Session Title
Let’s Redesign Advertising: The Role of UX at Ad Agencies
Presenter
Ross Popoff-Walker
Session Type: Discussion
We experience the digital world as timely, relevant, useful, and personable. I can find out exactly what my friends are doing as they do it via Twitter or Facebook. Or grab directions to a restaurant and concert tickets on the go through my mobile phone. This is how technology (when it works), has fundamentally altered the way we behave, work, and live.
But when it comes to advertising the focus is currently on disrupting culture, not augmenting it, and advertisers have focused on crafting messaging rather meaning. For this industry to thrive as technology continues to shift behavior, and during tough economic times, the model of experience design must move front and center.
The vein through which we can transform advertising from a function of marketing teams, to a core piece of the enterprise, lies within human-centric design. It starts by approaching brands, not with an eye for communications, but from the view of an experience designer. After all, consumers can interact with software, or use a physical product. But people have never been able to use a thirty-second spot, or gain value from a billboard ad. And that’s the fundamental reason why traditional forms of advertising are in decline: people want meaning, not more messaging.
For decades we’ve been saturated with marketing messages from all angles and channels. Messaging that is surface-y rather than cerebral, comical rather than emotional, and usually based on popular cultural symbols, rather than deeper human truths. What we really long for as individuals are meaningful connections — emotional, personal, and significant moments.
That’s in essence what this cultural shift is all about — not technology, but about humanity. A revolution against the pedantic brand and enterprise-wide efforts we’ve been fed for so long. We don’t want to be talked down to anymore. We want to communicate with other people. Meaning trumps messaging.
After all, some of today’s strongest brands, from Whole Foods to Google, have made their way into culture without a dollar spend on ads. They’ve built permanence by focusing on customer experience. They’ve designed for people, and that is the treasure chest for any agency moving forward. And this is the mantra: redesign the experience.
Biography
Ross Popoff-Walker is design strategist and blogger who passionately believes that user-centric design can change the world. Formerly Head of UX at the infamous ad agency Modernista!, Ross now works at R/GA in New York. Previously he worked at Forrester Research, helping clients with youth marketing and web strategy, and at Harmonix on the video-game franchise Guitar Hero. Ross holds a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University. He blogs semi-regularly at http://www.annoyingdesign.org/blog
2 Comments
Looking forward to this one. Ad agencies are pushing really hard to get into interactive, and hiring like crazy. But UX designers have found it really hard to get into the Art Director/ copywriter driven system.
This is really interesting. I was approached by TBWA but was concerned about IxD’s role in exactly that Art Director/Copy Writer dominated system you mention. Would I be relegated to a “usability expert” rather than as part of the creative process?
What would really add value to this discussion is to hear the perspectives of those art directors and copy writers on this subject.