Freelance Frank

The Mad Men Web Strategy

The economic downturn may well require a cull in traditional web agencies. Clients are getting scarce while trust in the individual freelancer is rising. This is evolution in action. The traditional agency approach was always relatively unfit for the realities of the developing web. Its problems are only becoming more apparent as economic realities finally kick in.

The traditional approach can be summed up easily: Make a keen visual impression on the client. This requires a large office in a warehouse location, filled with the right kind of curved furniture. It means clothes, staff and sites that are overloaded with visual ideas. While appearing cutting edge the approach is in fact very traditional. It comes, largely, from the old advertising agency assumption that image is everything – that you can’t throw too much money at making an impression. I call this approach the Mad Men Web Strategy.

The Mad Men strategy is expensive and cumbersome. It places an undue bias on gloss over substance. Even today, in many cases, it assumes that the main job of a company site is to be little more than a brochure – even if that now means a standards compliant, clean-coded brocure. When the web was exciting and new it was necessary to spend a lot on securing the trust of clients. There was value in the visual impression. That value is diminishing.

Strip away the gloss and a number of things become apparent. Chief among them is that there is very little a Mad Men agency can do that a good freelancer cannot. Time required in co-ordinating group projects may well be more than that required by a single committed individual in just getting the job done. Teams are expensive. Individuals are not. Client trust in the individual freelancer is on the rise. All of which bodes well. It is easier to feed when you’re unencumbered.