be sampled on the site. The samples instantly play – from Midnight Mouse Dancing to The Chickens' Farmyard Hoedown. Each song is themed to a different animal and there are lots of illustrations, all of which are fantastic. As the proud father of young daughters, I can confirm how popular the songs become – firm family favorites. The shop works perfectly and delivery is very quick.

What’s particularly impressive about this site is how a micro-retailer can provide a high specification site with product samples and full ecommerce service. The tools now available for everyone to use means there is little or no barrier to entry in opening an online shop – most of the difficult stuff can be outsourced – the limiting factor is good content. Fortunately, this site works technically and works commercially. Try the songs, buy the CD, feel good about yourself.

Asda Travel
www.asda-travel.co.uk

The travel sector is full of surprising intermediaries, for example, Aldi recently started to offer travel services in UK stores, following the practice in Germany, Aldi’s launch was so successful, they jumped straight into the top 10 travel websites as tracked by Hitwise. Because of their distribution, supermarkets have enormous opportunity to capture non-traditional traffic. Asda has been covering holidays for longer than Aldi and travel site is just a click away from the main site but set on its own domain.

The site focuses on mainstream holiday options and offers comprehensive navigation. The design is a little corporate but there is an attractive headline font used to soften the layout somewhat. As common with most travel sites, their content can be consumed through third parties and I found the site after clicking through on an offer on a Cheap Flights weekly email. This dynamic republishing of content is common in the travel industry with many brands overlapping and the same offers appearing in many locations.

The Asda Travel site, thankfully, has more measured use of descriptions in their copy compared to some other operators. The tone is informative and interesting without slipping too often into the hackneyed, adjective laden copy, more typical of holiday content – must-see attractions, dizzying choices and mouth watering food being some of the tired phrases that make me reach for the Back button, if not the sick bag.

Thomson Holidays
www.thomson.co.uk

And talking about hackneyed, adjective laden copy, let’s look at the exotic and unsurpassed experience that is the fantastic Thomson Holidays web site. See what I did there? Yes this is the home of dead-weight, unimaginative copy. Let me provide an example:

When it comes to mealtimes at BeachClub, the choice is dizzying. From laid-back snack bars by the pool and exciting theme nights to world cuisine and a la carte restaurants, you'll find plenty of enticing eateries to tempt your taste buds. There's something for everyone - even those fussy little eaters! Drinks are on tap from dawn to dusk, too - whether it's a cold beer, colourful cocktails or a frothy coffee... More.

I particularly like the exclamation point after ‘fussy little eaters’. More? Er, no I don’t think so.

Still, the site has good tools for navigation and a wide range of holiday options. The images are pretty good and the site does build excitement towards holidays. The home page is gorgeous and I love the wraparound picture enclosing the content. The first impression is very positive – slick look and feel.

The destinations tab takes you first to a rotating globe which you can pause at areas of interest and click through to find more content. It looks very nice but I wonder how necessary it actually is? I’ll trust that Thomson Holidays have done their homework and this navigation embellishment actually helps their customers. I’d have been happy with a flat map or even a panel per continent. In any event, selecting a continent offers the countries that you can select. These are accompanied by video highlights but the display size is too small to be able to make a sensible selection. Of course there’s always the copy to fall back on. Here’s what they have to say about Italy:

‘Soul-stirring cities, world famous art, waist-expanding food and drink – holidays to Italy will captivate you from the word go.’

I really think they could do better than this. And that’s really how I feel about the site – nice to look at but could do better.

Number 10
www.number10.gov.uk

Connect with Gordon and stay up to date with the message from 10 Downing Street. That seems to be the essence of the Number 10 digital strategy. Perhaps I’m deceiving myself but this site reads much more honestly than I expected. The message appears to be informational rather than distorted and biased. There is lots of content, frequently updated, covering events at Number 10 each day. Policy announcements and details of engagements make up the majority of the content but there does appear to be a real attempt to be open.

This is a nice site aimed at keeping the UK population up to date with the events at 10 Downing Street. You could easily go to one of the excellent news sites such as Times Online or Guardian but there are some interesting things that you only get here. Firstly you get the government view, which might be good or it might be bad, but it is a view. Second you can get a link to Twitter to follow the PM’s movements and announcements. Thirdly and most importantly, you can find out which petitions are currently circulating and digitally sign-up for them. So if you believe in a topic, add your name to the petition and see if people power can move the topic up the political agenda.

This is an interesting experiment in communication, bringing politics to the people in a tangible way, unsullied by party political attack politics and shouting matches during Prime Minister’s Questions. It is easy to register and confirm your interest in a petition and you get immediate confirmation. Nice.

The design is a big upgrade on some of the other government online properties (I’m looking directly at you, HM Revenue & Customs) and is maintained regularly. The language is accessible (pay attention HMRC) and the tone is informative. The Twitter feed sends occasional announcements which act as a good driver to return to the site. Some Twitter feeds, e.g. ESPN are so voluminous that if you don’t visit Twitter for a day, you have a page full of ESPN updates and little from your friends. Not that Gordon is my friend, though it would be nice to have a one-to-one, wouldn’t it? – ask all those questions in private that wouldn’t get answered in public, get a sense of the person behind the position.

Website Reviews 18 Jan

In this Digital Strategy Website Review I’m looking at different ways of searching for data. A few years ago, a text box and a search button was about as rich as site search got, but the growth of online and the growth of the data volumes stored, has led to new methods that try to make sense of often quite large data sets. The first three examples are for very different products – diamonds, tyres and flights, with very different types of data. The web site owners have each evolved methods of making large amounts of data easy to navigate, using quite different approaches. You may be surprised at how different they are. The final example is a more abstract search type – trying to make a me-too product stand out in a very crowded market. By creating a new faux-brand, the site creates real cut through in the heavily promoted market for Motor Car Insurance.

Amazon Loose Diamond Search
www.amazon.com

Sometimes a search technique is so specific that it only works for a very particular data set. This is one of those. Lifted directly, it would have limited applicability elsewhere and yet it is instructive in how to make a complex thing very simple. In Amazon’s Diamond listings, as with many other site searches, the challenge is to show a manageable number of results from a large population that might be of interest. With books, for example, it may be easier as they naturally break into categories – crime, travel, etc. however diamonds are somewhat different. Despite having categories – clarity, carat, etc. these are interdependent when looking for a diamond – you may be prepared to sacrifice some clarity to get a larger carat, or vice versa, for example. But how to you construct a query system that a visitor can understand immediately and engage with to gain the results set that is right for them?

Amazon’s solution is to represent the various facets of diamond description visually and rank the underlying data from small to large, dull to bright, etc, etc. Presenting the different facets as horizontal sliders, the visitor can be very precise in their selections and use all of the facets at the same time to generate a manageable results set just for their need. Brilliant!

EBay Parts Finder
www.ebay.co.uk

Searching some categories on eBay can be a frustrating experience – the platform is so successful that there is often too much data to deal with. Scrolling through the results, page after page is not the best use of time. Consequently, eBay have adopted fast search tools to make sense of the data. An example is on eBay Motors with the Parts Finders set of widgets. These allow ultra targeted searches, but the widgets need the right data to search for. Consequently the starting point for successful search begins with accurate data – this is the premise upon which the Parts Finder widget is based. Listings for particular items are formatted to fit the downstream requirements of search. So, for example, with tyres, the codes on the side of each tyre uniquely identify the size and fit of the tyre, so these are captured in a formatted style and stored in a way that can subsequently be searched.

This particular approach is used on a number of Tyre search companies – it most obviously benefits the user by getting them through a vast amount of data to the most relevant results – and a manageable results set. eBay also offers search by make and model and by registration number, making the process as easy as possible.

British Airways – BA Miles Rewards Flights
www.britishairways.com

British Airways rewards programme (BA Miles) is based on the simple idea – points make prizes. The more you fly, the more points you earn. The further forward you are in the plane, the more points you earn. Once you have a pot of points you can redeem on free flights across the BA network. Given the route network that BA has, there are a huge number of destinations you might want to choose from. Different destinations require different amounts of points and different routes have different reward redemption availability. To add to these variables you can do partial cash / points redemptions. That’s a lot of options.

To make sense of these options (and presumably to reduce load on call centres) BA has invested in a number of online tools to help manage the options. These include an interactive map which allows you see points and availability. Once you have an option that works you drop into the flight booking system, with your destination and dates recorded from the search tools. You can also search by nominated destination, country list and city list, giving lots of flexibility. Organising data in this way creates a credible online resource, the value of which is easy to see. This helps the customer to make selections from available data in an intuitive manner and helps BA to reduce load on its call centres, particularly reward flights which only represent a cost to the business, the value having been previously captured through the reward-earning stage.

Compare the Meerkat
www.comparethemeerkat.com

This is a site that’s had a lot of coverage because of the TV Ad spend. It’s a major initiative to create some separation in the market, from a very simple idea. Last week I looked at a simple application (a Household Contribution Calculator) which Cornhill Direct had developed to create a point of difference. I think it’s clear which one actually generates most separation. The great thing about the Compare approach is it’s uncopyable. Anyone can create a Household Calculator but Compare the Meerkat only works for this brand. The digital execution is nicely done, mimicking the real site right down to the logo (two meerkat’s face to face, in place of pound symbols) and I bet the team had fun creating it. It remains to be seen how much extra traffic this brings to the Compare site but a good attempt at separation in a very congested market.

The lead meerkat, Alexandr has a Borat’esque manner and is available to follow on Twitter. Great fun and plenty of links back to Compare the Market.

Update 7th Feb 09: I'm sure many of you have heard of, or like me, were lucky enough to experience first hand, 'frylift' - the exploits of Stephen Fry trapped in a lift, relayed to his followers on twitter. At one point Mr Fry, had his picture taken in the lift and posted it to Twitter to demonstrate to his followers that he was actually in a lift. This picture got good coverage. Those clever marketing peeps at Compare the Market edited the picture and reposted it from Alexsandr Orlov the Meerkat brand spokes-meerkat (!) as seen here, with the comment: 'Me with Mr Stephen Fry in a lift. Stuck, stuck, stuck ...'. Very clever, very very clever.

Website Reviews 03 Jan

Welcome to the first Digital Strategy Website Reviews of 2009. Four very different brands to review with very different digital strategies. Firstly a brand adjusting to New Year sales (although with deep discounting before Christmas, is there much more to discount?), an attempt by a motor insurer to make their site more of an experience, then an original online experience and finally a brand more associated with offline, bringing great content online. These are four very different digital strategies on show - I hope you enjoy the selection.

Debenhams
www.debenhams.com

Firstly Debenhams a UK retailer who we looked at a couple of weeks ago. This time the retailer seems to have sorted out availability challenges which affected the site before Christmas and moved the focus from Gifting to pure Discounting. The look and feel of the home page is recognisable from the pre-Christmas version but the content is different. The wild range of font styles remains, which I think is a mistake. Consistency is your friend! Still, elements of the design aside, there is stuff to like here. It is enticing and covers their key sales themes (presumably) well. There is easy access to individual shopping departments and the search is obvious.

Very busy design and too many signals, but somehow still manages to remain attractive. Report card might read "could do better".

Cornhill Direct - Household Calculator
www.cornhilldirect.co.uk

"Try to make insurance appealing to our customers" might have been the brief for this one. And good luck. Insurance is one of those sectors that just doesn't inspire us. It's not like booking a holiday or researching a new HD TV. Insurance is boring, let's face it. So it's a bit of a challenge to make the product anything other than a grudged purchase.

So how do insurance companies try to make their products appealing? Well one approach is to create a 'wrapper' for the proposition and turn it into something ... well, shiney. Cornhill Direct have created a Household Economy Calculator which allows you to assess the contribution made by each household member, across a spectrum of household chores, such as cooking, washing and grocery shopping. It's nicely designed (which contrasts with the 1999-esque main site) and is easy to use. An imaginative approach but I confess to feeling "so what" at the end of it. Perhaps adding in some social networking - compare yourself to your friends might have been interesting?

Creating some novel content is probably a good thing for an organisation such as an insurer as there is such competition in Search and Pay Per Click advertising - check out the bid prices for Motor Insurance on Adwords. Perhaps this initiative has giving Cornhill some content variation to use for traffic driving (no pun intended!)

Whopper Virgins
www.whoppervirgins.com

This is a one page site but it creates a lasting impression because of the super-engaging content. It's a single video that tells a story. It takes a very familiar brand - Burger King's Whopper - and manages to do something completely new, which is damned hard with an established brand in such a heavily promoted sector. Creating cut-through for your advertising in this market is very tough to do - check out the me-too advertising format that affects heavily promoted sectors such as beauty products.

In this video, Burger King commission research in parts of the world unfamiliar with burgers and do a taste test against McDonalds Big Mac. It is charming and engaging - a great online experience. By telling a story, Burger King take something pretty tired - the taste test - and transform it into an entirely novel presentation. I won't say any more about it - just watch it.

British Airways - High Life
www.bahighlife.co.uk

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed another BA site - Metrotwin - which is a fantastic social networking site. I don't want this column to turn into a BA love-in but I continue to be impressed by the online execution by BA. Quality, quality, quality. The digital strategy behind BA High Life is very different to Metrotwin but equally well executed.

The great advantage the publishers of this site have is their access to great content. Taking the offline content and re-purposing it for online is a simple idea and well used by publishers but not often as well as with High Life. The layout is quite different to the magazine but the brand is recognisable, taking good advantage of online features to search and navigate through the very wide range of articles. With so many contributors to choose from, it's a great resource for travel information, with a quality journal tone. And the photography is top class.

There is a subscribe section but surprisingly there is no online subscription route - only paper or telephone. One minor issue, in the About High Life section, there is some terrible copy, for example, "Stunning pictures set the scene. Glittering prose draws you in. Insider tips and hilarious anecdotes grab you and won’t let go." Who writes like that? Have you ever been grabbed by an anecdote that won't let go? No, thought not. Just let the articles speak for themselves, the site does not need such awkward self-promotion. Still, a minor quibble - this is a fine online destination.

Digital Strategy 09 Forecast

Digital Strategy Prognostication

What does the Digital world hold for us in 2009? Of course, no-one really knows – the answer is unknowable, however there are some pointers:

• Firstly, in the teeth of a recession, ecommerce will continue to rise. Dennis Woodside, Head of Google in the UK, writing in NMA, reported an interesting statistic: The UK’s population is 20% that of the US but it had 60% of that country’s ecommerce spend. That’s a significant indicator of how people in the UK shop. This trend will continue. 09 will see further growth in online sales as consumers search for better deals and research more product categories than they might otherwise have done. Expect a big year for price comparison sites such as Kelkoo.co.uk and Confused.com.


• Secondly, online spend will increase as a share of total media. In 08, online took just over 18% of all media spend and that share will increase, past 20% - a significant milestone. For online to grab a significant increase beyond this level will be hard – TV is still by a comfortable margin a bigger spend area and a more influential advertising media. The challenge for Online is to balance the needs of advertisers with those of the online population and the online community has more resistance to intrusive advertising.


• Thirdly, the mobile internet and a question asked of the two previous years: will this be the year when mobile finally becomes fast, engaging and ubiquitous? Well, no. That’ll be 2010 at the earliest. 09 will however see significant progress on mobile. Increased spend will drive further innovation. Better handsets, better mobile browsers, improved analytics, improved website design to allow content and advertising to work in numerous screen sizes and a change in mobile charging with more unlimited data bundles. A challenge for mobile operators has been getting data spend to increase significantly. The one big data success has been Texting and that’s been around for 10 years. 09 will be about setting the stage for the future success of mobile, but don’t expect a big change in 09.

Brands will be giving their Digital Strategies a shine in anticipation of a tough trading year. Fundamentals will be even more important: understand your customers, engage them with a fantastic online experience, integrate all marketing channels and deliver on your promises. Easy! Here are 8 Specific Predictions for 09 that might feature in the Digital Strategy of more than a few brands:

1. Video will become even more apparent – taking a more prominent position on more sites. Highlighting products and services through video works well today and expect this to become prevalent on many more sites. Things like destination guides in travel, product announcements in B2B, product demos in ecommerce will all benefit from increased use of video. Expect better tracking and analytics and on publisher sites, advertising intros and outros sandwiching the video content. Long run video will expand in 09. Examples from 08 include the wonderful Whopper Virgins and Adidas Dream Big campaigns – truly amazing online campaigns that use video as the key communication form. We’re likely to see many more examples in 09. Also big will be short and long-run video from the “upload yourself” generation. Self publishing has never been so easy with devices offering direct to YouTube offerings.


2. Online sites of TV broadcasters will make more of their live broadcast streams available online through dedicated players like iPlayer. More and more back catalogues will also be available. The players themselves will become more sophisticated and more stable. Expect social networking features such as user ratings and recommendations based on what other users liked. Personalisation will also feature and this will give publishers valuable demographics about users – expect this to be released as better recommendations and more advertising. iPlayer will become a product BBC continues to licence to other publishers, appearing on numerous sites and devices as a default media player.


3. Search continues to grow. Yawn, what a surprise. Yes, well perhaps not a particularly insightful prediction, but important nonetheless. Expect smarter use of search – agencies will be trying hard to add value (i.e. get a fee) and this might be in closer tie-ups between promotions and search – seeding particular terms for later use in through the line activities. The removal of Best Practice Funding will force agencies to work smarter on PPC campaigns.


4. Mobile device arms race will continue at a pace with today’s handsets guaranteed obsolescence making room for even “better” handsets by Xmas 09, taking the feature lists beyond the needs of even the geekiest of us. One positive out of the device wars will be a continued push on two fronts important to users – capacity and screen resolution. Expect Apple in Sept/Oct to announce a doubling of storage capacity on iPods and iPhones. And finally the iPhone will get a decent camera.


5. Online celebrity chasing will continue at an indecent pace in 09 with sites such as the wonderful Gawker.com commanding even more attention (and more advertising) with stories exposing celebrities to be just as mean, dishonest, avaricious and insecure as the rest of us. Expect strong growth in a social networking dimension to celebrity chasing – who spotted whom to appear on social networking and publishing sites – and more pictures submitted to sites directly from mobile phones, with, gasp, Jennifer Aniston shopping in LA wearing, wait for it, ... Gucci sunglasses! OMG!


6. Improved targeting (and tracking) will appear through the back door. Having had the front door slammed in its face in 08, behavioural targeting will creep in, step by step. Concerns about privacy need to be addressed, but claims that users will flock for the exits are unrealistic – consumers often express displeasure in “I’ll definitely leave my ISP” terms, however, who are they going to leave for? Another ISP that’s toying with a different behavioural targeting model? And anyway it’s such a fag to change ISPs that it’s not worth the hassle. Uncertainty can be overcome with information and expect a low-key charm offensive in 09. And, better targeted ads – and that’s a wholly good thing.


7. Online display advertising will continue to be enriched with more use of video. Expandable positions (where the ad expands to take over content space when you mouse over the ad) will increase and many more auto-run ads will appear on publisher sites. This creates a good workflow for digital agencies in production terms but expect pressure from above the line agencies muscling in on areas closer to their area of expertise. Media buying agencies and Ad agencies are beefing up Digital Media arms and will extend campaigns across media, capturing as much of the total production and media buying budget as they can. Expect more use of content designed for TV advertising to appear in online display.


8. Internet Explorer will continue to dominate browser share, albeit at a lower level as competitors continue to push aggressively, particularly Google with their new browser, Chrome. IE8 due in February will be the biggest upgrade of the year for most people. Initially a lot of websites will force IE8 into IE7 compatibility mode but increasingly website developers will take advantage of the new features in IE8 and design sites to work well in that environment – a change from the lowest common denominator approach of current development standards. Firefox, Safari and Chrome will still be playing catch-up in 09.

Certainly a common thread is Technology. Much of online is powered (obviously) by technology, but it should be mostly a background service, not the core proposition. A source of innovation and value certainly, but without an engaging content wrapper, technology on its own makes for a thin customer experience. A Digital Strategy should not be defined by technology. In fact if your Digital Strategy contains terms like load-balanced servers, XML or open-source, then ditch it, it’s not a Digital Strategy.

So that’s it. A very personal view on what might happen in 2009. This will be an interesting year in Online – seeing how brands deal with a slowdown in the economy and seek improved return from their online spend. Who will win? Who will lose out? It looks to be a good year for comparison shopping sites, but a bad year for whom? Charities possibly? Compared to offline, where there will be carnage, online looks likely to be spared major slowdowns, due to the measurable nature of online. A strong Digital Strategy will help online brands through this time of economic slowdown. It’s not enough to be online, brands must understand and engage consumers – and turn that engagement into pennies.

And finally ... some personalities who may well have a big year in 09.

1. Barrack Obama. As The Onion quoted: “black man gets America’s worst job”. A big year for Mr Obama. Is it too much to say that the world is looking to Mr Obama for hope? Certainly a fresh start but he will face many challenges. Look for this to be the most open presidency online.


2. Perez Hilton. Mr Online Gossip who spits out poisoned notes about celebrities over-managing their public personas contrasted with their calamitous personal life decisions.


3. Elena Moscatt. Creator of online drama series: Jamie’s Way and Life After Lisa, could be a pointer to how drama will evolve – webisode by webisode. Bebo has had success with online teen dramas. The presence of a major sponsor certainly helps with production budgets.


4. Steve Ballmer. As CEO of Microsoft, Mr Ballmer will have some big decisions in 09 – moving the software distribution model online, an update to Vista and Internet Explorer and challenging Google’s dominance of online advertising.


5. Tiger Woods. Mr Product Endorsement himself, returns to golf after an injury forced the end of his 08 season. Sport online is increasingly well resourced and highlights clips are particularly popular. Expect Mr Woods to feature in many of the golfing ones. As winner.