Why is it that advertising agency websites are almost always silly?
How come award-winning agencies full of award-winning creatives manage to create some of the most ridiculous websites on teh internets?
Well, Gerry McGovern nailed it in an article in 2004 on why you should never let traditional ad agencies near your website:
“The average advertising agency fundamentally doesn’t get the Web. Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy are great advertising agencies. When it comes to managing their own websites, however, they are rank amateurs. They bring their print and TV thinking to the Web with embarrassing results.”
Read the rest of the article here. Meanwhile, here are some silly ad agency websites that you can laugh at, er, check out:
It’s silly because: There are six tabs for news on the Home Page. Six tabs? This makes it difficult to differentiate between the newsworthiness of the news. Which tabs are relevant to you? And in what order?
It’s silly because: You have to use spinning planets to navigate the website. In other words, the navigation isn’t just inter-planetary, it’s out of this world! Sorry.
It’s silly because: The egg is the loading bar. It takes, like, forever to crack. Then, a blue hummingbird and a bunch of wires appear in the middle of the page. Wow.
4. TBWA
It’s silly because: The header graphic takes up almost half of the page, so space for content is compressed into the lower half of the website. To add insult to injury, the designers created a special scroll bar that sits within the frame, which means you can’t use your web browser’s scroll bar to scroll down to browse the content. Ouch!
It’s silly because: You can play around with the header graphic but it isn’t clickable and doesn’t link to content. So, why on Earth would you want to play around with it, anyway? Because you can?
Know of any other silly agency websites? Sharing is caring.
6 Comments
February 27, 2008 at 7:20 pm
lol.
http://www.bbdo.com
February 28, 2008 at 11:33 am
lol thats funny
March 9, 2008 at 9:34 pm
[...] Last month I wrote a post where I made fun of some silly ad agencies websites. [...]
April 3, 2008 at 12:42 am
Some of the agency sites in the Philippines that I think needs a review are:
Jimenez-Basic (?) That’s the thing. I can’t find them online.
Ace Saatchi & Saatchi (http://www.acesaatchi.com.ph/)–The elevator thing has made me dizzy. What’s the point of displaying a Flash-animated intro that has the word skip on the lower right area of the screen?
April 3, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Haha the elevator thing is funny! IMHO it is a bit of a waste of time. Why not go straight to the content?
As for the skip-intro link, I think it’s a Catch 22. You need to add a ’skip’ link because people who have visited the site before this might not want to view the Flash intro again.
But having a ’skip’ link might make first-time visitors want to just skip the damned thing before they even view it.
Solution? Scrap the Flash intro if it doesn’t do anything useful e.g. lead to a sign-up process or sell a product. Man, Flash intros are soooo 2000.
May 7, 2009 at 6:42 pm
[...] My poking fun at ad agency websites. [...]