Marketing Execs Vs. The Web: Stop Fighting Battles You Already Won!

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been working since early 2010 as a freelance accessibility and efficiency consultant. In that time I’ve repeatedly had problems fighting three types of people at every jobsite:

1. Artists under the DELUSION they are “web designers”
2. “Copy/Paste” framework fanboys unqualified to code websites
3. Marketing and advertising “experts” who know not the first blasted thing about the web, to the point of being incapable of making even the most basic rational decision on the topic!

In case you haven’t figured it out, group #3 is the one in my crosshairs today.

Marketing and advertising folks often have their heads packed full of print and video concepts that simply don’t apply to websites. It results in their focus being a complexity mismatch on the web, and in the process they abuse, mistreat, or just plain piss off users. Worse, much of the stuff “marketers” advocate and try to force into projects is redundant, bloated, slow, and does more harm than good to their employers.

So Which Windmills Are They Tilting At?

The User Is Already Here

The biggest problem I’m constantly butting heads with “marketers” over is the simple fact that once someone lands on your site, you’ve already won the battle of getting people to your site. Repeatedly they’ll say we need big fancy graphics and pointless animations to “draw in the user” and to “stand out from the competition”. Bullcookies.

They’re already on your site, GET TO IT! Provide what it is the user came to your site to do! I’ve seen it time and time again where businesses are so laden with pointless space wasting artsy garbage on their home page, it’s nigh impossible to even find what users would even be coming to the website to do!

Most of this problem stems from how in commercials and advertisements it’s common practice to have to “yell louder than the competition” because you’re all on the same medium.

Such techniques are even applied via sound engineering through something called “bandwidth compression” which can make audio sound louder than it actually is. Limiting dynamic range, which is why a lot of modern music sounds like distorted ineptly mixed garbage as it’s applied there too! Also makes it easier to “hide” a lack of vocal talent and cheats like autotune.

Everyone becomes convinced that you need to be louder than everyone else, leading to nothing more than a deaf audience.

If someone is already on your site, you already have their attention. Your glitzy crap now just gets in their way. Your attempt to be “louder” than a competition that is no longer even relevant at that point, can in fact be such a turn off or such an annoyance, the user says “screw this” and goes somewhere else. You’re not drawing them in, you’re driving them away!

Which brings us neatly to:

Customer Delight

This long proven — though difficult road — has been “under attack” by marketers claiming it is no longer relevant, or even outright dead.

The idea here is to create an emotional bond between the user and your brand. This is best done via exceeding the users expectations, getting them to talk about your product for organic growth, and then leverage the first two in order to garner a higher class clientele more willing to spend money for less effort on your part. In a lot of ways it’s a big fancy BS bingo term for what we used to call “brand loyalty”.

This technique has faltered and stumbled in recent years. I think its gradual decline can really be winnowed down to just three major points.

#1 : Product Quality Maintaining a high product standard has been out the door as corners are cut on every level, manufacturing gets shifted to whatever country you can get away with paying the least to, and shareholders have become more and more obsessed with optimizing profit instead of growth or even just plain stability.

Simply put, right now your typical Wall Street type and the people they put in charge of companies they’ve bought into have discovered they can GUARANTEED make a ton of money in the short term. How? By throwing the future of a company under the bus. Don’t believe me? Look at SEARS, K-Mart, and Toys’Were’Us.

Craftsman Tools, a SEARS brand, was the poster child for brand loyalty / customer delight. And new owners and investors nickle and dimed the company out of business and in the process destroyed the reputation of a once great brand.

They squeeze and squeeze and squeeze to leech out as much money as they can without putting any back into the employees, distribution, infrastructure, or even maintaining their brick and mortar presence (if any). Then they leave the broken battered corpse of the company in bankruptcy proceedings, whilst voting themselves huge bonuses… as they waltz out the door to find another successful company to ruin.

#2 : Availability

The “human malware” situation of COVID-19 has only exacerbated the decline of this type of marketing and advertising’s effectiveness. We have seen massive supply chain shortages in nearly every industry, resulting in delays and product unavailability.

Look at the video card industry, where the general unavailability of actual cards for gamers has done horrific damage to the reputation of video card makers like nVidia… and unlike AMD, nVidia doesn’t have other products they can fall back on to regain any of that lost goodwill.

But again, share holders having their puppets make cuts to infrastructure results in not having the warehousing, shipping, or any other aspect required to actually get products to customers. They then turn to marketing in the blind hope they can somehow maintain customer goodwill in the face of that.

But the REAL reason for the decline of “Customer Delight” is actually how marketing and advertising is handled in this century… why?

#3 : Marketers HATE “real” Customer Delight

That might sound strange given how effective it can be as a marketing technique, but many out there are trumpeting the death of it for a few reasons. The biggest of which is that it’s just “too hard” or requires more authority than marketers are given in a company.

Consider the first two things that make it work: Product quality and availability. These are things that in most modern businesses the marketer / advertiser has effectively zero control over. To make this technique work you need things that are the province of other departments, or are actively sabotaged by shareholders and the upper-management put in place by same.

More gasoline gets dumped on the fire by the “form over function” mentality where everything has to be as flashy as possible. It has resulted in businesses treating advertising as effectively dumping a can of shellac on a pile. No matter how fine a polish you put on the result, it’s still just bug excrement coating horse manure.

The cheaper product quality gets, the more damage to the reputation that no amount of feel-good rhetoric or artsy “emotion invoking” graphics can cover up for.

Long gone are the days where you can get some attractive looking ninnies to prance about shucking and jiving to sell more of your ass tasting sugar water.

When it comes to the web, this is even more true. Simply put websites tend to be task oriented. When people go to one they already know what they want, and are looking for information, specifications, or to contact you with questions. Wasting time, space, and bandwidth on artsy-fartsy junk that adds NOTHING of value to the process is just pissing more and more users off. This glitz vs. functionality harms credibility, reputation, and destroys “customer delight”… then the people loading up on all this excess crap can’t figure out why “Customer delight” is dying. Get a mirror!

Only further making things worse are marketers who SAY things like “Customer Delight” or “User Experience” without any understanding of what either are. They parrot them blindly as sick buzzwords, seeming to think that both are more about — again — form than they are function.

Marketers have suckered themselves into thinking fancy colours, stupid animations, and irrelevant “feel good” graphics are in fact an essential part of quality UX. Bullcookies!

As such in this case they’re not fighting battles they already won, they’re trying to fight a battle to distract from deep rooted problems that no amount of promotion, feelings, or good-will can correct for!

Case Studies

To illustrate the point I’m going to cover three different levels of clients I’ve had the past few years, each of whom have been screwed over by so-called advertising and marketing “wisdom” where for all intents and purposes, all that was accomplished is creating or fighting problems they didn’t even have.

Case #1, The Small Business

I don’t normally take on smaller clients as they are often not resource-deep enough or relevant enough for “what I do”. They also tend to be more detail focused and not fall into many of the traps that larger organizations do.

Even so I took on a local pizza and sub shop as a favor to a friend of a friend. They had a year prior signed up with an online menu/order provider that had gained them some sales, but nowhere near what they had expected and phone orders dropped off too. They had hired a local marketing firm — overkill for a business their size — to try and correct things, and their online sales suddenly took a massive dip. Thus my friend said “hey could you look at this and give some recommendations”.

The problem was painfully apparent. Their contact phone number was below the fold. The call to action to “order now” getting you to the online menu was below the fold even at 4k. The entire top 2000+ pixels of screen space was sucked down by pictures of the inside of the restaurant, their parking lot, and the food… but you had to hunt to find where to actually order anything. Worse, at nearly 6 megabytes spread out over 180+ separate files due to a mix of turdpress, bootcrap, and jquery — 80% of the bloat being code — the page took over a minute to load on the local cable broadband. OF COURSE delivery sales were in a slump!

When I confronted the local “marketing experts” about it, they said they did that to “create engagement” and a “sense of emotion” to bolster sales. And that removing that stuff would cost them what little remained.

My advice to the client? Kill off the website and redirect the URI to the online menu provider. Use the menu provider’s tools to put the phone number and address in the heading, a link to google maps in the footer, and DONE. People visit the site, they get the phone number, location, menu, and can place orders. That’s it, that’s ALL they needed!

The opposite of what a great many people making sites for restaurants are doing right now.

People who got to the website PROBABLY know that you’re a local restaurant, they type of food you offer, and are looking to order. That’s the majority of your traffic. Thus, that’s what should be front and center. Trying to “engage” them with pictures and feel-good hippy-dippy marketspeak doesn’t provide that, and amounts to — again — fighting a battle you already won.

Case #2, A Credit Union

Credit Unions are basically a medium sized business. They have the small business feel with the corporate attitude. Where a real corporation would have entire departments, they usually have one person in charge of each major aspect.

In this case the big hubub was over the fact that I was telling them to remove the splash screen from inside the member portal that was trying to get people to become members.

Let me just say that again, they were advertising to join the bank and open accounts, INSIDE the member portal. Aka after they were already logged in. Aka… THEY’RE ALREADY MEMBERS!!!

What’s worse was that even after logging in, just looking at your balances was three clicks and three page-loads away. You log in to a bank portal, the first blasted thing you should see is the balances!

Their marketing director lost her freaking mind when I even suggested that was wrong, and fought me tooth and nail no matter how many times and ways I tried to explain it to her. It reached the point where I had to tell their CEO that if she was really that stupid and couldn’t understand something that simple, she had no business working for them, I don’t care how many degrees in marketing and advertising she had. But then like my father’s alleged degree from a made up Canadian tech school, I suspect at least two of her claims of education were fraudulent works of fiction.

I mean, if she wanted to place an upsell off to one side, there was plenty of room — that’s even what got placed on the portal home — but she insisted that on the page only members could access that they needed to advertise to get new members. I still struggle to wrap my brain around how dumbass that is.

… and such dumbass rubbish is typical of what I deal with on nearly every job.

Case #3, The Cable Provider

This one is comedy gold. As with most of my clients I was there to help them meet WCAG minimums since they were being sued for local cripples being unable to pay their bills online with their setup. Part of my work always involves streamlining the process and removing unessential stuff users don’t use, don’t care about, or just plain doesn’t make sense.

Every one of their pages for both clients and non-clients was as is so often the case loaded with goofy animations, illegible colour contrasts, and all the telltales of an artist under the delusion they’re a “designer” spanking their crank on a graphics tablet, under direct direction of a “marketing genius”. The result was slow, inaccessible, and painful to use.

Naturally it all had to go for a cleaner, smoother, more useful experience… when I made the presentation to their inner circle of management, their marketer protested “But we need all that to stand out from the competition or we’ll lose customers!”

Without missing a beat I belted out in full “command voice” right from the diaphragm with a good open-O formation and the soft palate fully retracted:

“WHAT COMPETITION!?! You’re a huffing cable TV provider, in the majority of your markets you’re the only game in town. YOU ARE A MONOPOLY!!!”

THIS is the level of stupid I have to deal with. In the US cable TV providers have no competition. They have mutual agreements NOT to compete in each-others markets with the legal backing of FCC regulations. Sure you might have the low quality unreliable and expensive DISH type garbage, and landline phone service nobody cares about anymore mated to painfully slow DSL… but when it comes to quality TV, internet, and phone, your cable provider is more often than not the only game in town. As miserable and horrifying as that is.

Loading up on broken script-tardery, animooted trash, and bandwidth wasting stock photos utterly irrelevant to what you even do as a company is pointless when you have no competition to out-yell!

Thus the redesign of their home page ended up reduced to a normal logo/menu bar at the top, a login form on the right, a search for “do you provide services in my area” on the left, and a three across at desktop / single column mobile area outlining the three services they provide: TV, Phone, Internet. You log in, on the left is a horizontal menu (modal on mobile) where you can sign up for services, whilst the fluid right column shows your active services and bill. On really wide desktop an up-sell ad is a third column on the right, a smaller billboard is used after the menu on mobile. Problem solved.

And again, their developers and marketers fought me tooth and nail on every change. Even though they were being fined $10k/day for failing to even meet accessibility norms. Even though they were flooded with complaints from people who couldn’t use and/or find the most basic of things on the site. It was almost like their marketing “team” just wanted to spend the company’s money just to justify their jobs, when honestly they should just have been sticking to working on upsells.

In fact, having had access to their financial outlays for advertising as part of my efficiency analysis, it was painfully clear they were spending far more on the subject than said ads would or even could generate in actual revenue. Hardly a shock a year later they were bought out by another company who quickly curtailed such spending… and doubled down on the simplifications I had started them towards.

Conclusion

I’m not saying advertising and marketing — or those who specialize in it — are all some sort of drooling morons, or that their job isn’t important to the health of a company. It just seems that when it comes to the web they are horrifically bad at choosing their battles. They seemingly operate in a checklist style blanket applying techniques that often are not relevant to the medium, with total disregard for how it impacts users.

Many confuse art with UX, think that marketing and advertising can fix genuine product flaws, and have the mentality that the audience can be told what’s good and what isn’t, regardless of the reality.

In many other forms of communication you get to tell users what they like. Internet users are having less and less of that. Likewise there are times you need to out-yell and stand out from the competition. With the web more often than not your only chance for that is in SEO and not on-site, and by just having a better quality product at a better price than the competition; For the simple and obvious reason that as I said above if they’re on your site, you already won that battle!

Such “flash over substance” approaches to promotion have to be limited by the same factors that limit what artists under the DELUSION they’re “web designers” should be allowed to do. Anything that gets in the way of the user doing what they came to the site to do has to be kept on a very short leash.

As a dearly departed friend once said:

“People don’t visit websites for the fancy graphics you hang around the content, they visit for the content!”

— Dan Schulz