I’m a web designer/developer, not an advertising expert.  But I can pretend to be one on my blog.

I agree with this excerpt on the value of advertising:

ad impressions aren’t as valuable online—for every ad dollar that a print reader brings in, an online reader brings in just ten to fifteen cents. That’s due to the nature of the web, which has users actively seeking relevant information, so they can more easily ignore ads—rather than passively consuming them in a newspaper or an hour of television. Meanwhile, the web offers advertisers incredibly rich ways of tracking how well their ads are performing, which means it also provides a truer pricing mechanism for ads. Ads have thus come up wanting; they never were as worthwhile as the ad agencies and management consultants had hoped—and companies know that now.

That article is geared towards journalism and newspaper profit models, but it struck a cord with my experience.

For the small amount of online advertising I’ve been involved with, the clicks just aren’t there.  Even when the sites we place ads on have HEAVY traffic.

The blame goes partly to the quote above.  People just don’t react to ads.  But the other part of it has to do with the quality of the promotions and their relevance to each particular audience.  The success of google’s “contextually relevant” adwords program is all the proof you need for the “relevance” argument.

Aside from whatever value you place on “impressions” and people just “seeing” ads, ie: “brand awareness” , online advertising returns are usually pretty disappointing.  And I’d argue that newspaper ads would register just-as-disappointing results too, if somehow we had access to newspaper analytics just like we do with web analytics.

Do I know what I’m talking about?  No.

However, if I was sitting on a pile of advertising money, I wouldn’t sink it all into ads.  I’d invest a good portion of that money into content creation, into storytelling, into providing relevant information to people who are actively seeking it.

An interesting quote:

What consumers want is information, not advertising. This is something that Google seems to have figured out, likely by accident. Search isn’t successful only because it is relevant. It is successful because it offers information. That information just happens to come to us from an advertiser.

Taking “information” a bit further, what people also respond to are stories.

We’re now in an opt-in culture. The only way to get (positive) attention is to create great media—desired content that is relevant, informing, entertaining and on-brand. Having a brand interrupt a narrative won’t work anymore, whether that narrative is a TV show or a website. The intruding message will be TiVo-ed out of existence, clicked away from, put in the junk folder and ignored. Intrusion is a totally dead model.

Having read/consumed/devoured A List Apart’s newest issue on the state of web design education in higher ed, I have enough thoughts for 15 posts here about about the two articles, and also about my experiences as a student pursuing a career in web design.

But first and foremost, props to Leslie Jensen-Inman from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for conducting 32 interviews with industry leaders from the world of web design and development, having asked each of them the following questions:

1. What skills and technologies should colleges and universities teach students who want to be web designers and/or developers? Why?
2. Should students be educated in both web design and development or just one? Why?
3. If you could create your dream curriculum for web design and development, what courses and information would you include? Why?
4. What courses and information now in such programs would you eliminate? Why?
5. What type of projects do you want to see in a recent graduate’s web design and/or development portfolio?
6. How can colleges and universities keep web design and/or development curriculum current and relevant?

Read all the answers.

Some of my favorite responses:

James Archer: The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them. Most of the time, they’ve been brought a long way down the wrong path.

Andy Budd: I’d definitely drop Flash from the curriculum. It’s far too easy to learn and leaves a lot of graduates who think they have web design skills, when they are actually largely unemployable.

Jeff Croft: schools are not looking at the web as something new—they’re looking at it as an extension of things they’ve done before. I suspect another problem is that they’re using the same old instructors that have taught graphic design or computer science for years to teach “web design,” and not using web-savvy experts …colleges and universities are going to have to get over their accreditation standards and hire the people doing great work on the web today to teach. That’s really the only way. They can’t keep giving the same old dude that’s been teaching PASCAL for 25 years a Dreamweaver book and call it “web development.” It doesn’t work. Likewise, they can’t expect the same folks that have been teaching graphic design for 30 years to really be competent web design teachers. They need new blood—people that really understand this stuff and are passionate about it.

Rob Weychert: Hire faculty that are motivated to maintain their own continuing self-education (just as many of us in the work force do, largely via the blogosphere), and have schools fund it whenever possible (conferences, workshops, seminars, etc.). I hear too many horror stories about schools teaching sorely outdated practices.

Christopher Schmitt: We can teach design. We can teach programming. But teaching the merging of design and technology into a usable site is something I haven’t seen addressed in colleges.

Cameron Moll: There’s a line drawn between fine arts and technology in degree curriculum, and never the twain shall meet. So either students leave college very well-trained in the visual (graphic design), or very well-trained in the technical (web development, HCI, etc). Rarely do we see students, or programs for that matter, that offer a blend of both.

Fanboy is on to something here:

At first it started innocently — back in the day (about a year ago) various techie friends started to declare themselves social media gurus because they decided to hang out on Twitter and Facebook all day.

..the first symptom of this disease was what I call “social media deafness”, a state that occurs when a person’s social graph exceeds 500+ virtual friends. The result is that the person is a mile wide, but an inch deep. Suddenly the friend you use to know develops amnesia like symptoms and starts ignoring your direct messages — what was first simple Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder becomes full blown zombie like state.

I don’t know why I’m still on this storytelling kick.  It’s all I seem to post about lately, even though I’m heavily working on design and development projects.

I’m waist deep in a conflict between keyboard accessibility and a fancy javascript carousel for our university homepage.  Ain’t “universal design” a joy?   Also mocking up design elements for a fancy new online admissions application, AND trying to get video and lighting equipment ready for student recruitment video interviews.  I need to post some thoughts on all that stuff.

Last night I read and bookmarked a fabulous article in New York Magazine about Renegade cybergeeks saving the New York Times.

That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

And today there is a nice post over at mstoner blog about technology and storytelling as it relates to university marketing/communications.

Coming out of the discussion, the consistent and oddly-reassuring answer is good content—the kind that deals with personal experiences and passions, told in a compelling way that also makes people want to take action.

…it’s easier to tackle this question of good, compelling content than it is to resolve the questions centering on how best to record and deliver your content, and how to effectively stay on top of a rapidly changing tech arena notorious for trashing effective solutions in favor of the new.

…the technologies and methods for producing broadband content can vary wildly, change often, and will likely do so for quite a while—but what will never change is that good, compelling stories will find audiences.

I’ve found that big projects and initiatives always are more successful when “worker bee” types are involved in the planning stages.  I’ve found that people who are generally best at conjuring up and selling ideas don’t usually have the knowledge/skill to see them through.  I’ve found that “ideas are easy.  Execution is everything.”

There was an older web developer I looked up to at my previous corporate job, and I remember mentioning to him one morning how I’d watched an amazing interview the previous night on Charlie Rose. He took an awkward pose and returned a blank stare.  “…who’s Charlie Rose?

Sigh.  Only one of the best things on tv.  Yes occasionally boring, but always intelligent conversation.  Always going beyond the soundbite.  And it’s all online.  All of the interviews.

A recent show I caught the tail-end of was filmed at a university.  The 2008 Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award’ees in a roundtable discussion.  The 49 minute mark of this video, a guy named John Doerr said something that resonated with me. He talked about how things usually fail in the execution stage, not the idea stage.

This truth rears it’s ugly head in almost every plan, every project, and every goal.  There is an almost guaranteed disconnect between those talking/planning and those doing/executing.

Management/Administration on one side, and worker bees on the other.  Insulated from each other.  Speaking different languages.  The generals draw up war plans, the soldiers crouch in the trenches.

I haven’t experienced much of this at my current job.  But I can still remember the taste of failure.  The client is sold one thing.  The project manager carries a version of that idea to a working group.  The working group creates something with the information they have available.  And the client just kind of stares at the delivered product in confusion.  He might curiously poke it with a stick, before refusing payment.

Back to the drawing board with another idea.