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I’ve been undertaking a very interesting exercise these past few days. I purchased and downloaded a list of top B2B advertising/creative agencies. All of these firms have been classified into different buckets: “small”, “medium”, “large”, or “interactive.” Some have a dozen employees, some 50 to 100, some have *thousands* of employees (McCann Erickson, others).

More than 70% of the web sites run by these agencies either start with or are completely built in Flash. Can I tell you how much I dislike the use of Flash in this regard? Every bit of the experience I find irritating: waiting for the intro movie to start playing (some didn’t give me the option to skip), turning the volume down on my computer when the techno beat starts, waiting for all those gee-whiz animations to stop positioning text and graphical elements, reading those tiny anti-aliased fonts inside those pastel or electric-neon colored boxes, not having search on the site or via the browser, not being able to assign my own stylesheet so I can bump up the font!

When I try to analyze a customer’s web site that has Flash navigation–guess what, our spider can’t figure out how to follow the links (nor can any spider, including Google’s). Ding ding ding! Yes, you have a very pretty site, but not all your readers are (sighted) people, they’re software agents. Other programs that are trying to make sense of your information structures. Just as choosing a paper stock or typography can make or break a print project, these kinds of considerations can make or break an interactive one.

When did interactive turn into dog and pony show? Who hijacked interactive from the land of tracking sales, gathering leads, managing workflow, removing layers of bureaucracy between you and the customer, allowing your customer to get information and make decisions and comparisons?

As ModemMedia puts it on their manifesto page:

Your customers have been busy using [the Web] to gather information, compare products, share experiences and, of course, to buy.

In 2002, the Internet was a factor in 73 percent of all auto purchases, a third of all personal insurance purchases and was the most-used channel for planning travel. And those numbers are rising.

In fact, in every industry, the percentage of people who use the Internet during the purchase and ownership cycle is climbing. The Internet is becoming the customer’s dominant channel.

So, if your Internet investment isn’t climbing, we can tell you what’s going to happen to your market share: It’s going to be falling.

The question, then, isn’t whether you should invest in interactive marketing. You should.

The question is how.

The holy grail of all good web sites? The Three C’s — Content, Commerce, Community. Sometimes you can get away with not having so much of one (like commerce), but missing two or three of these elements means you really don’t have a web site–you have an electronic brochure. Blah.

Here’s some more from ModemMedia’s manifesto:

Your customers depend on the Internet for communications, information and commerce – for services that get things done. They don’t watch it like TV or read it like a newspaper. They use it.

To win their business, you have to give them more than intrusive advertising messages.

You have to make yourself useful.

So the answer for us and a few other firms, at least, to the question posed at the top of the blog is NO, interactive doesn’t mean break out the circus tent, the dancing dogs, the lion tamer, and the sideshow freaks. We don’t want to dazzle you with our dizzying feats of folderol, and your customers don’t want that either. They want good solid stuff they can use to make decisions. Important decisions–ranging from which neighborhood to move to or what car to buy all the way down to which detergent or hand lotion is the least sensitive on their skin.

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