The Conversion Site

Here's an idea for 2008.

I've been thinking about the state of the Advertising/Marketing Campaign Site. A few weeks ago, Adweeksuggested the campaign microsite (a.k.a. "the 30-second spot" of the interactive industry) was dead. Social networking killed the campaign site star. Plenty of punditry ensued.

But I wonder if something else is happening. Maybe it's more about an evolution or mutation, than extinction.

Here's my warm-up pitch: Advertising agencies and the industries that support them love formulas. They love codified systems, like the (NTSC) 30-second TV spot and the 4-color, magazine spread. Most of these systems were standardized decades ago, which leaves the focus on the idea contained herein, versus the container.

But all the newfangled interactive forms, with their "beta-this," lack of decades-old standardization, and increasing user-control have only created frustration inside the ad industry. Because the assignment's no longer just about the "idea" idea, it's also about how the idea's contained and how it functions. The interactive/digital approach requires conceptual thinking about the entire system, as well. It's what makes interactive/digital awesome. (On the flip side, imagine if art directors, writers, account leaders, art buyers and producers could reconsider printing methodologies every time they made a newspaper ad.)

So then we created the Campaign Site.

Every campaign needs one, right? Even if it doesn't make business, strategic or production sense. We created the allure of a system. And darned if digital technology, in the form of social networks, hasn't kind of poked a stick in this newish formula, just as it was starting to congeal. (You could also fault the advertising agencies for creating too many campaign sites that simply had no useful impact or consistent user experience, other than presenting a feeling of brand integration.)

Yet, I think advertising needs some kind of website-based, formulaic system that can centralize, and advance the cause of, a brand campaign.

Here's a solution: The Conversion Site.

The purpose of a Conversion Site is to convert:

1. People into Leads or Evangelists (or both)

2. Leads into Sales

3. User Action (or in-action) into Learning

4. Learning into Media and Content Optimization

This is by no means a trend. But I've been fortunate to be a part of two projects in the past six months (one for Harley-Davidson, the more recent for Audi) that point towards a better system for advertising "campaign" websites. (Kudos to Sean Scott, Katia Holmes, Jamie Ferreira and Chris Wexler for their insights and collaboration on this topic.)

The structure of a Conversion Site provides:

1. A modular, infinite system for content

Imagine a universal container for video, audio, images, copy, animation and interaction. Content could be a :32 TV spot. A behind-the-scenes video. An interactive survey. A stage of a game. A slideshow. The point here is to supply content in a consistent framework, providing greater relationships between different kinds of content. (Which is leveraged in the next step.)

2. A learning/recommendation engine

If all content can be modular, then meta links between various modules of content can be more easily created. Since "conversion" is active, the core of a Conversion Site is a dynamic engine that understands predetermined relationships between content, and soon learns which relationships are most compelling to users.

3. Automatic content optimization

The other side of the content coin is user preference. Do they like this piece of content? As users engage a Conversion Site, the engine observes behavior. Did the user rate, recommend, share or promote a module? How much time did they spend with one, versus another? Did they abruptly leave a module, and if so, at what point? All of this activity helps the engine better organize content to suit users' needs. And this optimization should be continuously dynamic -- as certain content becomes more appealing at night or on weekends, that content is prioritized to the forefront at those times.

4. Automatic online ad and email response optimization

The engine works outside a Conversion Site as well. Everyone's familiar with auto-optimization to drive efficiencies with online banner ads. But what if banner ad content was modular as well -- and linked with similar content inside a Conversion Site? So content "effectiveness" data, wherever we collect it, could be used to re-prioritize content inside the site, and re-prioritize media weights for specific banner ideas.

A Conversion Site is really meant to be a Conversation Site, in the sense that there's some kind of "intelligence" behind the scenes that reacts to your choices. If a site could continue to provide you with content you enjoy, you'll stick around. And if that experience can continue, via email or through online ads, then we've truly developed a better system for advertising campaign integration.

I've tried to deliberately keep design out of this discussion. Clearly, great design would only improve the situation on so many levels. And neither does this system have anything to do with individual concepts or specific advertising ideas -- other than to suggest they all take a modular approach. In fact, I hope a Conversion Site system would allow an ad agency to focus more on ideas (content), less on architecture and functionality, and let the systems automatically make the work, and the conversations it inspires, more effective for our clients.