2010 Resolutions for Advertising Peeps

Since we've been talking about 2010 Resolutions, one wonders what kind of resolutions would fit best for advertising peeps. From the Ads of the World site, member Ivan gives us:

21 suggestions for a successful advertising career

ivan | Mon, 2009-12-21 22:28

1. Find the right place to gain as much experience as possible in the shortest amount of time. This may mean a hot-shop independent agency, a large multinational or hopping jobs every 2 years depending on the available options you may have.
2. Work somewhere that's worthy of your time and talent. Don't settle for any job.
3. Put more effort into your job than expected and do it cheerfully.
4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic adman in the agency.
5. Be forgiving of yourself and others. We're humans and we make mistakes even when we only have good intentions. Don't allow such mistakes make you lose sight of long term goals.
6. Be generous with your contributions to the team's work. Do not try to take credit for every idea you came up with.
7. Persistence, persistence, persistence. Great work never just falls into your lap. You need to work for it, refine it, perfect it.
8. If you clearly see you're going into the wrong direction with your strategy do not be afraid to stop and rethink everything even if it means you have to start everything from scratch.
9. Discipline yourself to save money on even a modest salary. This will give you the freedom to change jobs when things go bad and will allow you to take meaningful holidays that refresh your mind and body.
10. Commit yourself to constant improvement. Technology and the industry is developing really fast. You have to keep up.
11. Commit yourself to quality. Do not ever settle for something less than your outmost best. Perfect your work till time allows.
12. Your professional happiness isn't based on the number of awards or how much you make, but on the relationships you have with your colleagues and clients. Treat them with respect.
13. Be loyal to your clients and your agency. It will be appreciated even by the competition.
14. Be honest with your work. Never lie or mislead the consumer. If you do you will feel miserable about your profession.
15. Be a self-starter. If you identify an idea take charge and go for it.
16. Do not blame others. If you're unhappy about something take the initiative to change instead of whining about it.
17. Be decisive even if it means you'll sometimes be wrong. Timing is everything in advertising.
18. Be bold and courageous with your work. When you look back on your professional life, you will regret the the things you didn't do more than the one you did.
19. Do not overestimate the value of formal education. Most successful adman never had formal advertising eduction. Real work experience is more valuable than any education.
20. Eat healthy, do sports. Your mind and body are your only tools available to you. Do not abuse substances. Save them for those critical special times when you really need a boost.
21. Don't take all advice for granted. Pick what's useful for you. Make up your own rules and change them at your will.

The Challenge: Building the Future Agency

Here's an article from iMedia that challenges the way traditional agencies are structured and how they work, and describes how the "digital agency of the future" should be. Read on:

The skills digital agencies will need to lead

By John Lane

November 23, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The digital age is typified by the advent of two-way communication channels and greater control over the timing of media
• The digital agency is built for rapid concepts, creation, and implementation
• When thinking about the pace of media's growth and change, the ability to deliver today while experimenting for the future becomes an essential attribute

Next in Media Planning & Buying

Here are the facts:

• Overall advertising budgets are down.
  
• Marketers are shifting much of the remaining budget to digital media.
  
• Money that used to be set aside for things like sales enablement, website development, and so forth are now falling, more correctly, into the category of marketing. Specifically, content marketing. And that content is overwhelmingly digital.

Whether or not larger, traditional agencies will be able to adapt to the speed and new media in today's digital world -- via retooling or buying new talent -- is a subject of much recent debate. But this isn't the focus of this article, because what's more important are the attributes needed for any agency to succeed in this digital marketing world, regardless of size, location, or heritage.

Successful digital agencies are proficient in these four basic attributes:

• Ecosystem structure
  
• Knowledge/Tech Ability/Experimentation
  
• Pricing/Billing structure
  
• Speed of response

Ecosystem structure
In the traditional marketer/ agency relationship, there are many rigid roles, boundaries, and rules. But none are bigger than who owns and pushes the marketing plan. The thought process of old was that the ad agency had more expertise to own the brand than the company. And that model worked pretty well -- when media were limited, communication was one-way, and media-buy lead times were long and hard to change.

But the digital age is typified by two game-changing shifts:

• the advent of myriad new media (the web, mobile, desktop, social media, etc.) that are two-way communication channels.
  
• much greater control over timing of media buys and posting (think Google AdWords over upfronts).

In light of those shifts, far too much control would be given up by the marketer by entering into a traditional marketer/agency relationship. So, as Marty Neumeier writes in "The Brand Gap," "It takes a village to build a brand." Though, in this case, that village is now an ever-evolving roster of in-house experts, execs, and marketing folks who lean on out-of-house experts -- such as strategy consultants, design firms, and research companies -- working in concert to market a brand; in other words, a marketing ecosystem.

Like many digital agencies, my agency started as a specialty consultancy, which means we were working as an extension of internal marketing teams -- not as outside agency soothsayers -- before the shift went mainstream. It also meant we developed working relationships rather than rigidly-bound responsibilities.

In today's world, that teamwork goes much farther, much faster than a single point of control. Marketer and agency are more often able to be sure they have the same goals in mind, because they were created together, without the need for a formal pitch.

Knowledge/Tech ability
Quoting Allison Mooney, "Advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world -- one where code is on par with content. The 21st-century ad isn't something to be looked at; it's something to be used." This is a huge paradigm shift, one that requires both new thinking and leadership, as well as requiring either large, traditional agencies to tear down and rebuild their established skills and seniority, or for marketers to engage new agencies.

Plenty of digital agencies say this: We were born digital. But that doesn't mean they're all Gen Y geeks raised with computers, video games, and texting (I myself fit squarely in Gen X). It implies a mindset, an approach, an understanding of how to creatively solve both technical and communication problems. The keyword is experimentation.

Digital agencies understand "the next big technology" may only be around for a year or two, and it may be something we can't even envision today. (For instance, this IBM study about the future of advertising done in 2007 doesn't even mention the term "social media" in the executive summary. And we all know it's hard to go through a day without hearing it multiple times only two years later.) But digital agencies are built to handle that reality.

Since we weren't making money off media buys to begin with, and we were trying to make our way into the conversation in any way we could, we helped create the new, better channels in which to engage consumers by restless experimentation. Therefore we have a good feel for why trends become popular, how long the trend will last, and how to be far enough ahead of the technology curve to find success for clients in the space.

The ability to deliver today while experimenting for the future is a good attribute to have when you think about the pace of growth and change in digital marketing.

Pricing/Billing
Plain and simple: Procurement via RFP and retainers isn't the way to client/ agency innovation. That system puts too much pressure on generating "soundbite ideas" and estimated tactics, and not enough focus on content strategy, execution, and rapid adjustment. That system also happens to be the one that most large traditional agencies have been working in (and perpetuating) for decades.

By soundbite ideas, I mean that the traditional pitch has been flipped on its head. Instead of building creative communications on consistent, solid strategy, campaigns are sold by spewing out a tagline and then talking about why it will work. I'd compare the agency review process to the infamous Pepsi Challenge. Sure, a sticky-sweet one-liner will intrigue at first. But you have to think about the taste when you reach the bottom of the can, and how you'll feel after the sugar high wears off.

The digital agency, on the other hand, is called upon and billed by the project, which accomplishes two things in regard to cost:

• There is no retainer paid during the time when no action is required. The marketer pays for a very specified time and deliverable.
  
• It's in the agency's best interest to deliver ahead of schedule. Call it being hungry -- if the agency wants to maximize its own profit and be called upon again, it will exceed both timeline and expectations.

That's not to say there shouldn't be some long-term relationships between marketers and agencies. It's just to say that paying for focused time makes more sense than having people sit around coming up with random ideas to throw at the wall, or being paid to wait for a call.

Speed of response
The three previous attributes all feed into this one: The digital agency is built for rapid concepts, creation, and implementation. As for many digital agencies, this ability was first developed as necessity and -- in this ever-evolving marketing climate -- quickly became an asset.

When the client is a simple phone call from not only the account executive, but also the designer and strategist; when content producers are unencumbered by a rigid creative process or being tied to the media buy as a profit center; when there is an established teamwork vibe with a culture of experimentation -- cultivating creative technologists -- you'll be able to think of your digital agency as an extension of your in-house marketing team. And you'll have found your agency for future success.

John Lane is director of creative Services for Centerline Digital.

Part 1: 5 Reasons why Clients Are So Dysfunctional (From Mashable)

This is a very insightful article worth sharing. Pardon to my readers who are doing their best to help with the relief efforts related to typhoon Ondoy. This is not meant to divert focus on the more important things we are facing in the Philippines.

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5 reasons why clients are so dysfunctional

By Sean X Cummings

September 29, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The agency side rewards talent, the client side rewards safety
• Client-side entrenched mediocrity feeds on itself
• The way most people rise up on the client side is by being adverse to risk

Next in Media Planning & Buying

I have been a vocal critic of the way most agencies are structured. However, many of the structural problems agencies face are a direct result of clients. Agencies have struggled for years to change the agency/client dynamic. They have actively experimented with ways to bring the client what they need, while still producing work that serves a higher purpose.

Chiat/Day and Crispin Porter + Bogusky have been changing the agency landscape structure for years by innovating, experimenting, tinkering, and attempting to produce the best work in a flawed environment. Unfortunately, most agencies are not that bold, and many of those ideas and structural changes have failed. This failure isn't because they weren't innovative, but like the nimbleness of an oil tanker, the clients' inability to change -- or the glacial pace at which they do change -- has forced many agencies to survive in a structure that produces neither the best work nor the most profit.

Such is the issue with service-based industries; they are only as good as who they service. In the end, it is the clients' fault. Here's why. There is a fundamental, structural, endemic issue that clients have that creates a system that prohibits change, how employees are rewarded, and how they are valued.

It is a system that serves to entrench mediocrity.

What most ad agencies do not realize -- because they routinely promote talent over personality and politics -- is that the way most people rise up on the client side is by being adverse to risk. Now, some clients reading this will protest, but I have watched and personally experienced this fact. The client is the equivalent of a scared 10-year-old boy who is worried that no one likes him. Don't dare make fun of that child, don't pick on that child, and whatever you do, do not question that child. Debate must happen in a "child safe" environment organized by the company.

For the client, from a myopic perspective, this keeps the company safe, and in a world of investors and public companies, safety and predictability rule over nimbleness and experimentation. However, there has been a profound societal shift over the last 10 years. The financial markets didn't understand that shift and it nearly destroyed them, and the old rules of organizational structure -- valid for decades -- have broken down.

I would posit -- and a number of economists would support it -- that the internet was one of the key fundamental shifts that changed the corporate model. True globalization was enabled by technology, accelerated by it, and created the system whereby those old structural models could be put to their fullest test. The result? It shattered them.

Look at the financial industry. The strongest people still standing are the technologists, the algorithm makers, the electronic automated trade creators, with multimillion dollar salaries. The game now is technology.

The company and client structure, which served the previous model so well for close to a century, no longer applies. But like that oil tanker, how do you turn it around? Very, very slowly. In fact, most companies would benefit from a whole-scale dismantling and reassembling.

I was amazingly dismayed that we did not allow General Motors to perish under its own weight. It is a model that cannot survive in the new structure. I would have been giddy to see GM implode completely. The amount of innovation that its collapse would have spawned would have ushered in a new era of transportation. But alas, we did not have the fortitude to do it.

In the end, there are five fundamental employee archetypes, and the interplay among them dictates the structure and function of a company -- and the way that agencies are forced to interact with clients. Org charts just provide a framework for structure, but it's the way that any given corporate culture responds to the various archetypes that dictates how a company really works. All five archetypes are needed for a company to be dynamic and grow, but unfortunately, two of these major archetypes are eviscerated by most corporate structures on the client side -- to their detriment.

• The Leader
• The Acquiescer
• The Follower
• The Saboteur
• The Control Problem

Watch out for the next installment of this interesting article...

Part 2: 5 Client Archetypes (from iMedia)

Here's the 2nd installment from the previous article. Read on.

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5 reasons why clients are so dysfunctional (part 2)

By Sean X Cummings

September 25, 2009

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The Leader is the person whom employees follow. This is not "the boss" (although this often can be the case), but rather it's the person whom individuals rally behind. It's the person who holds the compass for the individual, who gives that employee something to believe in.

Unfortunately, many people are leaderless. In the lack of such leadership, a large number of employees view their "leader" in an entirely different light: their paycheck. In larger client structures, that attitude is often tolerated. Those employees become The Acquiescers. The acquiescer will just go along with whatever someone wants because their heart is not in it. They are leaderless, because they don't really care who their leader is. Their job is their job, and not much more. They are the shy kid who often lights up when you invite them out to lunch. They are just happy to be included in the group. They don't care where you are going to eat. They don't really care about the project they are working on, either. They are just happy to have a project. It doesn't matter if they don't believe in it, they'll just do it. It's either all about the money, or about being included. You know them in your company.

But remember, your company needs them. Like worker bees, you get to point them in a direction and tell them "go," and then tell them "go" again, and again, and again. The problem is that you have to know where to point them and constantly monitor and correct them. They are a time-suck and do not produce great work, but they eventually get stuff done.

On the agency side, fewer people willingly work the crazy hours, cope with the insane work pressure, or put up with the abuse they get constantly without believing in someone they are following. Those who do survive the furnace of agency work are usually The Followers. The follower is actively engaged in the leader's direction, helps support their goals, helps reign in other employees, and moves the company forward. This is one of the reasons why agencies churn through new people who have this "idea" of what it's like to work in advertising: glamourous and fun. They quickly become disillusioned and drop out of the system. But the follower sticks with it. In this way, the agency system is vastly superior to that of the client. Agencies keep the top talent, and the detritus gets discarded. But it also means that there is a high turnover required to keep the ship moving. The disillusioned acquiescers need to constantly be replaced. Thank god for interns.

The client has an entirely different issue. On the client side, many of the systems are designed to support the employee, keep the employee, understand their concerns, help them grow. That's all nice and good, but when the employee views their leader as just the source of a paycheck, all the company is doing is keeping dead weight, and many companies over the years have been so stripped of actual talent that they are left with employees who are still there simply because they can't get a job at another company. On the client side, the follower is a more dangerous type, the "yes-man." The danger with "yes-man" followers is that they will often follow blindly.

The first three archetypes, Leader, Acquiescer, and Follower are easy to deal with. They are predictable, and clients love predictable. The client tends to tolerate the acquiescer, and promote the "yes-man" followers, while not fully understanding the interpersonal dynamics of their true leaders. What happens in that system is that the company becomes entrenched in "group-think" behavior. The reason for this is the evisceration of the other two archetypes.

The Saboteur attempts to co-opt the leader's position and take their followers in a new direction -- but change is often seen as a violent process within companies. If the saboteur is successful, he/she become the leader, but it is often this type of conflict that pushes companies to adapt to a new paradigm. The leader's ego is threatened, and the ego is a very powerful force that will do anything to ensure its own survival. Hence, saboteurs are usually the most vilified and celebrated people in the business world -- who often rescue companies from the brink. But if understood correctly, your saboteurs are also those who provide your safety net. They prevent waste and inefficiency from driving you down the wrong path for too long. Unfortunately, the saboteur is seen as a disruptive influence and dangerous in the workplace.

And then there is The Control Problem. The control problem is one of your most valuable assets, but clients rarely understand how to utilize them correctly. The agency world is filled with control problems -- those individuals who are not afraid to speak their mind. In truth, what they are actually doing -- and often don't realize it -- is they are speaking the thing that is on the top of everyone else's mind, but that others do not have the courage to voice. Most clients do not understand this, and they view their control problems as malcontents or rogue agents. But they are the people who point out the elephant in the room that everyone can see. They look at it, look at the group, look at the elephant again, and are confused as to why no one is saying anything.

The control problem is your ideation source. Sometimes their ideation makes them believe that all the ideas are theirs, and it feeds their ego. But if you can work with the control problems, and find a home for them, they become your barometer for good work, good business, and good deals. The control problems are those who envisioned the internet and left corporate America for start-ups because the system wasn't structured to handle them.

The control problem rarely gets promoted at the client side for one simple reason: negativity during reviews. And hence, this is why the promotion process on the client side is at the core of the issue.

Let me explain why.

Your control problem has often had several successful projects, and a few problematic ones, as well. Or they have issues that "upset" some people. When managers and directors get together during reviews, and they put forward a promotion for an employee, most employees believe they get the promotion for all the great work they did. What actually transpires is that unless someone in the meeting has an objection, the promotion goes through. Some of your best and brightest on the client side get sidelined due to a manager's personal ego. So what happens is that the "yes-man" followers -- who are not as bright or as skilled -- rise up through the corporate ranks. This is client politics at its finest. It is not about the positive aspects of someone's work, just the lack of anything negative. Thus, client-side entrenched mediocrity feeds on itself.

On the agency side, it is often the employee who develops the best ideas and creates the most value, regardless of how much of a colossal pain in the ass they are to deal with. And those of us who have worked on both the client and agency side understand the scope of that difference.

So that's the structural problem of why your client is broken and not able to adapt to the new mode of business that agencies are trying to push forward. The agency side rewards talent, the client-side rewards safety. So for the clients out there who believe they would love to work on the agency side, just ask yourselves: "When was the last time I was willing to risk losing my job to fix something that was wrong?"

That's OK, the world needs "yes-men" too. But try and give your agencies a break. The reason they push back is not because they don't respect you, but because the agency world is filled with control problems who are honestly only trying to create the best work they can for you.

Sean X Cummings runs his own marketing consultancy, sxc marketing.

Bad Client Briefs = Bad Marketing or Low ROI

I got this from Jake who got this from Rock. It's so telling about the state of agency-client relationships nowadays. It's like a SONA for marketing. Read on.

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Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs
Execs at Top Shops Say Clients Are Unclear About What's Expected, Leading to Lots of Wasted Time

Posted by Rupal Parekh on 08.17.09 @ 08:00 AM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Marketers trying to wring the most out of their ad budgets will find massive waste in a place they might not think to look: their own request-for-proposal and briefing process to agencies.

Casey Jones
That's the sobering takeaway from a survey last month of more than 250 senior executives at a variety of top marketing agencies. Agency executives reported that at least 30% of their staffs' time is ineffective or wasted due to poor communication from their clients. For large marketers, that could mean millions of dollars in needless agency fees and misguided ad campaigns.

It's an insight also gleaned from the experience of the person who commissioned survey: Casey Jones, former VP-global marketing at Dell, who now runs Jones & Bonevac, a marketing consultancy that counts among its clients Microsoft and Walmart. Mr. Jones left Dell in late 2008 after an eventful two-year tenure in which he drove the creation of Enfatico, an agency intended to be a stand-alone Dell shop that became the target of widespread industry criticism. Enfatico was folded into WPP's Y&R Brands division this year.

Mr. Jones said his firm's first study was spurred by observations from his time at the computer maker. "A lack of commitment to tight and coherent input to the agency was a major contributing factor to the struggles between Dell and WPP," he said, adding that that some of his marketing peers at Dell assumed having a single agency partner made it less important to provide formal instruction to the agency.

The study was fielded by Emeryville, Calif.-based Greenberg Brand Strategy, and included feedback from shop such as JWT, Razorfish, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Martin Agency, MediaVest, BBDO, Publicis, Deutsch, Carat, Interbrand and Wunderman. More than half (54%) of respondents said fewer than 40% of client briefs give them clear indication of what's expected from their agencies. Of that number, 30% said only 1% to 10% of briefs provide clear performance expectations.

Where agencies ranked the quality of client input highest was in identifying budget parameters and communicating the desired image and brand positioning. Client briefs were ranked poorest when it came to providing competitive information and describing how a client's offering ranked in the competitive landscape.

Another problem agency execs cited is that the briefs are constantly changing: 75% of respondents reported that client briefs go through an average of up to five significant revisions after a project has begun. Eight percent of respondents said they've seen briefs go through a whopping 45 or more iterations.

The changes might have something to do with agencies' belief that there are too many cooks stirring the marketing pot. They said ideally fewer than three client decision makers should provide an agency with direction during the course of a project, compared with a current average of more than five.

Without clear direction, many agencies say they wind up devising much of their clients' briefs themselves. Wrote one agency exec who responded to the survey: "The client rarely has a fleshed-out brief when we first begin to discuss a project. At [name withheld] the routine has been for the agency to actually write the client input or project input brief for them. I am not kidding!"

According to Mr. Jones, agencies' view that clients provide them with inadequate success metrics could lead to lackluster work and questionable payment practices -- particularly as giant marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola lead the way to performance-based compensation agreements. "How can the corporation fairly compensate an agency for the impact of work on an assignment for which they were poorly briefed?" he asked.

For copies of the survey, contact Jones & Bonevac .

Attention Web designers: Design experiences, not webpages

One of my biggest challenges right now is working with the concept teams in the agency. Designing for online is a very different discipline from designing for print. Even designing for TV is different because TV or video is still linear, whereas online design isn't. When I try to describe the process, I liken it to designing a choose-your-own-adventure book -- experiences branch out and interconnect in different ways; and you cater to different audiences and personas and try to give a relevant, personalized experience for each.

We have lots of good technical designers here in the country, and a lot with good aesthetic sense. But I still have to meet a web designer who I can say I'm impressed with. Maybe I haven't been around enough. Maybe designing a website takes more than one head. I believe a good web design comes from good collaboration among a collection of aesthetic, technical and stragetic heads.

Nico, our digital producer, has an interesting observation: usual advertising art directors find it easier to work with Flash since it offers a more flexible medium. Once you get into HTML web design, it gets more complicated because of all the limitations it puts on design. That's when good web designers really shine -- when an HTML-based design looks great yet works well and easy to use for visitors.

I found this material from an article by Alexander Wipf in Cultural Fuel.

He shares tips from Tim Richards of Razorfish on web design. Enjoy!

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Experience Design: Why Pages Are The Last Thing You Need To Worry About

View more presentations from Tim Richards.

Here’s a little talk I put together for a UX Meetup here in LA. It’s a bit of an amalgamation of emerging experience design tenets focusing on differences between page design and experience design. Probably not a giant eye-opener for folks that are currently engaged in Experience Design. I’ll offer up what I believe to be the missing subtext for the talk below - not a script; just some stuff that isn’t on the slides, to make it easier to understand.

Background
Originally, the context for this talk was an article I wrote for theFEED report, Razorfish’s Digital Design Outlook. The original title was “Putting Jakob on the Shelf.” Again, for experience designers, it seems like a pot-shot; most of us know Jakob Nielsen’s place in our pantheon of nerd-heroes. I guess the impetus came from quite a few client conversations that seemed to rush into page design as a primary vehicle for redesigning a web experience, to be specific.

Experiences, Not Pages
Pages are the old building blocks. We have square monitors, the Web was borne of hypertext documents, which are “shaped” like pages, pages date back to Egyptian papyrus, I suppose. Pages will probably be around for a while. With that in mind, when we design an experience, we design around the fulfillment of some human need. The truth of the matter is that these needs are very seldom solved via a “page”; folks are looking for fulfillment, conversation, connections, prices, comparisons, knowledge…that sort of thing. What I quickly narrow down to Answers and Entertainment is very seldom page-shaped - it’s smaller, and more fluid.

I think that search has contributed to our page focus - as last-click attribution has placed the almighty index on a pedestal. Image and video search are a step in the right direction, I guess…but, as we map real engagements, we know that actual behavior is quite messy. Impressions across channels build up to actions, interactions, engagement, purchase, loyalty, etc.

The last bit here, starting at Slide 16 and running through Slide 21, I guess, is a plea to all Product Managers, Marketing Folks, and other business stakeholders to start thinking about their products and projects in terms of experience and flow; narrative and interaction. As much as everyone seems to love to agree with me on this point of “Don’t Start Design with a Site Map” - I still see an awful lot of it out in the space. My only point here is that we should use scenarios, narrative, lo-fidelity UI, and map those to a system - and let an aggregation of narratives define the solution. A site map is representative of a design solution. It’s a handy design inventory. It’s not a starting point. In my mind, a lot of  the “good stuff” happens before we have a site map. Sure, designing the individual interfaces is fun, as well…but, the journeys and over-arching narratives are key to nail down before we do those interfaces. I think this goes for representative “comps” and “design directions” as a representative slice of the solution - let’s get better at designing experience concepts, as an industry; we don’t spend enough time there, I fear.

The backgrounds for these last slides of the section are scenarios and scenario maps - early site maps that evolve when we overlay several scenarios (scenarios are user segment + user need + narrative user story (of fulfillment/experience) + lo-fi UI’s.

Die, Enterprise, Die
I’ll come right out and let you know ahead of time that I think this next section is the least-baked. Sorry. It started out as an approach to Experience Design when there are already significant brand touchpoints out there - that by “Growing Organically,” we could meet emerging brand and user needs more quickly by bypassing the tendency to build every new experience in the context of the previous. That’s where that title on Slide 23 comes from, I guess. The cartoon map backgrounds were a deliverable for a big company who had hidden the most important content (according to their some-odd 16MM users) behind some impersonal promotions for prospective customers. These concept maps showed how hard it was to find the good stuff - and I even designed a peaceful town plaza/square to represent the suggested new design.

The next bit on Slide 24-25 are remnants of the first section, I guess - maybe it’s a recurring theme. The idea comes from  experiencing so many project kickoffs and requirements-gathering sessions where we were collecting “feature ideas” instead of user requirements. It’s not easy, managing the line between requirement and feature - but, I tell you, that line is representative of what I call “Design.” Slide 26 is a shout out to my man Saul Bass. I find it helpful to drop this quote from time to time to define and redefine our activities as Design, even if we’re working at a whiteboard, and not Photoshop.

The next little area may be a bit outdated - as I’ve seen so many integrated Creative/User Experience teams as of late. However, in shops where UX is highly-evolved (or devolved?) a divide sometimes grew between Creative and User Experience. My view on the division is best expressed in “Making is Thinking” recent post, “Logic Occludes Intuition.” Basically, it’s easy to slip into a solely performance-based innovation model as a User Experience Designer - trying to “prove” our way to an innovative solution.

Slides 27-34 explore some of the differences between the UX and Creative roles (even if they’re occurring in the same person) - and tries to make it OK for UX and Creative to be out of sync for periods of time, while concept catches up with insight, and such. Also, there’s a slide of a blue frisbee where I make a joke about Tron. Hopefully, you’ll get that joke.

Design Inside Out + Outside In
OK. Yes. I talk about Semantic here. Jumping the shark? Maybe. But, as the Experience Design field advances, and we learn how to measure and discuss the differences between bad experience and good experience across channels, we’re going to need to understand how Ontology Design should affect the design process. With so many experiences leaning so heavily upon good aggregation techniques, landing pages, and contextual navigation, we’ll do well as designers to know that we’ve got to be able to design very fluid experiences that allow people to move laterally (with context, as opposed to vertically “down” in an information experience) in an experience, in units that are smaller than “pages.” Slide 41 is usually when I like to drop a trip through Spock, looking for my favorite Daler Mehndi video, “Tunak” to show how Semantic Tech will change the world - and to show how rad the Tunak video is.

Slide 45 basically disallows Experience Designers from straying too far away from practical design, diving so deeply into ontology structures that they forget the “containers” for the experience; pages, modules, templates, screens, messages, videos, etc. The background for this slide and the previous were sketched by Darren Wong, a very talented experience designer in LA. I like the “Context and Container” thing quite a bit - I’ll dive more deeply into that in a subsequent installment, I am sure.

So, as I just returned from Memphis and the IA Summit 09, I reflected on this talk that I had put together - and I feel a kinship with Jesse James Garrett, who delivered the final plenary talk on Sunday, when he shouted us out - to rise, and be Information Architects no more - but, to be User Experience Designers (among other great things he said.) Yes, we perform information architecture. No, it’s not all we do. Should it be our job title? Nope. But, that’s just me.

Now that you’ve received the fullness of my approach to handling emerging challenges in User Experience Design, you are also relegated to go forth, and do good; design great experiences via storytelling, and not just information science. How’s that feel?