When working on Guinness, I remember hearing someone ask the question “Why should a beer company have a website in the first place?” And I remember it blowing my mind.

Like most people, and certainly most clients, I assumed that all brands had to have a website. But ask yourself: why do you go to a brand’s website? Let’s assume: shopping. But if it’s not an e-comm (e.g. a beer or alcohol site), what are you going there for? Information?

If I’m looking for information about a brand, I will likely look for a somewhat less biased, more objective, third-party source: e.g. Wikipedia. So making a website to host your story is a redundant wasted opportunity.

Brands used to create websites because clients didn’t want to be the luddites who didn’t have one. (Same thing for apps, but that’s another story.) But the truth is that branded websites are total missed opportunities.

Several years after the emergence of the branded website, many brands made great use of the new medium of the web to create interactive Microsites that contained Ideas and Experiences, as opposed to Information. This was the hay-day of the digital agency, but those days are over because everyone got the order of operations wrong: they put Information on the website where their traffic went organically and Experiences on the microsite to which they had to drive people with media money.

So what if we leave the job of presenting the Information about a company to Wikipedia? (Or maybe a microsite?) And we use a company’s .com to put forward Ideas and Experiences?