Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Leo Burnett in 150 words or less

Wow, it must be August if I'm spending quality time tooling around the Leo Burnett Web site. The reason is that I was fact-checking a bit of Leo trivia for my ongoing series on agencies' Wikipedia entries, and it just so happens that anyone who visits leoburnett.com can, virtually anyway, scribble all over the site with a big black pencil, just like old Leo. I'm definitely a curmudgeon when it comes to agencies and their Web sites, and although this one's navigation did give me a bit of vertigo, I had fun. Now onto that Leo Burnett Wikipedia entry ... is it really possible to distill the agency's entire history down to a mere 142 words (omitting the client list)? Sure, if you do a lousy job of it, which this entry does. (Leo himself gets his own entry, but at about 360 words it doesn't do the guy much justice, particularly since an entire sentence is devoted to pointing out that his daughter was a world-renowned bird watcher.) Anyway, the client list could use some editing as well. We know that the new business gods haven't always shown on the agency over the last few years, but the last marketer listed on the roster of "notable clients" is Walt Disney, which the agency won in 1994, and may no longer have for all I know. None of this would matter much if Wikipedia entries were buried in Google searches, but the entry on Leo himself comes up third, and the description of the agency comes up fourth.

1 comment:

Alan Wolk said...

I did a whole post about agency web sites-- most of them are so poorly done and so hard to navigate it's embarassing.