The Home Page Opportunity (5)

Beer. Despite the acknowledged subtleties of taste obtained by artisanal micro-breweries, it's a fairly generic commodity, consumed for a fairly generic reason. Relatively cheap, it's also a socially acceptable—even "manly"—beverage evoking memories of Youth, casual family gatherings and girth-enhancing binge behavior.

So while beer as a category needs no introduction, branding a beer requires an elaborate arsenal of meta-communication assault weapons, the kind of thing that goes way beyond package design and logo styling. Add to that the challenge of competing for attention online and the decision to create a Web presence for a beer is a dare worthy of Sir Edmund Percival Hillary himself.

Not surprisingly, as of July 2011, the results vary widely. Coors.com, for instance, barely makes it to base camp. "Grab a Piece of the Legend," the home page proclaims, before sending you to its blander than bland Facebook page. Of course, you do have the option of clicking through lifeless promotional stills. The site also includes a brief tribute to the company’s’ founding brew master. Leaving aside the sheer improbability that a beer first made in the 1880s would taste anything like a beer made in 2011, I can't see what this accomplishes.

Can't sell the sizzle if the concept’s a fizzle.
After all, we live in a culture where a grasp of history is as uncommon as a distaste for beer. When the average high school student can no longer retain basic facts about America’s historical record, a marketing message based on "our proud history" seems hopelessly dated.

Yet over at Budweiser.com they've taken dated messaging strategy back to the future with a rambling encyclopedic rollout that, at one point, effectively links founder Adolphus Busch to the birth of freedom. Imagine pitching beer as a catalyst for fundamental American values.

If I had a tail, I'd wag it.

Seriously, I can't imagine what audience this Bud narrative addresses. Certainly no one who just "grabbed some Buds." You have to wonder about a digital marketing strategy that actually interferes with the enjoyment of its product. After a few pints, I doubt anyone's going to wade through the site's claims of environmental responsibility.

A beverage campaign that doesn't grasp at straws.
Corona.com takes a more promising approach, simply by making no extraordinary claims for its product. Acknowledging that the purpose of beer is to be beer, it positions Corona as the bringer of Joy to Your Life. It then gives you the digital tools to create and post a photo montage, celebrating your own good times. By allowing users to associate themselves with fun and fun with Corona, the brand gives consumers a reason to care about it.

Eventually, however, Corona finally gives in to the urge to chatter narcissistically about itself. On Corona's About page, consumers are led on a trip to 1925 when, I have no doubt, no one cared about the History of Beer, either. But at least this site has the sense not to hang its branded voice on the false assumption: "We're good 'cause we're old." Funny how that works. In a country obsessed with youth and youth culture, many brands still expect that sales strategy to fly.

When over thinking bottles up demand.
Not that I expect a campaign based on the message, "We're a totally Modern Beer," would be more effective. To the extent that the Corona site succeeds it's because it grows directly out of the product's main attributes, rather than an appeal to history or any other abstract concept.

More interesting, perhaps, but no more relevant, is the approach taken by Beck's Beer. At the moment, its site showcases Beck’s Green Box project, an ambitious program to promote graphic artists. While this has the advantage of drawing attention to a unique aspect of the company, the site says nothing that might encourage me to watch a Brewers game with a Beck's in my hand, let alone visit an art gallery. It merely celebrates corporate sponsorship as a category.

And what, by the way, is a green box? Even if the answer proved plausible, the fact that I have to deduce it makes me wonder if there isn't something better to do than visit this Web site. Like drinking a Grolsch, for example, whose home page offers a true Web experience in the form of a virtual walking tour of Amsterdam. Then again, most Americans don't know much about Geography either.

Mission: Unwritable

Site maps and content outlines, those venerable staples of Web manufacture have been around just long enough to take on a patina of tradition. For reasons practical, political and ideological, we have sanctified a process in which the bones of the beast are laid down first and then "fleshed out" with content. It's a process desperately overworked Web designers depend on to make every stroke of the tablet stylus count.

I sympathize. I do. But in most ways that matter, this process has become so ossified as to be obsolete.

To understand why, imagine how a benign being might set out to create animal life to inhabit a newly formed blue-green planet. Like a site architect, such a being might also be aware of the need to give each creature a solid structural underpinning.

And yet, on our own planet, bone and flesh evolve and grow together, simultaneously, in an interdependent relationship. Plus, they always come together with an eye to function. That's why equine bone structure differs from human bone structure—and why ancient mythological images depicting horse-bodied warriors, or similar monstrosities, are biologically untenable.

It's also why so much that passes for information architecture is essentially unwritable.

Writable architecture? Exactly. A content outline and the architecture that supports and amplifies it, are only as good as their potential to be realized as viable, living creatures. Creatures, that is, with enough vitality, charm and personality to motivate, entertain, and reward your audience. Yet, at the end of the decade-long codification of Web site code, many aspects of site architecture have become the ritualized components of an agency's "house style."

About...uh, give me a moment.
Consider the ubiquitous About page. If the only function of your About page is to rattle on about "the finest ingredients" or "leading-edge technologies" such a page is unwritable.

Why? Because it can't be filled with meaning; it can only be filled with words, design elements and brand-sanctioned stock art—that depicts a diverse array of grinning crash dummies on the road to Personal Fulfillment.

Sure, you can hire a writer to write such nonsense. You can give the unenviable drone a sheaf of "back up copy," sanctioned by your legal department. But such pages are only empty calories, the first among many destined to make your site hopelessly obese.

You want to rephrase that?
No less unwritable are pages requiring so much legal qualification they can only deliver the verbal equivalent of elevator music. Needless to say, this applies to thousands of pages of pharmaceutical copy currently straining the servers at the W3C, but they're not the only offenders. Such pages stand as a reminder to everyone mapping out a Web site: A content strategy's sole purpose is to convey a single, clear message.

Web pages that cavort awkwardly on a razor's edge of credibility, veracity or manipulation are more than useless. They do as much damage, or more, to your brand as any shocking indiscretion by your CEO—considering they lack the glamour attached to steamy revelations on the evening news.

In such cases, no "word-smithing" exercise can save you. Nor can words conjure life into another iteration of the ritualized "advice and tips" pages that blemish many healthcare-related sites. Believe me when I say no one facing a potentially fatal illness has room in his or her heart to download your Nutrition Tracker, much less pin it to a refrigerator.

Besides, if you think a proactive, disease-Googling user doesn't already get the bit about "eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of rest and taking steps to reduce stress," you need to look up from your iPad more often.

Copying the copy of the copy a copywriter copied before.
Week in and week out, writers are asked to crank out unwritable drivel and make it fun, positive and empowering. How much better if a fraction of that effort went into creating a coherent brand message, and a fresh tone of voice to deliver it. By consigning writers to the drudgery of writing the unwritable, you're wasting one of your most valuable resources: A creative mind capable of bringing your brand—and your business objectives—to life.

Instead, in an obsessive compulsive bout of Marketing Anxiety, many brand managers can't rest until every copy check-box has been checked. And while we still rattle on about "the clutter," it never occurs to us that the most cluttered thing of all is our own bloated, obsolete site map.