The World Wide Web is going horribly wrong. And the irony is that the people who stand to profit most from the unlimited commercial opportunity of doing things right on the Web are the very people who are most determined to do it all wrong. Myopic telcos, ever-desperate media owners and - shame on you, brothers - Armani-clad spin merchants from our own groovy but equally fucked-up world of advertising. Meet the temporary leaders of a new media revolution going astray. Not the digerati - the dickerati.
Hey. Hold on. The Web, going wrong? A mess? Surely there's some mistake. I mean, everyone knows now that businesses and consumers from all around the world are trading, meeting, promoting and maximising everything in this oh-so-cool medium. And of course, it is written that anyone with half a mind will change his life and make fame and fortune out in there in the cybersmog.
Well, er, no, actually. The crisis facing the Internet and its alarmingly and increasingly corpulent baby, the Web, is occurring mainly because the people who made it happen were idealists - weird, shy idealists at that. The Net welcomes everybody. Its goal is harmlessly philanthropic: to create a global village, in essence a community of global relationships. Utopian stuff. Sweet but sad. Sad and, of course, doomed. Doomed because one mention of the word "global", or one sniff of those millions of consumers, and the corporate heavyweights suddenly steam-roll into the picture.
Think about it. For every global village, there can be a global supermarket. Full of global brands. And chocka with millions of punters all with global call and credit cards, all responding to cheap global ads. And you wonder what happened to the voice of the digerati? Sorry, mate. Nice idea, but shove over. The serious players have hit town. We hope you enjoyed your moment in the sun. Don't call us; we'll call you. Ciao, sucker.
Don't just take my word for it. Open your newspaper, look on the TV, spot the billboards. "Sign up! Sign up!" the sirens cry. "Five hours free access time! Bank on line, wank on line! Shop on line, surf till you barf, get out there and do it now!" And every ad now has a URL. Yo. Cool. Coolest of all, though, is the agency income generated by creating the sites.
High-tech market researchers at IDC calculate that 85% of the Fortune 1000 companies in the US have a Web site, and that the average annual budget for such sites is unexpectedly high: $750,000 to $1.25 million. That's getting on for a billion dollars spent on Web sites last year - just by the biggest US corporations. Wow. No wonder my own company has just opened a Web-site creation service.
Here's the real question: who do you think is making money out of this? Ad agencies, sure; where there are big Web sites, there are ads. But ad agencies' customers? Not many of them. And no matter how powerful the true potential of the medium, it won't take long for a Web backlash once business management discovers that the letters "ROI" are being spelt out in red ink.
Meanwhile, don't you think the thrill of glam Web sites is wearing a bit thin? All those groovy bits of Java, jiving across the screen, all those hot little Shockwave numbers doing their thang, all those interminable pages to wade though to get to the information you need. And as for online transactions, Tesco's management isn't hiring lots of people just so Tesco can make a living out of selling one box of Frosties from its Web site. I can order a fab new software package from Microsoft over the Net, which will arrive huffing and puffing over my 28.8K line in what, just 2 hours and 20 minutes - if I'm lucky. Hey, and I can download all my music, radio, CDs AND video-on-demand, and ... and ... puke.
The hard and honest truth is that the Web just can't provide a good return on all the cash being thrown at it right now. Sure, it's making big money for some. And eventually it's going to change everything, make huge fortunes - and maybe even live up to today's hype. But here's the tragedy. Just when the fledgling Web is starting to grow into its potential, the corporate losers and fakers, in their haste to grab quick profits, are steadily reducing the chances that it will live up to the hype.
In the mad dash for cash, ad agencies, telcos and media have lost the ability to see beyond the end of their balance sheets. They have turned into caricatures of the new generation of digital prophets they should have been. They think in two dimensions: mass audience = mass sales. The mantra of the corporate feeding frenzy. Greed and wealth. The Gordon Geekos for the '90s.
Sure the Web is a cool, graphical interactive medium. Nevertheless, as a marketing medium it's lousy for what the dickerati are trying to teach everyone to use it for. The Web is not all that great for the things ad agencies do; after all, they learned all their tricks on the old media. It's bad for showing off to mass markets in an attempt to win new customers: if you just want to knock the socks off the punters with flash special effects, do a television advertisement. The Web also sucks for making quick sales - the sort of buy-now-while-stocks-last offer that has made direct mail the hottest advertising medium of recent years.
What the Web is really about is relationships, bonding and service. Yup, garlic in the mass-market vampire's view-finder this may be, but this is what the Web is really good at: improving the relationship between people who already know each other - like, for example, between an advertising agency and its clients, or indeed between any company and its customers. This is the truly new opportunity, and the one that could make the Web fly. Tragically, because they deserve worse, it's an even bigger opportunity for the dickerati than they could have ever dreamed about from their two-dimensional mass = sales formula. If only they could take their heads out of their balance sheets long enough to grasp it.
Why are relationships so important? And why can the Web do so much for them? First reason: because this is what the Web can do uniquely. There's no shortage of effective media communication to consumers; so-called interactive advertising on the Web will be a small part of an already corpulent communications mix. And the nirvana of e-commerce will arrive not at the click of a mouse button, but only when fitted snugly within a marketing programme. At your peril should you let that programme be exclusively Web-based.
But the second, and bigger, reason why relationships are the key to the Web is that they make money. For everybody. Now.
Declaration of self-interest: I believe that the Net can improve relationships because my company, SMI Group, is using it to improve relationships. It works. We use Lotus Notes internally to brainstorm new creative ideas and to plan and coordinate new ad campaigns. For our customers, we set up password-protected Web sites. By linking the Web to Notes, we can include customers in our internal discussions. We can swap designs quickly, even with clients in California. We get more work done faster, and have a better dialogue with our customers. Our clients like it, and that's the key.
Clients pay our bills; retaining clients and expanding the relationship with them into new and profitable areas for both sides is the name of the game. I'd happily trade a dead-certain opportunity to win five new clients in a year for the ability to keep one customer happy for five years. It's not sanctimony, just good money - for everyone.
Bringing client relationships on to the Web saves clients money (and us, too); building Web sites costs clients lots of money. A good Web site is an ever-changing animal. New technologies and new content are the order of the day, every day. And all to achieve what? Too often, just an interactive brochure and a bit of hype.
To be of value, the Web has to add value. Cool graphics, fancy programming and VRML are all very well. But in the advertising world, these miss the point. I mean, would you pick an advertising agency for its Web site? Or even from its Web site? No chance. For most businesses, the real value of the Web - now and forever - lies not in prettification, but in developing service and confirming relationships. Along the way, the Web should also transform the advertising business.
Look at it, for a moment, through a client's eyes. Imagine you run a software company's marketing for Europe. You're based in London, and you have offices in ten countries, all with marketing teams that each have a contribution to make and an interest in what you're doing. Your basic advertising choices are pretty bleak. You can use an agency that also has offices in the same ten countries as you do, but you pay for all that real estate and all those people - and get in return only inefficiency and snail-like responsiveness while your ad agency struggles to talk to itself. Or you could use local agencies, and spend all of your time struggling to stamp out turf wars and maintain brand consistency.
You see, the agency-service model has remained largely unchanged for a century. David Ogilvy could start out all over again today with a phone and a few mates and, within the current competitive frame, he'd probably be just as successful as he was 50 years ago. In that time, though, the world has moved on at an astonishing pace in terms of transport, communications and yes, digitalisation.
Our clients today live on aircraft or motorways. They serve global markets. Their markets are full of new types of consumers, so different to those of 100 years or even 50 years ago that they might be from another planet. Yet the agency model plods wearily on. The Web could change all that. That it hasn't should set customers to wondering if the admen who cannot change their own businesses are really the people to catalyse the transformation of world commerce. The very people who are supposed to understand media and communication are, mindlessly but nevertheless for personal gain, suppressing it. It's tough to tell who's more feckless - agencies or their clients. Any agency today could offer to re-engineer its clients' businesses. But first it would have to re-engineer its own. Underneath nearly every Java applet lies cowardice, stupidity, or both.
Instead of seeing a way to streamline the archaisms out of their businesses, admen squeeze ever more cash out of their clients by churning out high-margin, but only vaguely useful, interactive concepts. Agency gurus claim to view business trends from a lofty mountain top - but the mountain is Mount Ararat, the Internet flood is rising and Noah and his mates have sailed off in the wrong direction.
The real opportunity for advertising agencies lies not in building virtual store-fronts and billboards for others, but in creating virtual agencies for themselves. A closed area for every client. A place where client thinking can be shared with the agency's, where administrative data can be kept humming along, where new radio ads can be auditioned, current ads reviewed and so on. Useful for single location clients, but imperative for clients whose markets and/or partners are scattered across the globe.
From a Lotus Notes platform linked to clients via the Web, our staff have access to 40 distributed offices from their desktops. They can share email or rough copy with a client as quickly as with someone upstairs. Think about it. Focus. Efficiency. Speed. Information. Two business processes as one. We are not alone in believing this to be the the prototype for the agency of the future. The agencies that will become à la mode and then the norm, will be those that embrace the Web as a chance to link with clients, and to create umbilical dependency that will only ever be cut after a lot of thought.
If you're an ad man who doesn't believe this, just check it out with your more enlightened customers. Do they want slicker, more streamlined service? Do they want faster response? Do they want global interaction? Do they want competitive edge? And would they choose another agency that really did deliver this? Ask them. Go on. Then again, better not if the answer will spoil the duck à l'orange.
The transition to the new world will not be painless. We have discovered to our own cost that while networks are great as a medium for generating ideas and coordination, for achieving positive consensus and action, electronic interaction is no substitute for a face-to-face talk .
"It's the greatest new marketing medium to hit commerce since the TV," bleat my fellow admen. Though they're right, they haven't a clue what they're really talking about.
But the spin merchants from Soho and Madison Avenue have started to believe their own doctored version of reality. And it's not even a virtual reality, not even close. Blinded by greed or stupidity or both, they are in danger of becoming the farceurs of the digital age as it moves sweetly into a new era of customer service and deeper, more profound customer relationships.
At the moment they have about as much chance of finding the Holy Grail as the Monty Python's comic rabble. The little piggies are busy truffling in the wrong place.
Alex Letts is chairman of SMI Group, a specialist in new-technology clients.