website that looks, feels and behaves as if it has come from a parallel universe – as if it is an idea-free zone. Finally, there is three-tiered chess game of interactive design. The best interactive design starts by facilitating intuitive navigation within the site itself. The less a visitor has to think about her next click, and the one after that, the better. The goal is a seamless experience that’s enjoyable – you want a visitor to think well of your brand and return often to the site. That much is a given. But the design ideally should also steer the user to a conversion, and – here’s the really difficult part – act more like a tool than a showpiece. A good website doesn’t draw attention to itself but rather serves as a hub, delivering the user to all of the components of your brand’s digital ecosystem. So the final question should be, “What other digital channels are you using?” The number of uniques and page views a site generates, which are provided by web analytics companies such as comScore or Nielsen Online, are only part of the calculus of a brand’s digital audience. Social channels are of ever-increasing importance, as the balance of web access shifts away from laptops and desktops to mobile devices. A brand with a good digital strategy may use its website as a hub, but it must also deliberately build its presence and following via social channels. A dedicated YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram feeds – all of these mechanisms grow awareness and reach. The sum of a brand’s digital parts, including its website, should be greater than the whole. Intimacy at Scale When E.M. Forster, in his novel Howards End, coined the quotable phrase “only connect”, it was part of a longer sentence: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.” Enter the keymost of all keywords, I believe, for any vision of media in the digital world that really wants to connect intent and content, marketers and consumers, prose and passion: intimacy. It’s also probably the most difficult thing of all to strive for, because, like Ben Richards’ threatened media operative, it seems as if at the end of the day everything might be replaced by a program: programmatic media trading automizes the