arturo.gimmicklab.com Corporate Communication, Web Design and Advertising

arturo in Advertising

05-01-08

9 years ago I started working in Advertising in Y&R Barcelona. Our main clients where Actimel and other products from Danone, a part from clients such as Swatch, Ron Pampero, Smirnoff…

Actimel is a highly demanding client who doesn’t always know exactly what he wants. Very stressful timings, too many changes and in consequence a lot of pressure and fights between the teams that work for them.

About 9 months ago we started working for them on the Actimel site. We developed in about 15 days a very neet, usable web site that mached their needs perfectly. Thanks to Cristian in about less that a week the adress whas the first one in google if you typed in Actimel. But 5 months later they wanted to change it completely having a flash application as the main part of the site.

Te process was really interesting in what production means. We shot the whole video in chroma with Marc Corominas and post-produced all of the rest with Sergio Espín, creating some flash interaction elements in the vídeo that gave the Actimel site a pretty interesting look. The rest of the content was inserted in html, but the main was still in the video. Thats definetly not a good decision for this site though google doesn’t read the content in it. And now a days indexation is a very important issue in a site like this one.The clients have realised this, and we are working on the best solution for them.

This happens many times when the client doesn’t want to listen to the oppinion of the professionals that work for them. What I’ve learnt from this process is that its our duty to educate them as good as we can so that our work is not harmed and we deliver the best product possible.

On the other hand, its very important to know when we have to use a specific technology. Use flash when its necesary. Use html in any other case. Think what’s the aim of your web site. If you want to make a fancy and specific action for communication such as Wilkinson’s or Got Milk’s, that canot be done in htm, use flash and proove that you are really good in doing it. But if your aim is to have relevant content that people have to read and find easyly, don’t use Flash.

No the question is, how do we develop a “fancy web site” for a “content site” without it beeing so boring you won’t read it. I think that’s something that has to be found yet. And its our mission to find it.

Here is an interesting Banner campaing we developed for Hydropoinc with Jesus proving that I’m not against Flash, but you have to know when to use it.

• Tags: Actimel, Advertising, Flash