Extendr 2.0 :: Towards the future of marketing

We left David Armano‘s recent presentation, from Conversations About The Future Of Advertising, with lots of positive energy. The very nature of marketing and advertising and the role of ad agencies is so clearly going through massive change.

David made an interesting comment about the mutation of advertising agencies, pointing to The Barbarian Group, EVB, Modernista! and our neighbors at Zeus Jones. First, he called them “agencies.” Yet for as long as we remember, our friends at TBG refused to call themselves an “ad agency” (and for good reason). Second, he noted how many of these agencies had become famous for promoting themselves with stunning, rich Flash experiences—yet now they all leverage very functional, very user-friendly, very much non- “flashturbation” websites.

We’re all trying to be useful.

Here’s a great example: Extendr.com— “Your link to rule them all.”

Concepted and developed by Neil Berget and our very own Joseph Rueter, Extendr solves the dilemma of the modern online person—you’ve got too many URLs and no easy way to share them.

The inspiration came during a job search. If all that you are is spread across the Internet, which link do you lead with? How do you connect them all together to represent a coherent vision?

Neil and Joseph created an elegant, highly customizable solution that’s being adopted by students and professionals with diverse portfolios (multiple Flickr groups, YouTube, Slideshare, LinkedIn) as well as companies like our own.

In our case, Extendr works great for new business or client presentations where we’ve got lots of different links to guide our audience through. Extendr’s “Tour” function (upper right corner of your Extendr page) offers a nifty bit of utility—ushering the viewer sequentially through your links with a small toolbar across the top.

The advantage here is speed. We can alter our Extendr page in seconds.

This is exactly what David was referring to on Monday. Advertising must now be useful, not to its creators, but to its audience. And advertising agencies must shift their focus towards empowering and enabling the lives of our brand’s audiences.

If you’d like to know more about Extendr, please contact Joseph via “josephr [at] helloviking [dot] com.”