Adverghetti Junction

The importance of the business case on digital projects

2012-03-28T15:24:00Z

We’re back with another article highlighting an important aspect of any digital project. This time, it is one that should happen before any work is actually undertaken on the project itself.

A business case is fairly straight forward. It is the primary business motivation behind performing some task or developing some project past an idea phase. In fact, usually the business case is developed before a project is identified to enable that business case to be realised.

So what does a business case look like? It can be a one-liner; “we want to sell Y volume of product X in Z timeframe”. It could also be a bigger document describing some specific business function that needs to happen, but it won’t ever go into specific detail as to how the business case is to be achieved. For most businesses looking to use digital means of marketing, it’ll be things like brand awareness increase, increased Facebook reach, sales volume, and anything else that can be measured in some way. The business case will usually also include information regarding the demographic to be targeted.

We’re often given projects to build this or that on Facebook, or some other platform, and we’re rarely given the business case for the project. We’re usually quite happy to build them, but when presented a business case we can usually offer best practice advice as to what does and doesn’t work in particular areas, and how best to reach a specific target audience, which in turn will help to shape the overall project.

We’ve recently been engaged by an agency to tackle an age-old problem. A brand wants to enter the deep, dark world of social media, but doesn’t know where to start. That doesn’t particularly worry me, as most businesses new to a means of marketing are usually unaware of what kind of results could potentially be achieved. Typically though, they’ll want to start growing their reach (the number of people who can hear, or see, their communication). That’s a good a start as any, but why does it matter?

Well the original brief meant that this brand (we’re under NDA, so I can’t tell you which) would have instantly alienated half their target audience, so we had to find a way to deliver back some mechanism by which to engage the 50% or so that don’t have an iOS device.

We boiled down the options, still wanting to keep the entry point as Facebook as an opening social media gambit, and settled on a competition whose details could be found on the brand’s new Facebook page, along with an entry mechanism, but also allowed instant gratification and entry via mobile messaging. Send a picture to a shortcode number, and you’re entered into the competition, subject to the rules, which are on Facebook. All aspects of the entry lead the user to either a Facebook or mobile page with share options so users are encouraged to share further to increase the chances they are involved in the prize pool.

Without the business case though, we would have been completely unable to advise as to why the initial option that was tabled wouldn’t perform adequately, and would have ended up putting the end client off further social media work, despite their brand being able to take a huge advantage by using it well.

We always question the business case, and we work hard to ensure that what we deliver is more than just an app and stems from real business insight.

We’ve come a long way this year

2011-11-19T19:46:36Z

I want to share with you some changes that have happened here at Initforthe over the course of the past year, and how these relate to the greater world of the web. We still build websites, we still build applications, we still do all the things we did last year, but the way in which we do them is rather different.

This has been the year that the web has seen a dramatic change in the way developers treat it. Websites and web based applications are now first class citizens in the software world and are seeing all the benefits of having that status. We’ve embraced the changes wholeheartedly and are seeing a profound change in the way we build and the quality of the work we deliver to our clients.

Firstly, our insistance on TDD is paying off. The quality of our work is a magnitude better than it was this time last year, and we’re now in a position where we’re ready to share our knowledge and learnings with everyone, so we’ll be bringing in a newly polished consultancy offering in the New Year. Of course, our clients are seeing the benefits of these changes, and we’re not slowing down in the pace of our technical innovation.

We’ve fully implemented continuous integration, we’ve transitioned our hosting platform to be more easily scalable and cost effective for our clients, and we’re always looking for new ways to innovate in that regard.

In addition to the technical growth, we’re also ready to impart our knowledge and understanding of user interfaces and human interaction with web-enabled devices, and again, existing clients are already starting to see the benefit of that. We’ve spent a lot of time this year developing and designing interfaces for websites, applications across a number of platforms, to best suit their target audiences. Ensuring maximum engagement is always a tough one, but we have found that where the interface has been thought through and designed correctly, we usually get very good feedback and usage statistics back.

So, to conclude, everything comes down to the design and quality of the interface and the ability to guarantee that bugs won’t affect unexpected parts of the platform we’re building. We’ve spent a long time honing those specific skills this year, and you’ll be seeing some rather interesting developments coming out of our doors. Whether you know it was us or not is a different matter – we work on a large number of projects behind a smoke screen as we partner with agencies to provide them with technical expertise that is better outsourced. Software is software, and web apps are software, and need treating as such. If you’re a web development company still using FTP for deployment, or not testing your applications automatically, start rethinking your strategy as you’ll soon find you’re long behind the times and hot-footing it out the door.

Is it right to abandon campaign media sites for social media?

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

In January, Coca Cola and Unilever announced that they would be shunning campaign media sites in favour of social media based marketing. A bold move, and one many others have followed since. However, I’m not sure it’s right to ditch one method of marketing in favour of another without fully understanding the consequences of doing so.

Let’s look back a few years. The Internet is the next big thing. Paper would disappear. People would communicate not by picking up the phone, but by email and IM (anyone remember ICQ?). Email marketing became the next big thing, and very quickly, businesses realised they needed somewhere to send the people who were getting their emails. Those places: campaign media sites. I’m not suggested that these mini sites are a good or a bad idea, but they exist, and to a greater or lesser extent, they work. So why break what works? Would you consider that offline (print, radio, TV amongst other formats) advertising had had its day now? Wrong.

What the industry has comprehensively failed to remember is that different businesses and different audiences communicate and consume the world in which we live in drastically different ways. If you ditched all advertising in newspapers and magazines because you decided that the next big thing was the back of your car because more people you knew saw the back of your car… well you just wouldn’t.

Offline marketing is just as important as online. Sometimes more so. Yep. We’re a digital production company, and I just said that. The Internet enables a new form of communication, not a better one. Because we live in a digital age doesn’t preclude the possibility for some amazing trans-format campaigns that truly encompass our social sphere, whomever we are, and however we choose to consume it. Because you have a Facebook account, does that mean that word-of-mouth advertising is now irrelevant because you can reach everyone’s friends through an application, or by looking at where people have checked in? Not likely. More, Facebook as a marketing platform should be used to augment and enable a more engaging experience than is currently being offered by the vast majority of brands. This is return on investment. Investment doesn’t mean cheap, and cheap doesn’t mean higher returns.

We’ve spent some time over the 10 months intrigued by just how many applications for social networks we’ve been asked to build, for some pretty high profile brands. That’s not to blow our own trumpet, but it is to serve as a warning thus: not one of those applications had the response expected of the people involved in creating the strategy. And again, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done, but they should be created as part of a larger strategy. The only time these social media campaigns do work is when they truly engage the user in something that user is actually interested in. If you are a brand manager and you are asking how your brand might engage in these environments, I urge you to think carefully about the bigger picture – how does social media fit into the overall ethos of the business, and how does that ethos portray itself externally? Does the brand in question already have a loyal following? If not, why not, and could it realistically build one in an intangible world? If it does, how does that following consume the brand presently, and how would you engage these people to become your advocates? By the way, social media doesn’t automatically mean digital. Take the example of the neighbour’s lost cat. Muddles’ photo is plastered on every tree in the neighbourhood, and not a single email or Facebook group has been created. Turns out, Doris at number 83 had taken pity on Muddles and given her some milk. She saw the poster one day and came and knocked at the door, but you were out, so she knocked next door and next door again until she found someone who answered the door in the middle of the day. So starts the Chinese whisper of social media.

I’ve gone off on a tangent a little, but the point is clear (in my mind at least). Advertising today seems a little too “follow-the-leader” in its approach. What happened to the truly creative campaigns that took you from radio to TV to something in a shop window to the Internet and back again before realising you were deeply involved and so were all your friends? And why does a campaign need to have a use-by date? Surely a good campaign (and the brands that get this truly get it) is one that stands the test of time. And just as importantly, a good campaign isn’t one decided on by someone saying “we need more social media”, but by someone coming up with an amazing idea, whatever the medium. You need to reach your customers, not mess around with what everyone else is doing.

Thoughts on the quoting process – how much of it is a waste of energy?

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

Being in business, and having clients to service, we’re often asked to quote for work, and not every quote turns into an order. That’s to be expected. Some are new or potential clients going out to multiple potential suppliers, of which we are just one. Others are existing clients and have a duty to tender their work for any number of reasons. The end result is that we get some orders, and lose out on some others. That’s a fact of life when you’re in business, and in my eyes is nothing bad. You can’t please all the people all of the time.

What I’ve found in the last nearly 3 years in business is what I can only call a correlation between clients’ sizes, the level of detail required in cost estimates, and the likelihood of that quote turning into an order. This is an exploratory article and I welcome comment; I’m interested to know how others in similar situations deal with this issue as I’m sure it’s not uncommon.

There is an amount of work involved in putting together a proposal or quote for work. We usually do this for free and we feel this is the right thing to do – for those that don’t turn into orders, the quality and attention to detail that we put into all our projects are visible, and we’re often asked to quote on further work, more often than not winning that work. However – there’s always a however – it’s not always like this. We’ve got a couple of clients, and I’m sure everyone does, that we spend a lot more time servicing than we do others, without the financial benefit that this should bring.

For the most part, I’ve found that this additional servicing happens during the quoting process – how much we’re asked to do, and how much turns into real work, and therefore money. I’ve talked to a number of clients about this, both large and small, because it’s something that I feel is a waste of everyone’s time. Why spend forever quoting for work if no-one’s actually going to pay for it to be done, and why keep asking for it if the money isn’t there to do it? There are answers to this, some of which I have, and some of which I hope you can enlighten me with. This is a learning exercise as much as it is an expulsion of hot air.

Trust

I’d like to think all our clients trust us to give them the best possible service and the best possible product that we can, and at a price that they feel is good value. I won’t use the word “cheap” because we’re not, and nor do I want us to be, as that would then reflect in the quality of our work too. Smaller clients often need to have more trust because they’re much closer to their own business and they don’t want someone else’s to jeopardise it. That’s completely understandable. I pick my own suppliers extremely carefully for exactly that reason. Larger businesses still need a level of trust, but because they’re dealing in big numbers all the time, they put less emphasis on the detail at the quote phase. Having said that, we have several small clients that are happy for a simple cost and time for the work they want done. If it feels right, they place an order. They trust us to be accurate.

Experience

Large businesses are experienced in dealing with external contractors, and therefore confident when a quote comes in that it feels correct. Smaller businesses may not be so experienced. This isn’t a complete truth, as many small businesses are started by people who’ve worked for large ones, but it does hold some value. Those with less experience though may well ask for more detail than is really necessary. Again understandable if you’re someone not experienced in a given field of work – we’re web developers, but don’t know how much it would cost to build an exhibition stand for instance, or why one exhibition stand in one centre would be more than another similar stand in a different centre.

Money

Clients don’t always have the money to do the work now. Just like I might ask my estate agent for a valuation of my property, even though I have no intention of selling it yet. However, my estate agent knows my property, and I trust him, so when I ask him for a ballpark, I’m happy with a top-of-the-head figure. What concerns me is the level of detail asked of us when we know the money isn’t available to complete the work.

So what do we do about the clients that we spend a lot of time servicing, but we either make very little money from, or even make a loss on. Do we drop them? Do we approach them about the problems? If so, how? What have you done in your business experience where issues like this have arisen?

I’ve no problem putting out detailed quotes, but I’d like to be more confident that these will turn into orders. For one client, we’ve put forward six or seven sets of detailed quotes this calendar year, and none of these have turned into orders. In the meantime we’ve continued to service them as valued clients, just as we do with all our others. Is this the right thing to do? In the hope that at some point soon, the work will actually come in? Do we charge for quotes – I know others have though I’m not sure whether it has proven successful or not.

Could we be more transparent? Maybe the solution is actually to offer a very high level ballpark estimate without the detail, followed by a more detailed quote if the client in question feels this is feasible with currently available funds. Although this doesn’t solve the problem that these clients want the detailed quote up front. I’m keen to try and reduce the amount of wasted work we do, without reducing the level and quality of service that we offer to our clients. Typically, I’d make a decision and run with it, but this feels a little more contentious and prone to serious consequence if we get wrong. I know I’m being very open in this article, but I feel this is the right approach. If you think you’re a client we’re not servicing properly, please tell me. I’d love the opportunity to discuss over a coffee what we can do in our business to better both the strong relationships we already have, and to bolster the weaker ones and turn them into strong ones.

I’m going to wrap up here, and ask for advice and experiences you’ve had and the solutions to the issues in this article.

SEO, its myths and how to really optimise your site

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

Everyone needs SEO. Really, we do. OK, but what is SEO and what does it mean? After all, it’s one of those Internet jargon bandwagons that everyone seems to have jumped on without really knowing what it is or how it works.

This article isn’t about paid search. It isn’t really about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) either. Mostly because a good website is naturally optimised for search. What this article is then, is a quick guide to what to do to make sure you get the best rankings you can by the search engines.

Code like a demon

This is one of those obvious ones really. If you build the site semantically (in a structured fashion, much like you might write a document), Google and the gang will spot that and work out what is relevant on the page and what is less relevant. It has nothing to do with how high up on the page it is. After all, “how high up” is subjective, depending on whether you’re browsing in Firefox or in a text based screen reader. If your code is semantic, then you’re a step towards search nirvana.

Get the content right

This is really the most important part of the whole process. If you have poor content, then you’re never going to get anywhere in the rankings. How do you write good content? Well, given that Google is effectively a big computer that understands the written word, you’re lumbered with a bit of an issue. First off, search engines scour pages for their content, and work out how many times and in what context words appear. Then when you search for them, it looks up which sites have the most “relevant” words in their content and displays that page as a link. One of the key reasons why the homepage isn’t always the most hit on a site is because there is content somewhere else being hit by search referrals.

In saying that, I’m not suggesting you just write rubbish with loads of the keywords you want people to reach you by. That won’t work. The search bots that spider your pages are clever enough to know if you’re just repeating yourself. Certainly write with search engines in mind. It’ll be no less readable, though you’ll have more keywords within the body of the text, but precisely because of this, it’ll appear higher in a search result.

What do the SEO companies do then?

Not a lot. I’m kidding guys, but it’s true that some of them (read many) are complete sharks. Actually that’s probably true of any segment of Internet based industry, and I’d hazard of any other too.

The ones that do a lot of work know what it takes to make your site appear high up in Google. They will do a few things that will help, but in truth, none of them can guarantee results, and most of it is really down to the content. That’s down to you or your client, whichever it is that is the content admin. They will add a few pages to the site full of keyword laden text that feels natural enough to a search engine but when you or I read it, it looks like a load of twaddle. This, coupled with a sitemap can help because the search engines see more pages with those keywords all over them, but it’s still not going to help if your content is poor.

So content is king, and while paid for software or companies specialising in Search Engine Optimisation can help, you’re better off first making sure your content is up to scratch. And that the search engines can see it.

Mobile technology – what should we build for?

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

There is a lot of discussion happening in the industry at the moment surrounding mobile technology. Most of it seems to be centred around the iPhone, but it’s important to remember the other platforms as well that haven’t quite had the hype that the iPhone has.

The contenders run as follows: iPhone, Google Android, Symbian (Nokia smartphones among others), Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and the “dumbphone” contingent that can run Java Mobile Edition applications. There are a couple of others, but they are found so rarely that they’re not important for the purposes of this article. Of course, if the majority of your userbase happens to use one of those rare platforms, then by all means build for it. It’s just that most don’t.

What this article will seek to empower you with is the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision as to whether a given platform is worth the time and effort to build an application for or whether it might be better to try a different one.

iPhone

The platform that has received more press inches than any other technology… in the World. The hype is there, almost everyone wants one, and we’ve just learnt that O2 is losing their exclusive contract with Apple in the UK. Orange will get the iPhone in November and Vodafone in early 2010. That grows the potential market considerably.

From a consumer perspective, the iPhone is brilliant. It does everything expected of it, and with relative ease – Apple have clearly spent a lot of time and effort on the user interface. There are over 85,000 applications on the iTunes App Store now that do all manner of things, ranging from silly games to full blown applications, and that’s not including any applications built for enterprise that are distributed internally and never see the light of Apple’s day. Couple that with over 2 billion downloads across the iPhone and iPod Touch and you have a force to be reckoned with. Dismiss the iPhone as a marketing tool, and you’re going to miss several tricks.

As for the developer angle, the iPhone SDK coupled with Objective C is no Ruby on Rails, but it’s certainly nice to work with. Apple, again, have spent a lot of time designing and building their development tools, and it shows. Since Apple released their non-disclosure agreement with developers, there are hordes of books and tutorials around the Internet, coupled with forums with developers supporting each other across the globe. It makes for a pretty handy development platform.

Miss this and miss out, as they say.

Google Android

Google decided it was time to play mobile, and built Android, an open operating system for mobiles. It’s been taken up by almost all of the big manufacturers and is proving successful to the point where Android will likely overtake the iPhone in terms of usage numbers in the coming few years.

As a consumer, it’s easy to use, does over the air updates, so you’re always running the latest software, and has a whole mass of integration with Google products. That just means talking to people is easy. There is one really nice thing with Google though: all apps are equal. So, if you want to, you can change the dialer to a different one, the keyboard, the mail application… anything you like really. Google’s own app store is also a little less policed than Apple’s, from the perspective that Apple will not allow an application that competes with one of their own. It is only with the FCC in America forcing AT&T’s hand that Skype will now work over 3G and not just over WiFi, for instance, and it took over 8 months for Spotify to appear on the iPhone. We all wonder why…

Again, the SDK available for Android is brilliant. It plugs in to open source products and lets almost any developer on any platform build for it. You also have a choice of app stores, and you don’t need to jailbreak to multi task, like you do with the iPhone. This is one of the iPhone’s major gripes – you can’t keep your application running if you want your user to send an email or send a tweet using TweetDeck. If you want it to do something, you have to do it yourself in your app. Not so with Android.

Again, like Apple, this is one to watch. There hasn’t been quite as much hype from Google about this platform, but it’s been allowed to grow and mature steadily, and this shows in the quality of the latest version available in the HTC Hero.

BlackBerry

RIM took the world by storm a few years ago when they brought us a mobile phone with a proper keyboard that would push emails to the device as soon as they arrived in your inbox. It integrated with all the major enterprise email platforms (Exchange and Lotus Domino are the key ones here), and it did everything very well. RIM have been pushed a bit recently by the likes of Apple and Google, but still they’re the ones that got there first, and as such have a vast share of the market. Our target demographic for most brands will definitely include the BlackBerry user.

It doesn’t have the development tools that Apple and Google have deployed for their developer bases, but it’s certainly not too shabby. Applications can multitask, and interact with hardware available. Because of the vast number of devices running BlackBerry’s operating system, this is one that should be considered in any marketing campaign. However, a point to note is that distribution of your application is a lot harder for BlackBerry than it is for the two platforms discussed above. That will probably change in the coming months, like Nokia has released Ovi.

Symbian

Symbian, once the pinnacle of British software engineering, and originating in the Psion series of palmtop computers of the 90′s as the EPOC OS, has rung its death knell. It used to be used by a number of manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson and Motorola, but in recent years it’s been Nokia sounding all the trumpets about this platform, most notably that they open sourced it. However, Nokia themselves have announced that they want Maemo, their Linux platform currently in use on their N range of Internet tablets, to take over in their smartphone range. It just isn’t worth developing for something that won’t last more than a couple of years, if that. Time to say goodbye. It’s a shame because it’s a nice platform, but the fact of the matter is that it’s a gonner.

Java Mobile Edition (J2ME)

J2ME is in use everywhere. Every non-smartphone on the planet, and most smartphones too supports J2ME applications. That means nothing though where advertising is concerned, because I don’t know anyone who has a dumbphone who has downloaded a single application for it, save for the techies who have added one or two. Games from the mobile provider’s WAP portals may have had a few downloads, but nothing in comparison to the vast array of useful applications available for iPhone and Android. That’s not to say they don’t exist… they’re everywhere, but no one knows about them. There isn’t yet a sensible distribution method for these phones either. You can’t buy an app and keep it as you upgrade your phones through the years; you need to buy it again each time you upgrade your phone. Worse, if you lose your phone or it gets stolen, you have to buy them all again too.

It just isn’t practical then to build for J2ME unless you are building for a particular market that you know will use it – simple games and ringtones spring to mind, with low income people as the main demographic. Other than that, don’t bother.

Windows Mobile

The lost soul of the party, Windows Mobile has been trying to gain traction in the mobile space for years now. It’s bloated, slow and above all, it keeps changing. Microsoft have laid their bed of nails, but they insist on lying in it. It’s a shame. It could be a good platform, and it’s certainly a nice one to develop for these days, with the .NET framework and languages available to you. Microsoft have also now launched a distribution platform for applications, but it’s not readily available on older phones. They’re some way off the technical abilities of the Android and iPhone platforms, and BlackBerry does everything better than Windows Mobile does.

As far as marketing opportunities go with Windows Mobile, the story doesn’t really improve. Mostly due to the current lack of devices available with a proper distribution mechanism, and the severely reducing market share at the hands of the men in Mountain View and Cupertino (Google and Apple, respectively, for those that aren’t “in the know”), this is another one that probably should be left by the wayside for the moment. We’ll see what the future brings, but it isn’t particularly rosy.

I guess the only other platform that needs some discussion is Palm’s WebOS. It’s the new thing from Palm, trying to regenerate interest in their brand of devices. Personally, I think it’s too little too late, and unless you’re Apple, a one-trick pony in a race amongst horses won’t be winning any prizes. That’s not to rule it out, but we will need to see where we are with it in a years time. Of course, it is easier to build for, because most web developers can build apps for it, being based on web technology.

Our view on the marketplace here at Initforthe suggests that the order in which applications should be considered currently is likely to be something like:

Apple iPhone / iPod Touch
Google Android
BlackBerry
Windows Mobile
Palm WebOS
J2ME
Symbian

This of course assumes you’re in the marketing and advertising industries. Other industries are likely to vociferously disagree with me here, and that’s fine. I’d agree that in some places, J2ME will be top of the list, and in some enterprises, the only ones to touch will be Windows Mobile and/or BlackBerry. That’s a decision to be taken based on a known userbase. In an unknown world where you have to make judgement calls about what will return the most for your brand, it’s a different story. This is how to tell it.

Testing, testing, and more testing!

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

It is blindingly obvious that testing is utterly important. You can’t go live without at least some testing time. But what really is testing, and do we give it the space, time and money it deserves? That’s the question I’d like to ask of the whole industry, because I think the answer is a resounding NO! And that worries me.

First off, I’m going to look at what testing comprises of. What is testing? What are the options and their meanings in terms of time and value? I’ll look at what we’re prepared to pay for, and why this needs addressing, and I’ll ask why we’re not being more forceful about it.

Testing can mean many things, so I’ll keep it in the context of a web application in this instance. It’s a limited viewpoint I know, but it carries the same message across other disciplines.

In testing a website, we talk about functional testing, we talk about user acceptance testing, and we talk about User Interface testing. The latter two often work hand in hand, and are done prior to build, where functional testing traditionally happens after the build process and is about eliminating bugs in the system. Fine, but that only works to an extent. It’s the functional testing we’re talking about here. If the others haven’t been done prior to build, there are bigger issues that need dealing with first. Like why not?!

We’re given scopes to look through and quote for on a day to day basis. Sometimes they appear complete and other times they don’t and need some reworking. The complete ones almost certainly are not perfect, and have missed one or two bits of business logic somewhere along the line. These aren’t picked up until later in development, and only surface when an astute developer asks the question of his Project Manager. If they’re not picked up, they surface when a user of the site does something unexpected, at least something that the developers didn’t expect the user to do. And that’s usually where the bugs appear.

So what sort of testing can you employ and how does it help? Well there are two main options: manual testing, or automatic testing. You could put someone in front of a computer and ask them to run through every single possibility and flag bugs, then run through it again and again until there are no bugs, in each separate browser. You could alternatively automate the testing if you’re building the application in a framework that has the possibility of testing built into it.

The first of these two options, manual testing, is what is normally assumed. Unfortunately, it’s considered a case of going through the application or site after build and checking everything appears to work as expected. This is fine, but doesn’t really deal with the issue at hand – those pesky bugs that hide under bits of code you never thought to look under. If you choose to go down the route of manual testing, preparation is key – all scenarios must be thought through, written up into test cases and tested by a person, or people, independent of the project. Clearly, the people involved in the project need to be testing as well, but they can often be too close to the project to notice what are sometimes glaring issues. Sufficient testing means a full set of written tests, with results properly recorded step by step. This costs money; often half or more of the build cost. Doing any less than this can’t be considered to be sufficient.

If the framework of choice has a test suite, such as Ruby on Rails, there is a second option that costs significantly less, yet gives almost the same quality assessment of the project as does the manual process. Depending on the choice of test suites (many can be employed, each one testing a different facet of the application; e.g. separate front-end and back-end suites), they can be written to be readable by people not affiliated to the project, or those not on the project in a technical capacity. This means these tests can be peer reviewed and cross checked for completeness against the technical specification. Usually testing in this way happens during the build process, the tests being written before any code and then the code written to pass all the relevant tests. Two methods used here are Behaviour and Test driven development. The first tests that the behaviours expected by the user actually happen, and the latter is often used to test the business logic. Both can be used together. Automated testing costs on average approximately one third of the build cost. With it come guarantees that the application has been tested almost to destruction, with all kinds of possibilities tested out. If you want an extra layer of security, do some manual testing as well. Get people not involved in the project to run through the system and if anything is spotted, then it can be dealt with promptly. Again, tests must be written for these, and should detail behaviour that the user should experience. As long as the results are recorded, including steps taken, then this is well worth doing.

There is one further major benefit to automated testing. The tester doesn’t go away. If you update the application later down the line and you want to add some more functionality, you can quickly make sure that the changes you have made work, and more importantly, that all the previous tests still work. If you decide on the manual process because of a resourcing issue at the time for instance, remember that you’ll have to run through every single test again whenever you make any changes if you want to guarantee the same level of quality. This is the value in automated testing. Continuous, solid, quantitative tests that never go away.

If making sure your application is robust is this economical, why then is it perceived to be too expensive? I’ll make an analogy to motorcycling. I recently bought some new motorcycle gear that cost me nearly £900. I know I could have bought gear for less than £200, but I also know I’d be compromising my own life if I did so. Testing an application is the same, if a little less terminal. Usually though, it’s the first thing to be thrown out. You need to reduce the budget and the scope needs to stay the same, so the testing budget suffers. The issue is that the expectation is still that the application be fully tested. I think there is a certain belief too that the £200 gear will save your life. It may well do, but not before you’ve had a few skin grafts and organ transplants. Should we be prepared to pay more for this part of the build? Yes. If the budget does need to be reduced, it must reduce the scope, or the quality of the end product will be severely compromised, and for that there can be no guarantees provided.

I know this is something of a long post. It’s important that we understand the unequivocal requirement for proper testing, whether manual or automated, and that our clients are educated to that effect. They pay millions of pounds and dollars for software systems that run their organisation on the basis that the systems are tested and won’t break. Even so, they do sometimes break, if rarely. Even less often do they break badly. That’s testament to the amount of testing that they do. All software has bugs. It’s almost impossible to eliminate them all. Why can’t budget be put into testing these bespoke systems that are being built? Education. That’s all. The budget is there for testing, but if the knowledge and understanding of the whys and wherefores isn’t there, then the budget won’t be allowed to be spent on what appears to be a frivolous activity. This is why.

That elusive integrated campaign

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

They just don’t seem to exist. And there doesn’t seem to be any reason why not. OK, every now and again, an agency produces out of its proverbial hat a campaign it calls integrated that actually does some justice to the term. It just doesn’t happen all that often.

I’m not going to sit around naming names, but I will explain why I think it happens and what can be done to resolve the problem.

You want to reach a wide audience. You know you’re going to create within your “integrated” campaign a full set of elements: Radio, TV, Direct Marketing, Online, Outdoor. Because that’s how to reach your maximum potential audience. Isn’t it? Well yes, and no. Integrated campaigns are all about creating awareness, and then getting people to want to find out more information. In this day and age, that information comes from one place – the Internet.

Making an integrated campaign work properly requires communication. Whether it’s cross-agency, or just multi-discipline within the one agency, communication issues are rife. No one really talks to anyone else until they need the work done. I don’t really understand why, seeing as communication is what we’re all supposed to be good at in this industry.

So how do we make it work? Involve specialists. Involve them early in the project. That means specialists in each field that you want to use in your campaign. Planners and strategists are great, but the bigger picture isn’t the nuts and bolts of how a campaign comes together. You need people who understand what can and can’t be done in each medium to really push boundaries across the board. Oh, and to talk to each other. It’s absolutely imperative! Don’t talk and you end up with 95% of the integrated campaigns that are out there. Nothing really driving anyone anywhere from the TVC, and no one really knowing where to find the additional information. It isn’t just a case of making some banners that look a bit like the TVC. Sorry, it just doesn’t cut it.

So, to my mind, the important thing here is to consult early, with the client and experts in one room, and don’t be afraid to bring in outside expertise. If you feel you could benefit more by partnering with a post-production house for your TV side, a digital production house that can make valuable suggestions, a marketing agency that knows how to get the information you need to the people that need it, do it and bring them in at the beginning of the project. The money you spend here really will save you thousands of pounds later on, and it’ll win awards left right and centre. Don’t overload the meetings with a bunch of people who won’t be able to make the integration work – you need the experts, no more and no less. Involve a strategist to start with, and a planner once you’ve worked out what you’re doing. They’re not needed in between.

I know this is somewhat controversial, especially to some of the larger agencies – it’s a control issue; how do you relinquish control of the overall project and retain quality? That’s really the easy bit, but gets hidden by process. It’s about communication, it’s about pushing boundaries, and it’s about asking questions. Asking questions of oneself and of others. Are we really producing the best possible thing that we can? What could we do this time around that we didn’t do last time? Did we honestly learn from our past mistakes, or did they get consigned to a filing cabinet. And there you have it. We just don’t learn from the past. I’d love this to become a real discussion across the industry, and I think it’s something that might well start to make an impact on the industry as a whole, if we make it happen.

New website launch

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

It’s here. Finally. We’ve brought our full weight to bear and launched our new spangly website. Like this blog, we’ll constantly be updating it with new bits and pieces. New functionality, new features, new content. And we want your input. This might be our showroom, but you tell us what you want in it.

The website follows our principles of launching a basic version, and adding stuff on as it’s needed. I believe a few others have the same thoughts – quick to market, don’t worry if it breaks, but fix it when it does.

Please comment here, email us, twitter us or call us for a chat. We really appreciate the feedback we receive.

A great new viral for a new film: “Shifty”

2011-01-20T14:48:30Z

Just today one of my colleagues received an email from the “Community Drugs Team”. She read it, re-read it. Then said “I’ve only just moved to Shepherds Bush. This isn’t right! I’ve not been involved in any of this.” She was referring to this:

Looking at the links, the code behind them, you’d never think it was a fake. Clicking on them, however, told a different story:

Well. It was definitely an interesting way to get the point across. The mark of a good advertising campaign is one that gets people talking about it, in my mind, and this one uses some of the most basic elements of digital technology to deliver that. A great example of KISS

Everyone in the office is talking about it. Oh, and stitching their mates up… Kudos to the team that did that.