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Rating the Web Site-Makers’ Sites
Area ad agencies
don't always practice
what they preach
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Business New Haven
8/24/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
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While few advertising agencies now buy banner ads on other companies' Web sites - or encourage their clients to do so - many are helping to develop their clients' sites, and some have established their own on-line presence.
A few Connecticut agencies, including Maier Advertising, have already had Web sites for years. Maier originally developed its site to gain expertise “so we could better counsel our high-tech and industrial client base,” says Harry McBrien, the Farmington agency's public relations director. “We were our own first Web client.”
Others, such as New Haven's Mascola Associates, remained site-less until much more recently. Chuck Mascola sees many companies placing a disproportionate amount of money into the Web, which should be “only part of a media mix.”
Nevertheless, he says, the agency is now “dealing with larger clients, and people who are very much into the Internet, so we certainly need to show off our capabilities.” At press time, www.mascola.com consisted simply of an entry screen with an animated logo, but Mascola expects the site to be fully operational by mid-September.
David Goodwick describes the multi-page site of his Newtown agency as “still in phase one.” Still, it's a distinct improvement over a design that never made it to the Web.
A couple of years ago, Goodwick let a now ex-employee design a model home page for Goodwick Associates “on a 22-inch Sony monitor, using any color she wanted.” Though it looked gorgeous, Goodwick knew most prospects wouldn't be viewing the site under similar conditions. “Just for the hell of it,” he said, “put it on a disk, and put it on my PowerBook.” The result was an object lesson in the effects of technology on creative design: a muddy screen displaying the truncated logo: “oodwick.”
What's the Point?
Most agencies use the Web as an adjunct to or substitute for direct mail and sales calls. Goodwick even sends his account execs out on the road with a version of his site mounted on their PowerBooks for face-to-face sales presentations.
McBrien says Maier's Web site saves the agency time and money: “Prospective clients can visit our site and conveniently and instantly review our portfolio without our having to send out printed samples. We update our site as we update our portfolio.”
Similarly, Jon Sinish of Sinish Marketing Communications directs inquiring prospects to his Web site. While still on the phone in his Stratford office, he can then discuss his agency's capabilities by referring to examples on his “gallery” page.
KGA Advertising doesn't confine its Web marketing to prospective clients. Susan Daniels, vice president and director of account services at the Meriden-based agency, says the site's job opportunities page has already generated inquiries from potential employees.
Physician, Heal Thyself
Despite the acknowledged importance of integrated marketing campaigns, few local agencies have gone beyond the basics of listing their Web addresses (URLs) on print materials. (Three people interviewed for this article raised the specter of the cobbler's children.)
Goodwick says he hasn't done even that much: “We don't want people going there yet.”
Neither are most agencies promoting their Web sites online, though Mason & Madison has finally begun to request reciprocal links with the client sites featured in its online portfolio.
How else will agency-deficient prospects find these sites? Not, in many cases, through online searches. To help guide people to a site, Web developers usually insert title tags and meta tags.
These markers, written in the same HTML code as the rest of the site, contain keywords that are invisible to the ordinary viewer, but are detectable by Internet search engines such as AltaVista. In addition, Web promoters submit their sites - and the tags encoded in them - to Yahoo! and other Web directories.
I checked each agency's home page for “search engine readiness” at the Web Site Garage, an automated utility. Most received fair to poor grades. The title and meta tags were absent entirely from some of these pages, too short or incorrectly formatted in others. KGA's site was the only one to receive an “excellent” rating in this category.
Yet even that site failed part of my second test: entering each firm's name, along with the word advertising, in Yahoo! and AltaVista. Though the KGA home page rose to the top of AltaVista's list when I inputted either K Gronbach Associates advertising or KGA Advertising, Yahoo! couldn't find it at all.
In fact, Yahoo! had trouble finding most of these sites, while AltaVista found all except Mascola (no surprise, since it's still under construction) and Sinish Marketing Communications. Even when I queried multiple search engines and directories simultaneously with Metacrawler, only one (Infoseek) returned Sinish Marketing Communications.
In Sinish's case, the fault may lie not so much with the coding as with the site's URL, the only one of the bunch that lacks a www prefix. That's because the site resides at members.aol.com, a vast domain of “free space” that America Online parcels out to its subscribers.
Sinish himself admits that his Web address is “not as easy to remember as a www site.” He sees no reason to move the site, however, since he counts mainly on direct mail and telemarketing efforts, rather than search engines, to point prospects to his Web lair.
Interestingly, many agency sites neglect the obvious: giving viewers a choice of ways to get in touch. Few company sites list mailing addresses or fax numbers.
KGA's site is especially perverse in this respect. No phone. No fax. Not even an e-mail or street address (except the special ones for job applicants). Sure, you can click on a “Contact Us” link that generates a pre-addressed e-mail form - but wouldn't it make sense to have the address visible on the page?
What is notably strange about all this is that the site does include an entire page of directions for travelers to reach the agency office from any of seven location - but even this page doesn't give a street address.
Advertising Their
Future Plans
Each agency, no matter how advanced its site, plans to continue developing it. Here are some sneak peeks at the future:
n Mike Dunn, vice president/interactive for Mason & Madison, says the New Haven agency will probably reserve one section of its site for content that changes monthly; a summary of the updates will appear in its monthly e-mail newsletter.
n Goodwick Associates has been working on a “marketing game” that will profile clients and prospects, identifying the kinds of organizations that give the agency most of its business.
n Much of the Mascola site will be off-limits to the casual surfer. Prospects will receive passwords that allow them to view specific presentations.
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