Comments

Unfortunately, it's the marketers (aka: the account gays) who force the senseless creation of generic, dead-end landing pages upon the creatives.

Edward, I've never heard this complaint from a creative. Good perspective. I'm an account gay (I guess), and am SO down with the protesting of landing pages. I think landing pages are a crutch -- a result of poor planning for what should come after the click. And this huge industry has cropped up totally focused on the wrong things-- optimize, test, analyze -- so focused on tweaking the minutia, and not focused on creating great user experiences.

Not to be too contradictory, Anne, but your site can use a bit of sprucing up — it is a bit bland.

Let's pause for a moment discuss the irony of the banner ad above...a landing page handbook? Well placed.

OH yes, absolutely. Apparently the short-attention-span generation is bored with doing the same kind of execution more than once or twice.

And tsk, all that testing, analysis and optimization...how dull actually wanting to know what messages drive the best response for the money spent, or actually creating revenue-producing results. Much better to indulge our "creativity" on doing things we imagine are more fun and engaging for people just like ourselves, whether they actually drive a business result or not. After all, we're here to entertain ourselves and each other, not for a business reason. The world owes us a living.

Hi Stevie the K,

Actually, the whole point of moving beyond landing pages is to increase conversion (the revenue-producing result), and should be all about testing and optimization (to see what drives the best response). Just not of a single page, which reduces all clicks to the same anonymous user, and leaving lots of conversions on the floor.

For anyone here who is missing the point...

Landing pages don't produce results. Even "optimized" they languish (according to MarketingSherpa) around 3% average conversion. That's pathetic. There's no business or creative reason for us to accept pathetic as normal.

Landing pages are the wrong vehicle for conversion. And, they're bad for branding (since most respondents go away unhappy). You can optimize them to high heaven and test them all you want. They still convert in the single digits and alienate most users.

We need to make respondents happy and get reasonable ROI. We need high-percentage pre-conversion segmentation and qualification data to hold our traffic sources accountable. And we need higher conversion rates that come from users having the trust and desire to want to convert. This stuff doesn't come from a landing page.

This is obviously a brilliantly conceived campaign to drive attention to a specific group that is promoting more intelligent consumer/media interaction. Nothing wrong there! It's interesting and brilliant in my honest opinion.
Web 2.0 is revolutionary and this marketing blitz is genius.

Mea Culpa...

I should have read the click through and not just the AdRants summary. I agree that slamming clickers onto a single dead-end page is not only lazy but wasteful in terms of lost insights and opportunity cost.

BTW are you guys related to Steven Tyler? :)

Yikes. I'm still lost here. If you have a click through generated by an enticement that is terrific...no? The landing page should never dead end...that makes sense...
I really want to get it... the swag is nice. I like the t-shirts and the message bag too!
Great Logo!

Arthur,
Thanks for the props on the logo and stuff. Hope you are enjoying ad:tech. No More Landing Pages is urging marketers to look beyond landing pages -- they are bad for users and bad for brands. Marketers can, and should, focus on the experience, audience self-segmentation and qualification. A landing page is not an experience or interaction. If you check out the NoMoreLandingPages site, you can learn more.

Stevie the K, No Steven Tyler in the family tree :(
Thanks for your comments back - glad you read through the comments and see the meaning behind the message.

This thread has proved another thing you account folks do:

Talk in circles and say absolutely nothing.

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:
(Will not display on site. Used for "Send me an email" option below)

URL:
Remember Me? Yes No
Comments: (HTML tags OK for style. URLs will auto-convert to links)

Send me an e-mail if anyone adds comments to this story

If even after clicking Post it seems to take forever for your comment to post, there's no need to click Post again. We're just blaming the problem on a mysterious, impossible-to-find bug we've stopped bothering to attempt to fix.