The Wired Stork Awards

It`s gotten cold these past few days, at least in Joburg. My colleagues from Durban assure me that it`s not so bad there, and Capetonians are keeping quiet - I guess they`re rained in.

Fortunately, there are the annual Loeries to keep us warm and comfortable. For those of us lucky enough to attend this past weekend`s celebrations, the most superb afterparty (this year sponsored by DStv) really heated things up in an otherwise frigid Sun City, despite my misgivings about the DJs` choice in music - I kept thinking that for a crowd of more than a thousand people, most of whom were younger than 30 and work in the advertising industry, a selection of more, shall we say, techno-literate tunes might have worked better. No matter, though, as most of us were inebriated to an extent where the music became more or less second fiddle, if you`ll excuse the pun.

What`s interesting about this Loerie event was that it once again demonstrated how little attuned the world of advertising is to what`s become known as the 'New Media'.

What`s interesting about this Loerie event was that it once again demonstrated how little attuned the world of advertising is to what`s become known as the "New Media". This year in its 20th run, the annual advertising awards are bestowed upon the most creative high-flyers throughout the advertising industry. Many, of course, dabble in design and concept work related to the world of IT, such as Web sites, CD-ROMs, touch-screen kiosks and the like. (In its second year this June, the "Wired Bird" new media Loerie had a record number of entries and got much attention.) The best design houses, such as Cape Town`s Tinderbox who walked away with this year`s top honours for a self-promotional multimedia CD-ROM, seem to be relatively new entrants into the marketplace. Close to advertising in spirit, they have embraced the culture of IT and brought their advertising-funkiness into a realm of its own.

There is a divide, though, between different types of Internet sites. In the past, it used to be the grand canyons between the good, the bad and the ugly; the chasm between the well-designed and professional vs the slapped-together and mundane (often the downright tacky and awful). But today, as both technology and design work mature to meet the expectations of an increasingly Web-literate viewing population, a much more fundamental divide is beginning to show: that between "sites that work" and "sites that look good".

It`s silly, really, and at first glance many will disagree with me. "You can`t say that the new Nando`s site at http://www.nandos.co.za doesn`t do anything. Sure, it`s great design work, but the technology is very important," my detractors will contend. I agree whole-heartedly, but my point is slightly different. It`s not that new technologies aren`t being deployed in enhancing the design and functional capacity of Web sites. But the technology elements are used to enhance the advertising or `interactive` features so as to maximise the multimedia cleverness of the sites.

It`s only in a very few cases that technology is being deployed in making the business aspects of a site work better. In fact, there are probably less than a handful of South African Web sites that actually impact the business of their owners in a significant way. Marketing and advertising, as we all know to our chagrin, are hard-to-quantify activities, and a Web site whose sole purpose is advertising may be a spiffy thing to have if you can afford it. Yet, even those with Java and Macromedia "interactive" elements, with movies and sound and new browser windows flying all over the place don`t by any necessity do more for your business.

Delivering the business promise of the Internet ultimately lies in running a Web project that aims, primarily, at enhancing your trading, pure and simple. It`s not necessarily about pretty pictures and clever design interaction, although it can be. It`s about committing to this Internet thing as an environment in which you`ll do hard business; selling and buying are, after all, the main activities of any business venture. That means that opening up your company databases to the Internet, through a well-designed, functional and secure Web site is at the core of the `Webification` process. The problem with this approach is that it`s not something you`re going to outsource to someone who is good at making splashy Web sites that enchant users into believing your marketing message.

It becomes a catch-22 sort of situation. Those who are good at constructing Web sites are advertising agencies or electronic media houses with a heavy advertising slant. So far, their primary function has been to figure out ways of selling things better; things that their clients have traditionally been wholly in charge of manufacturing. Those who are good at making saleable things are almost never any good at creating Web sites, as they don`t understand even the most basic parameters of working the Web. Would you let the creative from your advertising agency in the yellow pants make a crucial business decision for you? Certainly not. Would your advertising agency let you come near a design studio? Before you answer that, think about how many times your agency has subtly strong-armed you into going for their proposal anyway, despite what you think you know. "Advertising," as the creative director at my agency always says, "is one of the most difficult professions in the world because everyone thinks they know something about it."

In this brave new world of ours, what is sorely lacking is encouragement for cross-disciplinary teams to work together closely. We need to learn to trust each other`s specialities and instincts, unless we want to continue the great divide between new media creations that are either (a) good-looking and vapid or (b) putrid-looking and help us do business. Neither approach is going to succeed on its own in the long run.

Now that I`ve recovered from my hangover from the Loerie party, I`ve started thinking about suggesting a new type of bird for the "most useful pretty Web site". There should be an award, as sought-after as the Loerie Grand Prix, for Web sites that deliver business interactions in the most aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly way. Unfortunately, there doesn`t seem to be an entirely appropriate bird for this purpose. The only one I can think of is the stork. Being mythologically involved in a delivery of sorts, this seems an appropriate if somewhat curious choice.

There are Web and electronic media companies in South Africa that are learning how to make functional, pretty business sites quite quickly. The real ball and chain for them is the - perhaps somewhat justified - incredulity of their clients, what I`d call the creative-director-in-the-yellow-pants problem. The hardest barrier for those companies to break through is the believability factor. Let`s face it, though - business is rapidly changing and if you don`t make a conscious effort to catch up, both Loerie and stork will be out of reach before you know it. Any big business sponsors who are interested in bringing a "Wired Stork" Award into being, mail me.