It’s amazing how perspective changes. 10 to 15 years ago when I spent my day digging into the guts of computers, mucking with Windows configuration files (sad, but true) or hacking away at some code, I would have hated to discover who I’ve become. There’s two reason for this.
The first one is that I’ve become a typical “user” – the kind of person we used to put on hold when they called in to the Helpdesk and snicker about. I guess that the change has come about because I now work on a MacBook Pro, and from both a hardware and software perspective, there’s no need to know arcane commands or jumper settings to get the most out of it.
The second reason is that the technology used to be the centre of my work. When I had my own business I was the coder and I would simply leave out parts of the design that I didn’t feel were worth the effort. Rounded corners? Nah, seemed silly. Problems were tackled by looking at the technology. Now, technology is the last place that we look.
So why the change? If you’ve ever attended the Nomadic Marketing course at UCT GSB, you’ll know that I bang on about how technology for the sake of technology is not the answer. Technology needs to support what you are trying to do and it does that best by not getting in the way. When the supporting technological implementation is unobtrusive it is at its most effective. Both Henry Jenkins and Clay Shirky echo similar sentiments when they say “Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices” (Jenkins) and “…tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” (Shirky).
Which brings me to my longstanding bugbear – IT departments that control and dictate the manner and terms of a business’ online presence. When I was working at UCT in the mid-90′s the IT department were the people who made the website – simply because we were the only people who knew how to build it at the time. And since the files all lived on a web server that the IT department had to set up, it made perfect sense to just let us get on with “this internet thing”. A long time has passed since then, and remembering the quotes above, we now understand how the internet has enabled and changed cultural practices, as well as seeing the internet as something that is technologically boring.
As an advertising and marketing company, we use communication to solve problems for our clients. The participation that we want to encourage or story we want people to talk about is a marketing and communications issue. The technology supports and enables this, it’s not the way that the problem is solved.
You wouldn’t ask marketing to set up your new mail server, so why are you letting your IT department build your website?
Totally agree that marketing should manage websites. The only issue I have is that most marketing departments and agencies don’t get digital at all. To get digital requires some level of technical knowledge.
This requires UX skills first and foremost – putting usable over pretty. On the technical side, I don’t mean technical as in “I’m going to hack my iPhone to run Slackware”, but rather as in “When you design the CSS make sure content is properly segmented into content and headers and make sure every page title describes the page’s content” and “Consider this bit of Javascript to improve the way we drag and drop files here”.
You wouldn’t expect your agency to talk to the printers for your print ad without knowing what the difference between pantone and CMYK is (although I’m sure there are agency people that don’t). Likewise digital agencies have to be willing to dig into technology, but not for technologies sake.
Too often I see the “let us sell you some SEO – we’ll link you to blogs and raise your inbound links profile blah blah” (because we just hired this SEO guy) and the site they built has poorly structured CSS and identical page title tags and just fixing that would fix SEO.
So yes, marketing people should do websites, but there are precious few that get digital and even less that get technology.
Just saying.
I dont think you can so simply separate the responsibility as both departments should be responsible for aspects of the whole solution. Each usually have their strengths and their weaknesses which are apparent if they work in isolation. These days a website is a lot more complicated in its execution and objectives and as such need far more intricate levels of involvement.
Hi Allan,
well written and your last sentence sums it up perfectly!
Garron, couldn’t agree more, and I think that’s where a lot of agencies struggle with the dichotomy of the job. On the one hand we’re doing a communication job, but then also need to deliver a product that requires a high degree of technical skill to implement. I guess the analogy in an ATL agency environment would be that art directors understand what can and cannot be done in print, as well as knowing about CMYK and Pantones, but the final piece of work get’s handled by finished art specialists who know the very specific details about doing a print run. Any marketer needs to know the medium in which they want to play – whether it’s print, TV, radio or digital.
Matt, for sure, and I’m not saying that the IT don’t have a role to play. Stick to your speciality, but be sensitive to and understand the objectives and requirements of other parties.