Stay Tuned/Corporate Schizophrenia

[22 February 2007:] I am happy to say that almost everything on this page has changed - even the minor things (I no longer recommend the online version of Advertising Age to anyone and won't link it, and Maxi is long since dead). I thus present it as a historical artifact only. Latter-day comments are interspersed as applicable.

As I walk through my list of URLs and notes, looking for recurring themes to scavenge, it looks like the one I tend to rant about most often is the dichotomy between corporate and consumer web sites.

I discovered Advertising Age's online version today (thank Maxi for this). They're not totally in the pay of the corporations - they allow themselves to be critical, especially of what they perceive as bad advertising - but they are advertisers, and as such, they have more, shall we say, acceptance of the medium than I do.

(What do those two paragraphs have to do with each other, you ask? Patience; I'll get there.)

Now, I don't dislike advertising. I love advertising. I wouldn't write all this if I had a zero-tolerance policy. Nonetheless, there were times, reading the Ad Age site, where the reviewer was splitting hairs about "is this a good ad or a bad ad?" and I would mentally be asking myself, "More importantly, did there need to be an ad there at all?"

The web site dichotomy is a case in point. In their web site reviews (which they put in their "Interactive" section; this makes me grind my teeth, as corporations are usually the least-interactive things on the web, wanting only to forcefeed you content) they very matter-of-factly tell you whether a link is a corporate site or a consumer site, and their tone seems to imply that keeping a distinction between the two is a Good Thing.

Myself, I consider it close to fraudulent.

But wait: some of you may have come in late, so let me clear up the distinction.

A corporate site is meant primarily for the consumption of investors, shareholders, and members of the corporation's business community. It isn't meant for the likes of you and I. A corporate site typically lists financial info and crows about how big and omnipotent the corporation is. When you're appealing to that crowd you want to make yourself look as ubiquitous as possible.

On the other hand, being big is perceived by consumers as being threatening, so the commercial site usually attempts to make the company look small and homey and friendly and warm fuzzy - even if the company is something like Procter & Gamble, which owns half of North America.

Corporate sites are usually pretty boring. They're meant to convey hard information, not glitz. The flash and glamour - the Shockwave and the Java and the expensive web graphics consulting firm - those are all reserved for the consumer sites.

A link is worth a few thousand words here, so before I continue ranting, try these sites. You don't have to actually go anywhere beyond the first page on each site - one look will show you what I mean. Go on, try one. I'll wait here.

(N.B. Upon rechecking each of these sites, I noticed that the corporate sites seem to be getting a facelift! Maybe they figured, what the heck, as long as they were already paying the consultants .... Anyway, the difference in content should still be crystal clear.)

Pepsi: consumer vs. corporate
Nissan: consumer vs. corporate
Ralston-Purina: consumer vs. corporate
Dow: consumer vs. corporate

[2007:] Dow divested DowBrands to S.C. Johnson not long after this article was first written, so they no longer have a consumer site. Ralston-Purina's have merged totally; both links above go to the same place. The other two make it fairly easy to get from the consumer to corporate sites; in fact I had to use the Nissan consumer site to find the correct link to the corporate site, as my old one was defunct.

Some consumer sites are more deceptive than others. You can always tell who's trying to be sneaky; just check to see whether the consumer site contains a link to the corporate site anywhere.

The really big companies, such as the aforementioned Procter & Gamble, don't have one consumer site, they have several - often one for each product. When you get that big, you don't want consumers knowing how much you really own, so you segment your sites so that the consumers can't get the big picture. But on their corporate site, they want the businessmen to know how much they do, so they have to list all the products.

Advertising Age doesn't see a problem with concealing that information from the consumer. I do.

In case you think I'm being a lunatic, here's a partial list of recognizable brands owned by P&G:

Clearasil, Noxema, Luvs, Pampers, Duncan Hines, Camay, Ivory, Oil of Olay, Safeguard, Zest, Folgers, Biz, Tide, Cover Girl, Max Factor, Old Spice, Secret, Sure, Cascade, Dawn, Joy, Bounce, Downy, Always, Metamucil, Pepto-Bismol, Head and Shoulders, Pantene, Pert, Prell, Vidal Sassoon, Comet, Mr. Clean, Spic and Span, Hawaiian Punch, Bold, Cheer, Dash, Dreft, Era, Gain, Oxydol, Crest, Fixodent, Gleem, Scope, Banner, Bounty, Charmin, Puffs, Jif, Vicks, Chloraseptic, NyQuil, Sinex, Pringles.

That doesn't cover their pharmaceuticals and their institutional and industrial lines. [2007:] Nor does it cover their acquisitions, since the article was originally written, of all Gillette product lines (which includes Duracell, Braun and Oral-B), most Bristol-Myers Squibb OTC and non-drug lines (including Clairol and Excedrin), and god knows what-all else. Not shabby, huh? Suppose you're boycotting Olean and you decide you don't want to buy any P&G products. Good luck! (And if you're boycotting P&G and Unilever at the same time, you might as well just give up now.)

As linked above, Procter & Gamble's corporate site lives at www.pg.com. Now, for a fun game, try looking for that URL on these consumer sites. It's there - in a couple of places - but never obvious.

hugo.com (Hugo Boss)
pringles.com
pampers.com
crisco.com
oldspice.com
vidalsassoon.com
sunnyd.com
olean.com
covergirl.com

It doesn't have to be this way. Nabisco is one site that's done a decent job of splicing its fiscals right in with its consumer data, and now that their new site is up, I can't even complain that it's too "cookie-centric" (Nabisco used to not like to admit to Knox, Planters, Fleischmann's, etc).

[2007:] I've removed a couple of dead URLs from the original list. Also, two of the links still on here are no longer P&G: Crisco has been divested to Smucker's, and Sunny Delight has been divested to its own company. Olean is still in a state of denial, but most of the others offer some way to get from those sites to the corporate one - primarily because if they have a "news page" it tends to be the one on the corporate site. Anyway, it's worlds better than the situation ten years ago when you could barely get P&G to admit its presence in the copyright notice. Frankly, the P&G corporate site has gotten much friendlier to the non-investor as well. I would like to say this shows an increased awareness of the way the web works (i.e. knowing that people will sniff out your corporate site, so you might as well welcome them). However, that may be overly optimistic of me.

The Nabisco site is the one site on this page I consider to have gotten worse. Nabisco became part of Kraft Foods sometime after 2000, and the non-baked-goods brands are now not really considered part of the Nabisco line anymore, so it's understandable that the site once again is cookie-centric .... Alas, what's less forgivable is that there is no good way of getting to Kraft's corporate site from the Nabisco site, although "Kraft Foods" is very clearly shown in all copyright notices on the site. And the site no longer contains the least bit of corporate content, or, really, much of anything useful at all.

I would rather have a single site with subpages for each product than this deliberate concealment. It would conserve domain names as well, unless you're Pfizer, in which case you use this centralized sort of web structure, but reserve all the domains anyway. (I've already done that rant.)

The ultimate danger of this dichotomy is a site which tries to conceal its commercial nature entirely - a site which is commercial but attempts to look like a public service, giving "advice" which amounts to "buy our products and everything will be fine." I haven't found any really egregious examples of this ... yet ... although once upon a time there was a site called "Women's Link" which came close enough to worry me.

But that has been discussed in a separate rant as well.

and now back to our program

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