Clever might be cute, but useful is effective.

We’re all familiar with the deserted phone book left outside that no one ever bothered to pick up. There’s the Internet. Does anyone really expect you to lift, let alone use, that huge book? As a paperweight or some added height on your chair, maybe. To look up a phone number, please. There are easier ways.

It’s easy to look at “traditional” media like the yellow pages and see how they’ll need to be very creative to keep up with all things digital.

But what about those of us working in digital industries?

It’s easy for us to forget that our industry is always changing. Sometimes, it seems, at the speed of light. If we’re not careful, it might not be long before we’re hanging out on the curb with the yellow pages.

Researching a direct mail site one day, I came across a banner ad for MRM Worldwide with this tagline:

“In an evolving digital landscape, useful is the new clever.”

This concise statement is itself useful and clever. It sums up what it’s easy to miss with the constant change of digital industries.

Take for instance, again, the example of the yellow pages. Many companies that used to offer yellow page advertising are now offering a modified version of pay per click advertising. However, these pay per click ads are often first routed through a “storefront” or profile page on the company’s site. The ads don’t link directly to the the site for the company in the ad.

First, this isn’t useful for the end consumer. Adding an extra step to get to the site they want to visit doesn’t help them.
Second, this isn’t useful for the advertiser. With added barriers, it’s more likely that their consumers will never make it to the information they want visible – the content on their website.

What’s most useful for these previous yellow page advertisers and their customers? Probably to work with an experienced search engine marketing professional that will send targeted traffic to an actual website. Useful for consumers. Useful for advertisers.

With the saturation of the Internet with blogs, social media, and just plain websites, competition keeps growing.  In turn, so does noise for consumers. It only makes sense, then, that we, as consumers, gravitate toward what’s useful for us.

A clever ad might get our attention, but if it’s not backed up by a useful service or product, we probably won’t do anything more than think about it in passing.

Of course, how to be useful is another story. And it’s not an easy story to tell either. I think this tagline, though, is a great place to start: “…useful is the new clever”.