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Navigating Multichannel Waters Requires Advanced Design Considerations
May 23, 2008

Last Tuesday, I was driving to Boston from upstate New York and I stopped to gas up. All the travel plazas on the Mass Pike have now installed LCD TVs on all the gas pumps and were broadcasting (narrowcasting?) specialized programming called (I swear I am not making this up) “Gas TV.” Basically, this programming included weather reports, sports highlights from ESPN, a CBS featurette on the British royal family, and car commercials (they wisely left out, as far as I could tell, any mileage information, no fools they).

For the at least the past decade, gas pumps have been increasingly important as a marketing medium—for years, they have had LCD displays (of various size, resolution, color, and complexity) that would advertise, to a captive audience, the latest specials on soda, beer, or cigarettes to be had in the convenience store (thanks to pay-at-the-pump abilities, drivers who use credit cards or those Mobil Speedpass thingies have no need to go into the store to pay for gas, the way you once had to, so the shops have to get people inside somehow. If they ever mount outside coffeepots on gas pumps, I will have no need to ever go inside a gas station minimart. But I digress...)

I bring this up because I was driving to Boston to give a presentation at this year’s HOW Design Conference, a big get-together for graphic design professionals. The topic of my talk? “Designing Across Media Channels.”
It’s funny; my presentation was in Balllroom C of the Hynes Convention Center. In Ballroom A was a session called “Designer Sobriety” and in Ballroom B was a session called “Branding is Like Dating.” It occurred to me that I should have changed the name of my session to something like “Multichannel Marketing is Like a Roman Bacchanalia” or something less staid and frumpy. Sometimes I avoid analogies. Sometimes it's best to...

Anyone who had read my past posts in this space can pretty much figure out what the gist of my talk was; that developing content for more than one media channel—print, the Web, mobile devices, e-mail, etc.—more or less simultaneously is needed to re-aggregate increasingly fragmented media audiences. An ever-increasing number of places where people can go to get information, news, and entertainment has made aggregating a mass audience rather like getting cats to walk in a straight line. Ergo, deploying marketing and advertising messages through a variety of media channels helps wrangle an audience that is of a large enough size to make advertising and marketing effective.

Today’s plethora of new media channels and platforms is the result of technological advancements: Small and fast microchips and new display technologies transform everything into a potential marketing platform: ATMs (why are some ATMs so slow to process your transactions? So you have more time to look at the onscreen ads, of course), appliances (refrigerators now have TVs in them, for reasons passing understanding), cars (my car’s LCD display flashes “Welcome to Camry” every time I turn on the ignition, in case I forgot), and if you ever go to a live sporting event (my brother treated me to an evening at Fenway Park to watch a Red Sox game while I was in town) you know that every available surface can be used as an advertising and marketing medium. Oh, and, of course, gas pumps are now counted among those items.

After laying out this background, the main thrust of my talk was to offer general and detailed design considerations for marketers, designers, and other content creators who are looking to wade hip-deep in this environment. Here is an overview of what I came up with:

Define the media strategy. This is the most important step in any marketing campaign or project. Which media will you use? There are a number of factors that affect media choice, the most important being the demographics of the target audience and the media can best reach them. The media favored by teens and young adults differ than those favored by seniors. More affluent consumers often use different media than less affluent consumers. And so forth. At the same time, budget and client comfort are also important elements that will define a media strategy.

The second step is to decide who will handle what. That is, which media can be developed in-house and which will need to be outsourced? Just as design firms are quite happy to outsource print production, there is no reason why they can’t outsource the production and development of media that are not necessarily their purview. It’s easy to learn fundamental Web design or video production or mobile media development, and the tools are not expensive. But effective development requires highly specialized skills. Can your company develop dynamic Web sites that include Flash animation, blogs, and other Web 2.0 features? E-commerce capabilities? How well-versed are you in search engine optimization? Do you have the capabilities to create and deploy effective e-mail marketing projects, with all the CAN-SPAm and opt-out regulations that are involved? On the other hand, do you have the skills to develop print-based campaigns? That is, do you know how to design for high-quality print, use the correct color spaces, and images that are of the right resolution? When thinking about your media strategy, it’s crucial to evaluate your in-house capabilities. Can your current talent pool handle old, new, or newer media? Should you hire new employees to add to your company’s skill set? Or is it more efficient to outsource? Identifying and defining strategic partnerships with other businesses to complement the skills you need will help both you and your partner develop campaigns and projects for a broader range of companies.

Once you have settled on your media strategy and decided who is going to do what, it’s then vital, no matter who is doing the work—whether it’s performed in house or contracted out—to ensure that the message and design elements are standardized and made consistent. That is, headlines, subheads, and taglines should not vary from medium to medium. Any variations can blunt the message and cause confusion. Likewise, the same fonts, logos, and colors should be used regardless of medium.  After all, the idea is to reinforce the brand not muddy the message.

The next step is to design for media “agility.” If you’ve done your homework in the strategizing phase, designing for “agility”—or the ability to easily deploy content from one medium to another—is a case of acquiring appropriate assets and delegating production tasks. Much hay has been made about “creating once and re-using many,” and many content creators are clamoring for a solution that will enable that. Not unexpectly, software developers have devised solutions (like XML-based enterprise publishing systems), but even with the technology now available, I recommend against looking for “push-button” simplicity. After all, each medium is different, has different design considerations, and different ways that users interact with it. While there are certain immutable laws of design that don’t vary, still, each medium has its own design standards, some technical, some aesthetic. A design that works well on a printed page may not work on a Web page, which may then not work on a mobile screen. And vice versa. Content should play to the strengths and design considerations of each medium, and “consistency” should always be in the context of playing to a medium’s strengths. Sometimes that means making sacrifices—using Arial rather than a really cool font, for example.

Finally, as I have said ad nauseam, the point of multichannel marketing is to use a combination of media channels to reinforce the brand and stand out from a very crowded marketing message-saturated world. For example, studies have found that print direct mail combined with e-mail follow up is much more effective than either medium by itself. Video is also becoming more and more important on the internet. Many sites now feature video-based ads, but information videos added to sites are also becoming popular, and can also function as standalone videos in YouTube or elsewhere. Again, the combination of media platforms will be decided during the strategizing session you have at the start of a project.

One way to start the strategizing process is to devise a media matrix, with a list of media and channels along the top. Breaking these down by what you can do in-house and what you would need to outsource gives you a good start on how resources can be allocated.

And maybe you can even take out an ad on Gas TV.

Posted by Richard Romano on May 23, 2008 | Comments (0)