Making non-anachronistic music on the Web simon Van Wyk
ANACHRONISM, n. Something placed or occurring out of its proper time.
Have you ever noticed how important music is for setting the context for a film?
If a movie is set in 1962, you expect background music, particularly music played on the radio as the actors drag around town in their cars, to be from the early 1960s.
When it’s done right, music appropriate to the era of a film makes you feel you’re right there in the middle of the setting, as in American Graffiti.
But if they’d played a tune from the 1970s, the film’s director, George Lucas, would have been accused of not doing his homework and the film would have been written off as anachronistic.
Deliberate anachronisms—using contemporary music in a historical setting—rarely work on film.
Two recent exceptions that I can think of (because I recently saw both of them within a few days of each other) are Moulin Rouge and A Knight’s Tale.
The images of Ewan McGregor telling a 19th-century Nicole Kidman that “Love lifts us up where we belong” and a group of 14th century peasants at a jousting match thumping the railing and singing “We will rock you” are jarring at first, but after a while you can see how they help you understand the historical setting by drawing parallels with modern life.
So what does this have to do with Web marketing? The principle of anachronistic behaviour also applies to different media.
If someone takes the easy way out and simply transfers something from one medium to another, you can smell it a mile away.
For example, taking a movie or television show and sticking it straight onto the radio without adaptation doesn’t work.
Continuing the George Lucas theme, imagine turning on your radio and listening to the final battle scene from Star Wars.
Sounds of spaceships whizzing through the air. Explosions. More sounds of spaceships whizzing through the air. More explosions. “Phew, that was close!” Yet more sounds of spaceships whizzing through the air. “Use The Force, Luke.” You get the idea.
This is particularly true when it comes to marketing.
You don’t read out all the text in your DM piece on your television ad, or limit your DM piece to the words used on TV.
Advertising agencies have built their reputations upon being able to develop the right approach for the right medium.
So why do so many ad agencies continue to take old media approaches to their Web work?
I see it every day: Web sites filled with unedited brochure copy and downloadable versions of a company’s TV ads, Flash animations that take precious minutes to download while users are waiting to get to the home page so they can start getting down to business, and sites that show a complete disregard for user-centred design and functionality.
Many ad agencies still don’t get the Web. They’re still thinking in the traditional advertising paradigm, couching brand strategies in offline terms and relying on gimmicks and giveaways instead of thinking about how a Web site will change the way a customer interacts with a business.
Using a Web site as a marketing tool is about usability. From what I can see, many agencies don’t rely on usability testing when developing a site—they seem to prefer the focus group approach establishing how people feel about a brand. It’s not how people feel about a Web site that’s important: it’s how they use it.
Five years ago, if anyone had an opportunity to kick a goal online, it was ad agencies.
They had control of customer relationships and they had the imprimatur to develop those relationships in a new medium. But by and large, they have dropped the ball.
Of the big Web developers worldwide, only a few have their origins in an agency base. Agencies have been good at TV, but the rise of the Web has meant the decline of TV and the decline of agencies.
Why haven’t most agencies made the transition? Agency work is fundamentally centred around the cult of the individual and the power of one creative idea.
It’s an approach that has served the advertising industry very well—particularly high-impact broadcast advertising. Entire companies have been built—or rescued—by the power of a jingle, a tagline, a logo.
Often that creative idea is the product of one person’s inspiration, and everything else flows on from there.
But to be successful on the Web, you need a team involved. That requires a different sort of thinking.
A Web team needs to think long term. A Web site is an ongoing presence; in that sense it’s more like a publishing operation than an advertising campaign.
The Web is all about talking to an affinity group again and again—building a relationship.
The types of questions a Web developer asks clients during the business development phase are vastly different from what his or her advertising colleagues ask. To build a Web site that works, you need to become familiar with overall business processes and not just marketing functions. You need to develop a new set of skills to function in this new medium.
It’s not too late; ad agencies still have the opportunity to develop those competencies and blend them together with their current skills to make some beautiful, non-anachronistic, music on the Web. Will that happen? Ask me again in a couple of years.
When he’s not critiquing the use of music in films, Simon van Wyk works as MD of Web development consultancy HotHouse Interactive.E: simonvw@hothouse.com.au
