Content Marketing Today

Here’s a Great Marketing Site: Duffy & Partners. They Really Get it!

Content + Design are Inextricably Intertwined in this Clean and Colorful Website.

Successful branding depends equally on content and design.

Joe Duffy, head of the firm, kicked off the 2008 Custom Content Conference. He had plenty to say, but he made two related points that stood out.  First, marketers must provide more meaningful content that makes lives better.  Second, design makes the world makes sense.  As an example, he used the iPhone, noting that it’s design and functionality had forced everyone else to get better and that it had “improved your ability to manage your life.”

But, when it comes to a successful blend of design and content he could just as well have been pointing to his own website, Duffy.com.

I found it particularly gratifying to discover a marketing website that truly represents the marketing concepts it delivers on behalf of its clients.

Although his home page does use flash, it takes less than five seconds to load. Once loaded, it offers the visitor 20 stunning snapshots of brand images.  Click on any one of them and you go to a page which verbally and visually tells the story of how Duffy and Partners solved a tough branding related challenge.

Here is the Diet Coke page:

You see a great big logo on the left with just enough explanation to tell the story:

The Diet Coke brand was not being leveraged to its full potential.Our charge was twofold:give Diet Coke a facelift to appeal to a younger consumer and reinforce the loyalty of many drinkers who saw Diet Coke as” my Coke.”  we brought Diet Coke closer to core Coca-Cola heritage and equities, updated the brand’s identity, and develop various packaging solutions addressing marketplace and cultural differences around the world. 

This page, and the entire site, offer intuitive visual navigation. In the case of Diet Coke, you can take a look at five different elements of their rebranding campaign. 

In addition, there are more intuitive navigation elements of that take you back to the original home page visual list or on to the next case study.

Another sensational case study is that of the Bahamas.

Joe and his team completely reinvented how the Bahamas approached the world. This was essential to reverse a tourism slide that had gone on for years.  We will  write about that separately but for now, treat yourself to a visit to that Bahamas page and the rest of Joe’s site.   

This is what a marketing website should look like.

Simple. Beautiful. Informative. Intuitive. Interactive. And fun.

The only problem with Joe’s site–You’re likely to spend too much time on it rather than too little. But, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.