I find Marc’s text connecting very closely with the message in my post from two years ago, which then turned into a couple of follow-ups. Work in interactive channels demands leadership just as any work needs leadership, and the most accurate, efficient kind of leadership comes from people who understand the importance of the functional side of design, the interactivity, the user experience, and know how to research it, define, design, and present it. It takes a whole team of engineers, writers, designers and others to create digital advertising, products, and services, but user experience and interaction designers are the ones who should be the closest to being the new creative directors.

Karri Ojanen

His tweet made me think of a number of things I think should be common sense, knowledge and understanding in this industry by now. I made a list of some of those. Besides Matt’s tweet, my list is inspired by the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau, and if you end up reading through my list, I encourage you to continue by reading through Bruce’s.

Most of what we think we discover now as “new” was in fact already discovered before
Recently, I watched the documentary “Objectified“, directed by Gary Hustwit who also did “Helvetica“. Listening to people like Bill Moggridge talk in the film, I had several moments where I thought that many of the fundamental insights, thoughts and even methodology that people now feel like they’re discovering as “new” in the context of software, interactive media and interaction design where actually already discovered earlier, but in a different context. What’s hard for people is to take that knowledge and to apply it to a different context. That’s why, even if the things we think we are discovering now aren’t genuinely “new”, there’s tremendous value in rediscovering those things and applying them to the current context.

Clients don’t envision the future, they inform the present
It’s way too easy to blame almost every challenge in this industry on the client. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.”" If we’re the experts in this business, we need to be the ones who envision the future of it.

Interactive media works best when it’s… interactive
TV and video still work, books still work, great stories are definitely still great stories. Banner ads may have a purpose and some of the content on YouTube gets hugely popular. But the one thing about interactive, online media that is different to traditional TV, radio and print is that it’s two-way communication, it allows instant interaction. The best solutions online are those that encourage and use interactivity to the max.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
That’s a quote from Steve Jobs. But I wish that it wouldn’t need to be – I wish that everybody who develops solutions for interactive media would understand that visual design, technical design and user experience design shouldn’t be separated. Form and function aren’t to be divided into separate processes – they are one.

Great design isn’t based on research alone, it’s research + intuition
The great “big ideas” of the digital age won’t come from academic research alone, they’ll come from intuition, from a real “design sense”, from the designers’ and developers’ understanding of today’s world and the people who consume media.

Separate the problems and you’ll mess up the solution
We are all strategic thinkers, developers, designers and writers, on some level. Of course, we all have our titles and own specific areas of expertise, and so it should be, but when we brainstorm, discuss great ideas and seek for solutions, the technologists, the strategists and the experienceists should all be around the same table. And never mind who ends up leading that process, or who the greatest ideas end up coming from – arguing about who should lead will only distract us from getting to our common goal: finding the best answer.

From Bruce Mau: “Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.”

Keep up your connection to the work at ground level
Without a hands on approach to its business on all levels of management, the company will lose its touch with the reality. Those at the top level of management should be as connected to the everyday reality of the business as those on the lowest levels – as much as possible.

If you talk about Twitter to your clients and discuss it with your peers, make sure you have tried it yourself. If you’re asked to develop the design for a new blog, make sure you’ve blogged. I find a surprising amount of people in this industry who haven’t actually used the things they talk about.

Think of not just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn
Learn to think of ‘media’ in new ways. Don’t think of just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn from your audience, if you get them engaged. And then how that media goes back, and gets redeveloped by both you and the audience again. When you’re thinking of designing an effective interactive solution, think of building an engine, not a billboard.

The effort to control will more often lead to loss of control
An effort to control what is being said about you will most often lead to even more things being said about you. Instead of trying to control the conversation and trying to stop it, see what you can make out of it. When there is a problem, the only way to fix it is to fix it. Stopping people from bringing the problem up will only make it worse.

You need vision first before you can develop passion
“Social media”, “user experience design”, “platform solutions” – all of those (and many more) are just buzzwords until you come up with a plan.

Too many companies have not decided whether they want to conserve the past, define the future, or just turn to others for leadership. They lack vision, but they keep asking their workers for passion.

Karri Ojanen

And that idea of what advertising is about also matched the communication technologies that were at hand through the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and on to the 90′s. Print, TV and radio are all one-way communication, mass media that can deliver a message to the masses, but doesn’t expect or allow the masses to easily interact with the advertising there and then, at least not by immediately “talking back” to the message.

Now, as we all know (but often still have difficulty utilizing), interaction with online devices has changed what mass media can do. And the audience has changed, too: we live in a post-industrial economy where people, through decades of exposure to it, have learned a great deal about advertising. People have learned to ignore and avoid a lot of it.

Interactive media should, indeed, be interactive – it should allow people to work with the content they receive. If you give people a service or a tool, a platform for expressing ideas, a way of working with the product or service you are trying to sell, people can get involved in your message, and once that happens, it’s so much easier for them to understand your offering than if you were just telling and showing something, expecting the audience to listen. Once your audience gets involved in what you do, you become part of their story, and they become part of yours.

That’s why services is the new advertising. Instead of just pushing out the message, you now need to build a service or a tool first and give it to people to interact with it in order to get them convinced to buy the bigger product, service or tool from you.  That’s the new way to “sell the dream”. One-way messaging and display advertising will still have its role in creating some awareness, reaching audience in places where it’s not possible to offer complex interaction, but it’s not the way of advertising that creates significant brand loyalty or deepens customer relationships anymore (if it ever really did?).

Many people with any kind of history in the advertising industry of the past will argue that developing services and tools and promoting utility isn’t advertising – it’s product design and service development instead. And they’re right – what we have got used to perceiving as advertising hasn’t got to do with complex interactive platforms. But because the old model of advertising isn’t efficient anymore, and because, in the meanwhile, technology offers us great new opportunities, isn’t it time to change the old models without worrying about breaking the definition of advertising?

Karri Ojanen

I believe that the introduction of every new device and UI just increases the need for scalable solutions, ideas and executions that can be applied across multiple “channels”, devices, and screen sizes.

Over the next few years, we will move from the idea of millions of computers connected by the Internet, to the reality of one huge computer that is the Internet. Every device will be a window into it. Banners and microsites have been an attempt to continue the traditional advertising era idea of standardized spaces into the digital age, but in the new era, the channel-based thinking of the past just won’t be the winning strategy anymore. What matters now is platform ideas, bigger concepts that, on the idea level, are device agnostic, and can then be scaled and executed on different screen sizes etc to convey the same overall idea and functionality across the board.

It won’t be easy, as there will be no ‘one size fits all’ solutions, but hey, when was this business ever easy? And, more importantly, should it be?

Successful agencies will realize that, going forward, this business will be (and it is already) much more about creating utility, producing services and tools than just pushing out effective messaging. And, unlike Josh Bernoff, I don’t think this means that the Internet is getting splintered. I think it means the opposite: we are getting more connected and realizing that the Internet is the highway we all share, we are just looking at it through different windows at different times.

I don’t think that the past 15 years was “the golden age” of the unified Internet, either, and further on in his article Bernoff points it out as well that the new era is not cause for panic. There’s no point in trying to undo the changes.

I think for the past 15 years we’ve been merely learning the basics of what the Internet can bring us, and, for large part, creating interim solutions that have been based on a combination of the past, the “what we know and understand”, and the new. Now, moving forward, we are starting to see the real shift, the shift that will change the advertising industry as we know it, as well as many other industries. To me, that’s not Splinternet – that’s the Digital Age, and for those who are already living it, it comes very natural, despite the challenges we face and the speed at which the changes are happening. So instead of trying to force new standards to replace the old ones, jump in and be flexible, modular, fast, and humble – willing to look at your work with new eyes.

Karri Ojanen

How Does It Work?

That user experience design should be, on some level, the responsibility of the whole team, and not just one department or person, must sound like common sense to most. The statement that user experience design needs to be integrated into everything the team does is quite easily repeatable mantra. We’ll get there, if we just keep educating our team about UXD, right?

There is a great variety of different situations, agencies, teams and individuals. The approach where a highly specialized UX designer works together with “creatives” who lead other aspects undoubtedly does work in some places. But there are other issues that, in the end, may not be solved by that solution.

CD vs. UX Designer

Traditionally at ad agencies, the ideation process is led by the creative director together with the copywriter and the art director. They develop the Big Idea: the basis of the advertising product that is then created. As the center of that process, the creative director commonly uses the most amount of power to shape the idea.

That scenario, in and of itself, may not be in direct conflict with the role of a user experience designer. But if people agree that user experience design is multi-faceted and not just about usability, information architecture or any other one, separable and highly specialized field, and if people also agree that user experience design is not a checkbox, not just one step in the process, then doesn’t it start to sound like the user experience designer also needs to have a more directorial position in the process? And, vice versa, the creative director needs to have a very solid understanding of UXD himself. Andrew Maier wrote a good article about User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director for UX Booth in September, and I recommend it as further reading. What are your thoughts on it?

Traditional Advertising vs. Advertising in the Digital Era

Today’s best ad campaigns are not campaigns at all: they’re highly functional, self-sustaining platforms, as testified by AdWeek in their choice to award Nike Plus as the “digital campaign of the decade”. They’re more like services and tools, real products, than just effective messaging, like the Big Ideas of the past. If the creative director keeps leading the ideation process to create Big Ideas along the same lines as in the past, while a user experience designer brings UXD-thinking to it, how do the real killer concepts, ideas of functionality, not just messaging, that the world needs today, come up? Jim Lansbury has written a great post about this for Adweek: Goodbye, Art & Copy — Hello, Idea Engineers, and R/GA’s CCO Nick Law wrote an excellent description of the situation back in March ’08: The Next Creative Revolution.

Proven Models

The old models of creating advertising are well tested and proven over decades of traditional marketing. There’s no reason why they should be completely disregarded now.

But a more radical, new model of the creation process, to produce the kind of functional concepts and platforms I described above, has already been proven as well. As an example, in the Nordics there are agencies whose steady stream of Lions, Eurobests, Webbys and other awards hasn’t gone unnoticed in North America, either. Many of those agencies and the people they employ didn’t come from a long traditional advertising background, but have built their work on a different model and mindset.

When I worked in the Nordics myself, in most cases we didn’t have people with the creative director title. Instead, we had concept designers: ideation leaders who, together with the team, guided the development towards functional concepts while bringing in a strong sense of user experience design and an understanding of interaction and information architecture. Depending on the project and the idea, there were then also other, even more specialized UXD types who were brought in to help work the initial idea more in detail later in the process.

At best at those agencies, we created concepts quite similar to the thinking behind Nike Plus: platforms for interaction with the customer. Concepts like an ongoing online supermodel search for an international fashion retailer, and a game-like fundraising tool for a charitable organization.

Dare to Think Different

Like I said, this may not be the model that, literally taken, works for everybody. But simply taking the old model of advertising and slapping on a new layer doesn’t work, either. That’s why people on both sides should dare to rethink their models now. The changes we see in the world around us aren’t minor. It’s a major shift. It takes a new mindset to make it work in the best possible way.

Agencies that aren’t yet fully committed to the pieces of UX design they have started to employ should think of their approach and truly define, what is the value of UXD for them? Once that’s been defined, they need to decide how to make things work so that everybody gets that value out of the process. UX designers, we need to think of how we can best give that value to the team. How do we contribute to not just user experience design, but idea generation as a whole? What is our role in advertising? How do we define it? There are many answers, not just one, and I think we should all dare to think of at least some. The first post I wrote sparked some interesting conversation – I would now like to invite you to continue it below.

Karri Ojanen

In advertising, traditionally there’s been a need to get the customer’s attention and quickly sell an idea in a limited space and time, on the TV screen, a billboard, or a magazine. The Web has added a lot more to that. Now advertisers have to deal with instant interaction, pages and pages of content to be organized within a library framework, and software applications that can add functionality to the advertiser’s message.

So advertising agencies have been hiring IA types, user experience designers who can make sense out of the new medium by… drawing wireframes. The UXD people get to act as subject matter experts who answer questions about usability, state their opinion and POV on the ‘experience’ and do occasional testing, maybe extend their work into simple business analysis and creating personas.

An Uneasy Marriage of Old World Creative Thinking and New World Development

In the digital age, many advertising agencies think of their work as a marriage between two different worlds: traditional advertising that focuses on messaging, and software development, which is focused on designing products. Digital is merely a new ‘channel’ for advertising – like television, radio and print before. In most instances, this has been an uneasy marriage. Agencies have kept the old creative director, art director, copywriter triangle that they’ve had since the days of Mad Men, and tried to slap on a new layer of IAs, UXDs, or digital strategists – what ever title they’ve chosen to pick for this group of people supposed to make sense out of digital as new specialists on the team.

But what is the ‘user experience’ in advertising? Websites, even when they are just a couple pages for a simple campaign, need to, of course, be usable in the basic sense in order to successfully deliver the message. But on such level, ensuring usability should be the task of everybody on the team – creative director, designers, writers and developers – and, increasingly, it is. So what are usability experts still needed for at an ad agency?

Big Ideas Turn Flat in Digital

Many creative directors, even those who have done most of their work in digital, are trained to think of a ‘big idea’ as the starting point of the process of creating advertising. In interactive communication, however, the big idea model can lead to a very flat functional concept, no matter how beautifully executed it is in terms of traditional design. In digital media, there is much more than just an image, or animation, and text – there is a whole layer of functionality, which often doesn’t get properly utilized by people who are trained to think of big ideas to send out a message instead of a functional concept to offer a service or a tool that aids the message.

Make the User Experience Designer Your Creative Director

The solution is to make the user experience designer the creative director. Not just any user experience designer type, but the kind that can think in terms of functional concepts, of which creative design is then a part of. When an ad agency looks for a creative director, they should make sure the person has a solid insight and experience of usability, and an understanding of a user experience designer’s field of work. This is not yet the norm.

Many digital ad agencies also from time to time do projects, where there is a need for a usability specialist in the role of a subject matter expert, but they don’t form the bulk of the work, and can usually be handled by a contractor. I’m not saying that there is no need for user experience design or information architecture in digital advertising – there’s just no need for a specialized, subject matter expert -type information architect. Instead, there’s a need for a savvy, functionality-driven creative director – a concept designer – who understands user experience design, or a strong creative director + user experience designer duo working in tandem, truly understanding each others’ roles.

Karri Ojanen

In his article, he talks about how the Swedes don’t actually care all that much about advertising. When they started working with the Internet in the ‘90s, they were just excited by the incredible communication and creative possibilities that the new technology enabled, and only later became to be known as the creators of a really great share of the world’s most innovative advertising. And, Patrick writes, now the Swedes seem to be moving away from advertising into developing their own online products and social tools, and specializing in areas like gaming or corporate dot-com development.

The exact same applies to other Nordic digital agencies: having worked through the developments of the industry in Finland myself, I know that the thinking of the people behind the most innovative agencies there is very close to that of the Swedes. Danish agencies have, as well, contributed their fair share to the pool of Lion-grabbing work from the Nordics.

Part of the success of the Nordics can be easily explained: Denmark, Sweden and Finland all share a culture of elegant design, state support for infrastructure (Finland recently declared access to high-speed broadband Internet a legal right), and a long line of famous architects, product design and engineering. In broadband and mobile penetration, the Nordics have always been ahead of much of the world.

But the second reason to their success has to do with what Patrick Gardner manages to touch only softly in his post: the (mostly) young and wild Nordic kids who are behind the agencies that have since gone to not only steal the attention at Eurobest but to set up offices in the New World as well, didn’t come from a traditional advertising background. When they started creating their digital work, they didn’t think of the traditional model of CD+art director+copywriter, and then add a couple strategists, IAs and developers in the picture. They created their own roles and model of working that is closer to product design and creative software engineering than poster production or scriptwriting. Even when their work turns out to be a YouTube clip similar, in format, to a TV commercial, their non-traditional roots show in both the creative idea and the execution. What they may have lacked in sophistication in message-making, research and measurement, they have always had in sheer creative energy and a realistic grasp of the new digital culture and mindset.

Patrick Gardner’s post falls a bit short and the conclusions in the end seem hastily drawn. Several people note that in the comments. But I hope that his text doesn’t go unnoticed in North America. Because even if the Nordic creators can’t see into the future any better than anyone else, at least they have realized one thing from the start: the future is not what it used to be. It’s something different. We can’t create something new by just taking the old and adding a new layer to it. If the media we use has changed, then why not the org chart and the roles as well? And with the ongoing development of the digital tools and culture around us, we will all need to pay more and more attention to long term product development than short term messaging.

Karri Ojanen

This is something that we often struggle with in our work in digital advertising. Much as a result of the waterfall model and the general legacy of the industrial era production line mentality, we tend to separate the problems in creative design, user experience, strategy, and technology. And we separate the people who look for solutions to those problems. The technology team gets to step in only when the strategist and the creative director have finished their work. They come together somewhere in the middle to discuss solutions in check-in meetings, over a couple wireframes and comps, before heading back to their own chambers.

The problems that arise from this separation are most pressing in, to go back to Alvar Aalto with a modern twist, information architecture and user experience design. The danger is that we separate ourselves from our audience. Because when the audience looks at the campaign we’ve built, the process we’ve engineered on a website or in a mobile app, or the social networking components we’ve brought into a digital billboard ad, the audience doesn’t consume the pieces of the design and the functionality separately. They get the total experience – the sum of all the choices we’ve made in strategy, in tactics, in visual design, copy and code.

Realizing this has been somewhat easier in actual software development than in the world of advertising. Where in the past, advertisers were limited to a one-way message that could fit on a billboard, in a TV commercial or a print brochure, the Web has brought a library framework combined with a software application platform to the people who used to focus just on getting the customer’s attention and selling an idea in the limited space and time without instant interaction with the target audience. Like Erica DeJoannis points out in this excellent article about UXD in the world of marketing, marketers and UX designers approach online marketing in two fundamentally different ways. Marketers are focused on selling and messaging, while UX designers are focused on designing products.

To help UX designers and marketers work together more efficiently as well as to help high level strategy connect with the low level tactics more effectively, we need to get out of our silos. When the architect is sketching the blueprints, the builder aka the technical developer needs to be as close as the visual designer and the strategist. The solution to a strategic or architectural problem may well come from the mouth of a programmer, and we all contribute to the same product together.

Karri Ojanen

Sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? But Engeström claims that the world’s biggest cell phone maker Nokia may have lost the crucial connection between what happens in the field and what happens in the managers’ world. Where at Google, says Engeström, even the most top level managers are still contributing to the code themselves and monitoring the development of their products first hand, at Nokia the bosses are lost in their own chambers. At Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have even given up their personal assistants because they didn’t want to get estranged from their workers and the people who use their products.

A recent post in the Harvard Business Blog talks about the change we’re witnessing in organizations around us due to the development of networking tools such as Twitter. The writer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, recalls how America in the 20th century was called a “society of organizations”. Formal hierarchies with clear reporting relationships gave people their position and their power.

In the 21st century, however, the world is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within companies and other organizations. People with power and influence derive that power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done. There’s a study that shows some of the fastest growing companies realize that, at least on the level of how they use social media in their marketing mix.

But in terms of the organizational structure, I bet that Nokia isn’t alone with its problem. In fact, I think that most companies around the world that were born in the industrial era are struggling to change to become more like Google, a company mostly developed in the networking era of the 21st century, where a less hierarchical model of connecting and sharing ideas comes more natural.

In the advertising world, there is a debate about traditional vs. digital, and how to combine the things we have learned from both thus far to drive the future. The world we work in, in (digital) advertising, is going through constant change at a seemingly increasing speed with every new tool, piece of code, site and platform that becomes somehow meaningful. Maintaining a good connection to what happens on the ground is a challenge, but it’s easier for those who actively network and participate in the discussion, and who are willing to let go of the old hierarchical model of management. It doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be a coder, a director, a designer and a hyperactive, visionary Twitter user all at the same time, but it helps to have done a bit of it all to have experienced it first hand, and maintain that connection to the ground through all the cycles of change.

Karri Ojanen

The first one by Ana Andjelic offers some good views and a provocative starting point to the discussion. But  it also does more than its fair share of stereotyping things and jumps into rather quick conclusions. The second post, Jacques-Herve Roubert’s response to Ana, manages to offer a more considerate, balanced view on things, and rightfully notes that “the balance may not be there today, tomorrow or next month.”

But instead of trying to find the answers to these questions in what clients and agencies do and don’t do in their processes (while those are all important), why don’t we concentrate more on finding the answers in what consumers are doing? Ultimately, they are our client, the ones who need to buy into our advertising more than the clients and brands we design the advertising for. In the ways they consume media, connect online, play games, interact, buy and use services and products, more and more people are quickly getting way ahead of what agencies and their clients are doing to catch their attention. They have already made their choice on digital, and our technological development has given them the tools.

I don’t think the original question, whether digital agencies are ready to lead, has a simple answer, yes or no. And before getting to that question, I would also like to, perhaps more importantly, ask whether clients are willing to let digital lead (or just willing to think of all advertising channels, digital and analog, together, without dividing them in the middle).

Karri Ojanen