Experience Matters

The Un-Dying of the Microsite

Originally published at Ad Age, Digital Next

If there’s one type of headline that gets attention, it’s about claiming the death of something.  Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format that I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing.

The microsite was adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience.  Continuing to add sections to our large company/product websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service simply became too unwieldy.  And specifically for advertisers, well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.

And so the formula had begun.  Launch a campaign, build a microsite, buy online media to drive traffic to it.  Everything was in its place - advertisers now had a presence on the web, clients were happy about it, and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done.  In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol’ time proclaiming the death of the microsite, and with some validity.  Fact is, the internet is littered with thousands of them and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value, or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them.  On top of that, most of the microsites I come across are difficult to use, take way too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.

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