big guns go digital

I've just picked up on this from the Creative Social blog:
Following BBH’s win on Axe, John O’Keefe said ‘“A couple of years ago, we might have been at a disadvantage in a pitch like this, simply for lack of having the digital craft skills in-house. We now have that capability, whereupon this, and any other digital pitch for that matter, comes down to the same question that decides any such process:’who has the best idea’. Well BBH have now delivered their first standalone project for Audi - www.ttremastered.com. I have already garnered some opinion and general consensus is that it is dated (looks like it was built in Flash 5), ponderous, aneamic and hinders your ability to get to the heart of the TT’s motoring experience. The Audi TT is a beautifully crafted car and the website should reflect this.

WOW! This is one of those projects that makes you wish you'd been able to get your hands dirty and go in there and sort it out! (Or had the opportunity to give it a go yourself ;-) )
You can see the kind of effect (not great, but better) they were going for here:
http://microsites.audi.com/audir8/html/index.php

Frustrating to use and ultimately unrewarding... the TT site looks like its come straight from the 1998 Web Designers' Annual... Or a current poor graduate portfolio.
I'm really shocked that BBH could get it so wrong in terms of simple digital design... the font and the text treatment/animations/preloader scream of something produced by someone just getting to know their way around a timeline... and that's just the start of it...(file size anyone?)

Although you can never beat a fantastic idea, truly great digital work comes from the marrying of brilliant ideas and quality of execution/understanding of the technology - a collaborative and open process that is in many ways the antithesis of how more traditional agencies work... and its a dynamic that I'm sure we're all struggling to perfect and refine too. As far as I'm concerned this process is the Holy Grail of brilliant digital advertising.

I'm sure the big guns will cotton on swiftly and we'll not see another site like this from BBH, but it just goes to show that not only is it true that "you can't polish a turd" but the reverse is true also. You can't leave your ideas to meander aimlessly after conception and hope that they make themselves somehow...