The other day a friend of mine brought H&M’s global website to my attention again. Back in 2006 I was one of their consultants until I more or less lost the assignment due to the fact that I told them what the didn’t wanna hear – Your website sucks! Of course I was wrong and they were right. After all, they’ve been awarded time after time at major advertising shows (Thanks to among others to me and the team I worked with back then) so why wouldn’t they know what they are doing.

This is exactly where the problem start for most major brands – at ad awards like Cannes Lions, Eurobest, Clio and others where people with no understanding for how to build an online presence beyond Adobe Flash and cool animations take these monsters to new heights. Back in 2007 I was also a part of building these kind of platforms for major brands but behind closed doors I constantly tried to convince my clients that sticking to these worn out technologies was nothing but stupid.

Let’s take a look at couple of major players and have a quick look at their online presence.

The Online Nike Store

The online store belonging to the worlds leading sports brand. All built in Flash…in 2010

Nike has always been among the first brands to adapt to change. Back in 1999 when I took part in pitching them into Framfab they were even heading the pack.

At first glance it all looks great. The site design is inspired by blogging with that clear and present left hand menu hanging there. But once you start looking deeper it’s a mess. The entire store is built in flash which is just plain stupid. To Nike’s defense I’ll ad that they launched the store in this costume around 2005 when Flash was the hottest thing around. However that’s not the case…since 3 years back. Until a couple of month ago the first page on Nike.com was also dressed in Flash but now they’ve changed that.

Nike.com is filled with fantastic content that people would love to get their hands on. Take Nike+ as an example, a fantastic running community that would have been spread engaged people hundred times more if they’ve built an open platform that allowed the community to truly contribute. However, today the Nike+ site like most of the other sites is locked up deep down in custom made solutions that doesn’t make it easy for people to speed the brand.

The adidas digital presence

As you might know I was working with adidas for a full 8 years. During those years I Creative Directed and took part in launching 59 global digital advertising campaigns for the brand. I also took part in developing their global site and their intranet.

In 2006 we launched the adidas global campaign for the World Cup held in Germany. Around this time I started to raise the question about leaving the flash platform. All results pointed in the direction that Flash, that was and is a wonderful platform when it comes to creating cool rich media sites, didn’t meet any of the demands that the users had. People came looking for products, videos, TVC’s, exclusives and more – but they did not want was to load heavy content, use unique navigation, not being able to bookmark specific pages or share specific content with their friends.

I continued to work with adidas until 2008 but never managed to convince them to leave the flash platform. Instead they listened to another agency that managed to talk them into rebuilding their global website with flash as the main tool. In 2008 they launched the new adidas.com, the same site you’ll see today and it was already in 2008 a step backwards, today it’s more of an artifact that they instead should burn on a disc and give away to Wikimedia as an historic time stamp.

The Rolex Global Brand Site

The Rolex site. I full on Flash site that demands a state of the art computer and broadband connection

Oh god how I loved this full-screen flash site when it was launched in 2007. It was state of the art and even though I started to abandon working with flash sites at the time I still felt that this served Rolex purpose. Now 3 years later I’m on the contrary sure it serves no purpose at all.

The thing with these sites made entirely in flash is the fact that they don’t do anything that cannot be done in HTML and frankly they can’t do some of things you can in HTML 5. The most important thing though is that when you build things in flash you’ve gotta cater for the SEO/SEM manually by customizing the platform.

A Car Site – Volkswagen

Volkswagen has since 2007 been going with flash all over the place. It was a bad decision then and still is.

I just took Volkswagen as an example. Every car brand seems lost in flash and big ass animations when you visit the campaign sites. Kind of strange since all we want is tons of short videos and photos of the cars. After all, we’re supposed to make a decision to buy a 50000$ car based on this information…

The Global H&M Site

The global H&M site all built in flash back in 2006. It takes you 4 minutes on an ok connection to even reach the right information.

I don’t even know where to start. It’s just plain stupid. The H&M site uses flash but in a way so that it could all have been built on HTML4 technology. There’s simply no logical reason at all why this site should work like this. I took part in launching Viktor & Rolf in 2006, Kylie in 2007, Summer of Surf and more for H&M years ago. Back then we had discussions where I told H&M they should throw the entire platform out and get new technology in. That was of course not appreciated and as we ended up being forced into creating flash sites we decided to drop H&M as a client in 2008.

The Microsoft Web Site

These guys got their first page covered in an animated Silverlight banner even thought they announced the wouldn’t continue develop this platform. Say no more… (Updated, just before I was about to press the publish button they actually removed the Silverlight technology from the first page)

Microsoft are strange. They more or less have the same site they had back in 2001 or something. They’re stuck with Verdana and a monster of a site. I bet that somewhere in that big ass company there’s a manager responsible for the site saying things like “It’s just to much information, we just cannot change this site” I say 85% of it is shit. Throw the site away and start off fresh!

So, why does’nt worlds best brands get online communication right? There are of course lots of reasons but I want to share 5 thoughts on the subject.

Old management

This is of course the number one problem. The guys and girls that are running these brands have in most cases been brought up in their business life before the Internet existed. This means they’ve learned how the world of communication works without the now most important component – The Internet. Having these people lead your brand Is like hiring an architect that doesn’t know 3D or CAD. They simply don’t know better.

The Ad Award problem

So, most of the people who manage these brands most likely send their stuff to ad awards. And most ad awards juries in the world are filled with advertising people who don’t give a damn about results. They go for the four F. Flash, Fun, Friends and Finalists. This means Flash as in sound and cool animations that more or less looks like the TVC the jury people love to see. Fun as in games, crazy solutions and humor. Friends as in awarding agencies and foremost people they know from start. Finally finalists as in – if another award show awarded the contribution, something must be right.

Stuck in technology

Most major brands have invested in huge content management systems. Interwoven, Sharepoint, SDL, Polypoly and Episerver among others. These systems were built by consultants aiming to lock you in and they were built for old web thinking. Many editors and many pages. Now when suddenly you wanna change technology or change how your digital presence is built up, these brands have to change their strategy entirely. This turns IT managers and brand managers into people afraid of change since that would mean they threw 1 million Euro on something useless. Thinking like that is of course wrong since were living in uncertain times where you don’t have a clue what’s right or wrong in 3 years apart from the fact that you will probably be wrong. Sticking to open source products and constantly iterating your online presence is the solution.

Wrong consultants

Most web agencies and advertising agencies out there have staffed their companies with people who can do wonders with Flash and .Net based platforms. Then suddenly you’re supposed to have people on your team who can rock PHP, MySql, Ruby, Python, Cassandra, Java, Jquery and other technologies that most IT departments hate on top of that.

Brand managers not understanding technology

Some of you will think I’m plain stupid. A brand manager shouldn’t need to understand technology. But I have different opinion. Personally I’d always prioritize knowledge about technology over knowledge about brands since all brand will be built on technology in the future and the wrong decisions from a digital point of view will have a greater negative impact on the brand compared to non technical decisions. After all, the world is filled with consultants who really know traditional branding while the other breed is hard to find.

Last but not least – CEO’s that just doesnt get it.

I’ve written a long post about these dinosaurs before. Go read it ››

So, if you’re heading a brand or a company. Here are 7 things you should do asap to get your brand moving into the digital future.

1. Never let an advertising agency steer how you do digital communication

Always initiate projects with the digital communication aspects first. It’s not very hard for offline activities to support online when they’re planned. The other way around thought is practically impossible.

2. Leave Flash. Leave Silverlight.

From a user point of view (based on how people really use the Internet) the is nothing, absolutely nothing, that motives the use of these technologies.

3. Change platform from your propriety platform.

The sooner you move all your digital assets to open sourced and MySql based ones such as WordPress, Drupal or others, the better!

4. Make sure you socially integrate the spreading of your content on most major social platforms.

Start by checking up on Brian Solis and JESS3 Conversation Prism. Video, Sound, Events, Documents, Live Streaming, Podcast, Images, Social Networks, Intranets, Extranets, CRM. It’s all to be found there as I wrote about the other day.

5. Provide people with true values

Once people end up on your site they are there for the products. They don’t wanna play around with games and shit. Products and services, that’s what you sell. If they’ve found you, your advertising has done the job – start selling!

6. Search should steer everything you do

Face it. People Google everything so make sure your platform is built to lure the Google robots into bed.

7. Don’t fear loosing your job.

Only fear doing things that doesn’t do any good for your brand. That will most surely get you a new one of you have one of those dinosaur bosses!

Go change now!

The other day I spotted this video showcasing i-TAG augmented reality toys. It’s the result of a cooperation between toy manufacturer Mattel and James Cameron in order to support the launch of the motion picture Avatar coming in fall 2009.

These next generation trading cards comes with a 3-D Web tag, called an i-TAG, a technology developed by Total Immersion, With any ordinary webcam consumers can “scan” the i-TAG and it will reveal special content onscreen unique to the corresponding product. The content varies for each item, but can include biographical information, additional images and animated models of the figures. When the i-TAG for ‘deluxe’ figures, vehicles or creatures are placed under a Webcam, animated 3-D models will “come alive” and bam – there’s your augmented action reality. I love it!

We’ve already started to see a lot of buzz around augmented mobile apps. And last year car brand MINI known for new formats and innovative advertising campaigns took the first step in this direction already last year when they created an augmented reality campaign in Germany.

The MINI campaign was the first ever augmented reality campaign integrated with print advertising. Next up are flash campaigns. Digital agency Boffswana has developed a technology they call Releas3D. By customising Papervision they’ve created a new and exciting way to interact with flash content.

Release3D enables Boffswana to create campaigns where people can simply print a glyph and then interact in any kind of augmented reality. Apart from a series of experiments Boffswana has also released a campaign for the Royal Australian Navy where they let you control a Collins Class Submarine in 3D.

The possibilities with augmented reality are endless. One can only imagine what direct marketing looks like in a couple of years. Any brand with products that consumers crave for has a huge opportunity in building hype with technologies like this, at least for a couple of years. Imagine – what would your next marketing campaign look like if it was an augmented one?

Update!

I wrote in the beginning about how the i-TAG cards would be perfect as trading cards. Then today I found this video on YouTube.

There you have it!

For years people have been wondering – when will Amazon redesign their site. Of course it’s been changed in small iterations over the years but all in all it’s not that far from what they launched in 1995. Amazon is absolutely one of the best example of a formula one shopping experience from a social networking and artificial intelligence perspectives. But now they’ve taken the whole thing a step further. Basement.org shares the news that Amazon has launched a new shopping experience called Amazon Windowshop Beta. Wow – I’m exited.

So what’s Amazon Windowshop Beta. We’ll it’s basically what it’s called – a window shopping experience. As you enter the shop you get to navigate with your keyboard through a papervision/cooliris experience type of interface. As you browse the images and categories Amazon obviously things you’ll start shopping – this is where they go wrong according to me. It’s fun the first couple of minutes to browse the products but I quickly find myself missing recommendations, reviews, other suggestions etc etc etc. The flash interface let’s you play around for a while but I quickly get tired of the whole thing and leave – long before my buy now finger starts to dazzle.

Why is Amazon doing this? That’s a question I’d love to ask the people behind this. When the rest of the worlds is fighting to make their sites more user friendly, simpler design and at least 10% as smart as Amazon.com then these guys go the other way. It’s a little 2006 this whole thing.

Instead, why don’t you go truly rich? Why doesn’t Amazon launch TV instead. I’m calling it TV cause I don’t mean Video. What I think Amazon should do is launch a bunch of TV channels online, hosted both at Amazon.com and other social networks. They should make sure the bring on some TV personalities that creates a show much like Fashion TV or Top Gear for example. Travel the world and do reports, review products etc. While you’re at it make sure you integrate the products closely or even inside the shows. Make sure you launch a couple of widgets and iPhone apps to support this new thing. Bring in celebrities to ad some spice to the show. By doing something like this Amazon would embody their store and give it personality.

Amazon! Amaze us an launch the best freaking online TV channel out there. And of course…don’t let this beta turn into an alpha.

It’s friday afternoon and I just gotta get this out of my head. Have you ever wondered why you enjoy having a cup of coffee?

Don’t know about you, but many times a day I just feel I gotta get a cup of coffee. The same feeling occurs on a thursday and friday afternoon, but this time it’s a beer that signals the neurons in my brain. 

Basically what happens is your brain probably signals that it wants you to relax and the answer is a cup of coffee (or tea or smoothies) since thats what you usually do when you relax in the middle of the day at work. A strong association. It’s funny cause I remember my first Beer or my first cup of Coffee, and the experience wasn’t a nice one. Instead it was rather disgusting. They both tasted like shit.

This is what we gotta do when we create communication. We have to associate things people don’t necessary like with something they do like. This way we’ll move those associations onto the brand/product/object that we market. 

I’ve taken part in creating many Flash sites, but have always tried to make sure people don’t have to wait for the experience. Today, many price winners on competitions like Cannes Lions take forever to load. So, when you are part of the jury, the agencies instead post a video that showcases the campaigns. This way agencies make sure that judges in Cannes, Clio, Epica, Eurobest, NYF, LIA, DA&D and others don’t have to wait for that super duper flash site to load. Basically, the experience is totally overlooked.

So, do you think you would enjoy that Espresso of yours if it involved a wait that was measured in % and took 2 minutes one time and 4 the next and then 3.

Adobe announced today that Flash 10 is on it’s way and a first beta is available of their site.

The new version of the more than 10 year old animation and rich media plugin will create new possibilities for both designers and coders.

From a first glance this morning the things that impresses me is the advanced text edit tool that among other things allows you to work better with asian characters plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
  The other thing that seems great (although I really haven’t seen it in action yet) is that the creative features now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta won’t slow down performance,

Grant Skinner, CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com says: “With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more – such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic. No other browser runtime has these capabilities.”

Still missing
What I personally lack is that Adobe has yet not solved how to minimized the font weight if you’re using asian characters and the fact that they haven’t created a better way to link dynamic text directly into databases during the building process. This is one area where Microsoft Silverlight has already gained good terrain.

ReadWriteWeb made me spend an early morning looking into Flash 10.