Mika Tuupola

Lates paper issue of Best Marketing magazine had a short story of advertising agency Taevas. There was also short interview of myself. It was shortened quite a lot. Since lots of the stuff I wanted to stress out was missing, I decided to republish the original interview here.

How much has Interactive media changed during your career?

In the early days technical limitations affected everything we did. Browsers were more buggy than now. Bandwith was limited. Servers were extremely expensive. There were no such things as MySQL, PHP or Ruby on Rails. JavaScript was totally unusable. Most of work was done in languages such as Perl which were not actually designed for web work.

Those limitations do not exist anymore. You can concentrate more on the creative idea. Gone are the days when you needed funding to buy servers. Anyone with armed with creditcard can start their company using Amazon EC2 which provides endless computing power. New programming frameworks enable you to write working services in weeks instead of months. People have faster and faster internet connections.

Which would be the further trend in Interactive media?

Line between online and real world starts to blur. Everything will be connected.

Reverse economics start to happen. Online business models go offline. Great example of this South Korean cosmetics brand Missha. It started as Internet order only brand in 2000. With every order they asked what would be most convenient delivery location for the client. Later they used this information to open real world outlets. Currently there are around 300 shops in 30 countries.

What kind of role is Interactive media acting in advertising business?

Chris Anderson of Wired fame put it great: “Your brand is what Google says your brand is, not what you say your brand is”. Smart advertising agencies understand we are not in total control of brand anymore. Interesting thing is that now marketers are now chasing consumers. Customers are more active in online world than marketers.

Co-creation will be a big thing. New models designed by kids in Lego Factory website is primary source of ideas for new Lego products. Nike and Etnies have websites where you can create and order shoes with your own design. Even Proctor & Gamble made Tremor, an online community to understand teens. What is even better they were honest about it. They said “We want you to help to develop our products”. Advertisers start to understand participation can be more effective than display advertising. All this participation happens online.

Are there any impossible solutions in Interactive media? Why?

Everything is possible given there is enough time and money. Quality, cheap and fast are three adjectives. You can get only two of those. You can do quality projects fast but it costs more money because people have to work overtime. Cheap and fast projects are always bad quality. What about fast and cheap then? Well, you can do quality projects even for pro bono. Deadline needs to be flexible though. They are done if there happens to be nothing else to do.

What are the main characters of a successful Internet campaign?

Simple to understand. Reflects the brand. Fits the brief.

What is the advantage of an Interactive department in an ad-agency compared to the agency that deals only with Interactive media?

When traditional advertising creates a project they tend to think only about being surprising and innovative. In the end this is what advertising is all about. Competing about attention. Web is fundamentally different. If you throw surprising and innovative navigation in the users face they just get confused. People have five second attention span and just go away.

Web designers in the other end think how to deliver information simply and effectively. When user comes to a website attention is already there. No need to yell “Browse me!”. When you put these two people together you hit a jackpot. Innovative ideas with simple and elegant execution.