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Timothy R. Hawthorne is the founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct Inc., a leading full-service direct response agency. He is regarded by many as the “Father of the Modern Infomercial.” Hawthorne’s agency has produced or managed more than 600 campaigns for such leading-edge clients as Apple, Discover Card, US Navy, Time-Life, AARP, Paramount, Bose, Taylor Made, and Nissan.

Author of numerous articles, a sought-after speaker, and expert witness, Hawthorne was named Entrepreneur of the Year by USA Today/Ernst & Young, and one of the 25 Most Influential People in DRTV by Response magazine. He received the Electronic Retailing Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

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Features

Get Hyperlinked

Written on
Feb 3, 2009 
Author
Timothy Hawthorne  |
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Get Hyperlinked

revolutionsmall.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Before Google, before memes, and before URLs were staples of both TV and print ads … there were hyperlinks.

The first time you saw them, you didn’t much care where they went. The important thing was that they went somewhere new, and they went there with astonishing 14.4 modem speed. The thrill was discovery, and we all wasted hours just noodling around. Quickly, we grew accustomed to learning by clicking. We found favorite spots, and trusted that whatever was linked there was probably worth seeing. In online advertising, Adotas plays this role. You can learn a great deal by just clicking around here.

Just like that first day you discovered the web, hyperlinked serendipity still yields profitable insight. To prove the point, I spent a few hours checking out random brand sites featured on another of my favorite online playgrounds: the Hawthorne Videoactive Report. The site posts thumbnailed screen captures of e-commerce and brand sites that industry friends and colleagues find interesting. Old-fashioned hyperlinks whisk you instantly to real companies’ real advertising—a real-time ad tactics laboratory.

What you’ll quickly discover is that very different companies often market the same way. While brand sites are unquestionably varied, it doesn’t take much link-hopping to uncover common threads:

Exposure rules. In a world in which virals now infest all computers, putting brand names before consumers often trumps the message’s message. Awareness is good, but I worry that bad-mannered brands invite negative associations. A visit to Burger King’s Angry-Gram—the Gilbert Gottfried of websites—invites visitors to fill out a Mad-Libs styled telegram. When finished, an animated spicy-hot hamburger shouts insults at whoever you send it. J.C. Penney’s Doghouse also embraces a negative dynamic—though admittedly amusing—in which aggrieved spouses and friends consign bad-acting partners to the proverbial doghouse. But Penney’s offers a profitable way out: forgiveness via bracelets and diamonds.

Social media immerses consumers in brands. As the BK and Penney’s sites illustrate, brands increasingly invite people to participate. The logic is simple. Give visitors something engaging to do and to share, and good feelings will rub off on the brand—whatever the message’s content.

Jag Jeans’ Jag Studio immerses visitors by letting them run photo shoots of beautiful models. One male and one female pose seductively as you maneuver a virtual camera and click away. You can create virtual albums, or download your favorite photo to serve as your (Jag-branded) wallpaper. Keep visitors busy and they not only engage the brand longer, they literally may take the brand with them—or send it to others as an Angry-Gram. At least Jag’s creative sends a sales-purposed message: people who wear its jeans are photo shoot worthy.

Production values matter. Much more, in fact, than online gurus suggest. The Jag site is visually sophisticated, and the only bad photo you can take results from mis-framing or mis–timing your shot. Angry-Gram is also impressive technically. Creating a cranky talking burger is challenging enough—but it’s got to be easier than programming it to yell what you tell it (thanks to a surprisingly long list of word options). A Volkswagen site loads up video thumbnails that move across the screen to simulate bad traffic situations the car helps you conquer.

The 42 Good Things site that promotes Samsung’s Omnia telephone features dozens of highly-polished video vignettes, each of them promoting an Omnia feature—just what a sales-minded website should do. Sprint’s Plug Into Now site highlights a similarly dizzying feature set. While its page full of widgets makes you feel like you’ve fallen into the big ball at Epcot, the site illustrates in a glance the full scope of what Sprint products offer—weather, games, scores, videos, news, statistics … perhaps even a phone call or two.

Brand interactions should be easy and fun. Each of these brand sites are intentionally easy to use. Make an activity too complicated—or a game too hard to win—and casual surfers will bolt. That, surely, is why the game on the Sprint site resembles Pong, not Halo. Volkswagen’s game is also easy to play. Even if you miss the one-in-five chance of answering your question correctly, the site just alerts you to try it again. If you can’t conquer this challenge, you shouldn’t drive a golf cart, much less a car. And Samsung’s Omnia site? It’s a simple branded treasure hunt: what cool function will I learn about this time?

Names matter less than they should. You’d think a brand’s name should be prominent in a branding effort, but in this random sample, only Sprint and Jag keep their names front and center in their sites’ URLs. Jag-Jeans.com is no mystery at all. Now.Sprint.com keeps you guessing a bit more, but certainly less so than Angry-Gram.com, or BewareOfTheDoghouse.com.

The reasoning, presumably, is to entice visitors with the sites’ wacky antics—sites people might avoid if they suspected that brands will jump in and start selling. But it’s not like “42 Good Things” is any easier to remember than “Omnia,” so a worthy website might just as well confidently claim credit. If you feel any need to disguise your site’s origins, you probably shouldn’t let it live in the first place.

– Express your opinion, comment below.





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