Hill | Holliday Ditches Website, Goes All Blog
Boston agency Hill Holliday has tossed its traditional site and launched a weblog. No, they didn't just add a blog to their already existing site, they ditched it entirely. Well, almost. They've done a wonderful job incorporating some of the usual capabilities and portfolio items into the header of the blog using Flash. The beauty of this approach, what many agencies still need to discover, will catapult Hill Holliday into the "conversation" about advertising. The site will get natural Google love, Technorati love and proliferation throughout the blogoshere's link-fest, something a static agency site can never achieve. And, most importantly, potential clients will get to know how HH thinks rather than how well they write website copy.
Other agencies such as W+K have great weblogs but we're not aware of any other major (yes, smaller ones have) agencies that have gone the all-blog format. We think this is great and we welcome HH to the conversation.
Comments
Great idea, I think this is wher a lot of agency's are going to go. I intrody=uced that element to my agency's site a while back and although it has not grown as fast as I would have liked. It is doing everything I wanted it to. Soon it will not just be a place to post thoughts but I predict it will be a new marketing tool for agencies to get new clients.
Check it out at: www.tmcollective.com/thinking
It's current, informative, fresh and against the grain. So full marks there.
Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder if potential clients would prefer to find out how an agency thinks by seeing rather than reading. At the end of the day it is about blending design, writing, and strategy into a coherent statement, and I am unconvinced that a Flash movie on top of some postings achieves that.
Still, I like it! But perhaps I am just saddened to see another site give into the two and three-column virus.
Allen,
Surely, you don't think the current state of ad agency sites comes anything close to "blending design, writing, and strategy into a coherent statement" do you? Most current agency sites contain meaningless babble about mission, vision, essence, positioning and strategy. They're all the same. They just have a different logo at the top. HH demonstrates it's intelligence buy writing about it. If the site had no Flash section at the top it'd be even better. It's exactly that stuff that needs to be trashed. Work can be featured in a far better context if it's just featured and writing about in the blog than it can be in some canned Case Study section.
There not giving into anything. They are adopting a better way of sharing who they are with prospects. I'd take the 2-3 column virus as you call it any day over the Flash-tastic Flashturbation we see on most agency sites today.