Although Twitter co-founder Biz Stone calls it “non-traditional” in his blog post, the model sounds very similar to Google. Tying ads to only searches will help to avoid upsetting the user base: you won’t see the ads unless you use Twitter to search for something. And at the same time, the advertisers will have at least a vague idea of what you’re interested in.

After having taken such a long time to think of a revenue model that “puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit“, I expected Twitter to come up with something way different than this. I anticipated them not to resort to an advertising model for revenue, and instead go for something that would’ve involved the users in paying for the service.

That kind of system shouldn’t be created by suddenly forcing users to pay for the basic functionality they now get for free, but by carefully investigating what sort of new premium features the most active Twitter users would be willing to pay for, and combining that with a system that would allow users to earn and give credit for the things they do on Twitter. I myself, as an example of a pretty active Twitter user, wouldn’t be excited to pay for the tweets I send, but if I could get new and effective tools for finding more like-minded people to follow me, I could be willing to pay for that. I could also pay for the ability of setting up custom groups for tweeters, and I could see some media companies and journalists, reportedly using Twitter more and more often as a source, be willing to pay for special features tailored to their needs.

With a credit-earning system in place, the average Twitter user who wants to use a premium feature wouldn’t necessarily need to flash out his credit card every time he wants access to premium features. Instead, he could use credits that he’s earned by doing things like favoriting tweets and recommending users to others. Such a system would help drive the further growth of Twitter as well as support the existing ecosystem, where many additional features have already been introduced through 3rd party apps, mashups and community-driven innovation.

Of course, building such a system and then growing its value would take time. It seems evident that some investors and monitors have grown frustrated to wait for Twitter to find a way to start making money for all the publicity and millions of users the service has attracted. It feels like Twitter’s had to press the panic button and come up with a solution that will appease the investors for the time being.

But that seems incredibly short-sighted. More and more clearly, the biggest challenge that people are facing in the digital age is that it will, if it hasn’t already, disrupt the traditional business models of so many industries from advertising to entertainment to communications to all media in general. People are forced to look for entirely new models to nurture both business and usefulness online, and in the long term, only those who embrace this current time of uncertainty as a real opportunity and dream up something bigger than just a slightly modified copy of the old will truly succeed.

In the music business, record labels all complain about how illegal file sharing and new digital distros are killing their business. But this graph shows that while labels are seeing their profits diminish, artists and promoters are experiencing growth in the amount of money they make from live performances. Digital distribution has opened the door for thousands of small, independent artists who in the past didn’t have that much chance to get discovered.

I’m not saying that the future of the music industry is entirely in free file sharing or that it would be easy for Twitter, or any other service, to build a complex system that manages to both credit users for their actions and make real money at the same time. But I’m saying that look left or right, up or down, it’s evident that there is a big change taking place, and that change will require us to completely rethink our approach to a lot of the business we do now. Twitter’s advertising model doesn’t look like rethinking to me. Instead, it looks like reusing and slightly repurposing something that’s already been used. And they’re doing it at a time when the world calls for something much bigger than that.

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

The advertising industry has been rooted in the idea of the campaign – that is what agencies, by and large, do. And campaigns come and go, while a few overarching themes in them are constantly refreshed with new pieces of creative.

Now, even as ad agencies have been migrating into the digital space, most of them have continued to approach what they do through the idea of a campaign. And the idea of a campaign is the idea of ups and downs. For when the campaign is running, there’s media in the market, and the audience grows. But as soon as the media is pulled off, or as soon as all the people have seen the campaign, the audience breaks up and drives off. And then the agency and the client are on to the next campaign again. That’s what the entire advertising business has been about.

But those who see the future of this business in the digital age are starting to see the rise of platforms. Platforms that are built to last. Platforms don’t necessarily go into the market with a bang, with lots of media buy, but they grow over time. Platforms are rooted in utility, and they provide something that the customer, the audience, will feel like using, and using again and again. The best and most pervasive platforms become a part of the audience’s lives. They’re more like services and tools than a 30-second spot or a clever billboard ad.

And the platform, when it encourages the audience to create and distribute their own content, and aggregates it from various sources, then becomes a media engine for the advertiser: the content, the comments, and overall enthusiasm from the audience feeds back into the platform, which can then churn out the content back to the audience again. And that content is much more real, much more authentic than traditional advertising material, because it comes from the audience itself. That content is what is called earned media.

Some examples of great platform ideas are, of course, the Nike+, and, in Europe, the Seppälä Supermodel Search, which I myself was lucky to get to help create back in 2006, and the way that HSL, the Helsinki Region Transit Commission, has sourced both utility and marketing material out of its Journey Planner and Transit Cost Calculator.

The problem with these platforms to many in the advertising and media buy+sell industry is that they don’t match the idea that we’ve had for so long of what is advertising. To envision, design and develop these platforms, it takes a different kind of a team, a different set of talent than what’s been used in traditional advertising. And it takes a different mindset. The way that people consume media, the way that they connect, is now driven much more by technology than it was before. To develop platforms, a new breed of creative technologists need to get a real seat at the creative ideation table. And, perhaps even more importantly, to make sense of all the different connections, links and experiences across different technologies and devices, agencies need Experience Leads to replace the old definition of Creative Directors. It’s an opportunity, rather than a threat, for all of us to grow and explore new things.

Sure, old style campaigns will most likely still be made for a good while, as this giant industry slowly changes, just like VHS tapes were sold for a time after the coming of the DVD, but forward thinking individuals and agencies have started to realize the change that is taking place. And this change is driven by the consumer, the audience, who, ultimately, is our real source of income. If we lose the attention of that group, we lose our business.

Change is often scary, but think about it: wouldn’t it be nice to get away from the ups and downs of the campaign era, and enter a new era of sustainable growth?

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

Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience

Some of my favorite bits of the post are these:
“The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.”

“For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false.”

At the end of the post, Jon states that “instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior.”

Coincidentally, the focus on frameworks vs. control (of the product) was one of the main themes/realizations that came out of the IDEA conference in Toronto earlier this year.

This idea puts pressure on the process we use now to create our work. If  we give up our urge to control, we have to move from a production line/waterfall process type mentality to a more agile, fluid model of thinking and assigning roles.

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

A User Experience Designer can’t play the role of a subject matter expert within a narrow field. Like Andrew says in the beginning of his article, “because of how multifaceted User Experience is, a user experience designer begins to take on a more directorial position within a project/company, which I see as analogous to that of a creative director.”

However, I don’t see that the roles of Creative Director and User Experience Designer need to be mutually exclusive. There is room and need for both. But I’ve experienced that some Creative Directors see User Experience Designers as a threat, which is a fear that I want to help to remove. We work for the same goal – to get the work done well – and as long as we have a clear understanding of our roles and requirements, we can only help each other to get the work done more efficiently and effectively.

Karri Ojanen

Games, and namely video games, are addictive. Just look at the Nintendo Wii craze, or Sony Playstation before that, and all successful video games, consoles and computer games since the 1970′s. People give games lots and lots of their time over long stretches. They keep coming back to them, ignoring several other, more important influences in their lives.

Marketers have known this for long, and you can find mainstream consumer products (and a certain presidential candidate’s campaign ads) placed in video games. Agencies are telling their corporate clients that brands need to do things with games.

But Jonathan thinks that instead of brands doing things with games, games need to do things to brands. We shouldn’t twist games to support our old ideas about brands, and have brands use game tactics. Instead, brand (and business) strategies should get configured like games, says Jonathan. “Marketers mistakenly see games as a lowest-common-denominator channel, instead of realizing that games are not channels at all, but rather places, like social media, only with a purpose,” he continues.  Games are models of places where people live, worlds that have rules, roles, expected behaviors, and even dimensions of time. Perhaps most important, video games are places where people go to do things. Games are built upon creative ideas, but they’re experienced with behavior, says Jonathan.

I can’t think of any close examples of that yet. Can’t say that I’ve seen any brand designed like a game. But I find the idea really thrilling. And I noticed this upcoming webinar, organized by Rosenfeld Media and given by John Ferrara, on extending game design to business applications. It’s not exactly the same as what Jonathan Salem Baskin writes about, but nevertheless I’ll sign up for it. If anybody has examples of brands like games, please comment. I first thought of the old Nokia Game and other ARGs, but those are not quite the thing.

Photo credit: David Farrant (Creative Commons)

Karri Ojanen