Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Peter Merholz, who is somewhat of a User Experience Guru to most of us who have a User Experience background, recently wrote an interesting and entertaining article on the Adaptive Path blog (which we are avid readers of) entitled “The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design” stating such things like

The thing is, these agencies do not come at user experience from an honest place. Ad agencies, in particular, are soulless holes, the precepts of whose business runs wholly contrary to good user experience practice.

And there is quite a lot more of these types of statements going into how Advertising and Marketing professionals treat people as sheep that crap cash when you advertise to them, and that the working environment of ad agencies is poisonous, employees are treated as cattle and clients feel jilted, etc, etc…  You should definitely give it a read.

I do believe a lot of the things he says are true about ad agencies, and can even identify with those points, but Gurus sometimes slip and become dogmatists, so:

1. To portray UX professionals in such agencies as victims is self-indulgent and arrogant. It’s not like we work in a Gulag of Ads and we needed someone to free us, like a Nelson Mandela of the UX professional. In fact, some of us might actually be quite aware of the challenges and still choose to work in a multi-disciplinary and conflicted environment, where noone has THE formula for success and where working dogmas are changed like underwear. Maybe it is quite intentional that we are where we are and we even need the friction with the traditional world of advertising because we can effectuate change in different ways, while still being advocates of the user and marrying that with those who advocate brands. Just imagine getting good user experience practices implemented in a “system that works contrary to them”. It is much more rewarding than a Calfornian group hug to some of us. It’s a matter of career choice and taste, not morality.
2. Looking at some of the gripes he has (and he admits having had for a long time) are a fairly dated. A lot of agencies have thankfully learned from their UX professionals (even if they renamed them to Experience Planners, or Connection Planners) and have rewritten their agency philosophies to focus on human behavior, customer journey etc, and have revised their stance towards the role of brands and advertising. Leo Burnett, just as one example, does not speak of consumers, but people, whether they are users or shoppers or viewers. Our workflow starts with “Explore the human Journey” and not the consumer insight where we only look at people through glass. More important than stating that the brand era is over, though, we have also completely retooled our planning tools to be based in and starting with human behavior, not the brand, product or category. And Leo Burnett is not the only one that has done this.
3. In fact, if I were to engage in equal amounts of provocative blanket statements, we could easily throw the ball back and say, what has the UX community innovated in the last 15 years? For the most part, I still see the same tools & techniques in use as when I started many years ago. Or, what has the UX community done to part with its image of being stale, dry, process-driven functionaries, that may deliver usability or even utility for users, but do little to create and reward human connection? I know they are many UX shops that do deliver on human connection,  but so do some ad agencies deliver on utility and usability for their brands.

Now, if you followed the discussion before, you know we’re a bit late in answering to Peter’s rant. We saw it last week, but our cattle was busy crapping out some ads that make sheep go buy stuff they don’t need. So, our apologies.

But apparently some other folks did already respond quite vehemently to Peter’s post which prompted him to write a follow-up in which he tries to stand by his statements, but still apologizes for having labeled agencies as “soulless holes.” He also tries to explain why he wrote this article when he wrote it. In his explanation, he presents himself as an idealist that gets sad when hearing about the bad practices of ad agencies, then mad, then wanting to do something about it. Well, I can understand and identify with that, all I can say is: if you wanna do something about it: work in an ad agency and change it or at least seek exchange instead of making judgement calls that make you look no better than the evil ad agency people you rant against. You can’t topple someones ivory tower by putting yourself in one.

All I do take-away from this, is not a honest attempt of doing somthing about delivering better solutions to people that make a qualitative difference in their lives, but rather the fact that someone is trying to beat old-school ad agencies (which don’t really exist anymore) at their own game: because provocative idealistic dogmatism coupled with blanket statements about a group of people always makes for good PR. And the worst part is: alienating your own kind (the UX professional) because they work at what you self-righteously make out to be “the wrong place” seems to be a small price.

Well Done. Submit your blog entry it to Cannes.

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Enough already? How many more so-called “viral” videos of brands copying the flash mob dance in public places phenomenon can a human person take? After the “Sound of Music” flash mob in Antwerp, I had it.

Ok, so we posted them too here on the blog, back in the day, but now it’s too much. It’s always the same:

• choose a song
• choose a train station
• get some performers dressed as “normal” people
• rip clothes off, do the song and dance
• get some “normal” people to pretend to be “normal” by-standers who are suddenly totally exhilirated by the experience and join in
• film it “unobtrusively” from at least 27 different angles, alternating tele and wide-angle shots with “hidden” cameras
• slap a logo on it at the end
• post it on youtube and forward to everyone you know who works in an agency and start a viral that is seen mostly only by people within that industry
• Call it viral and put in your credentials deck

So maybe flash mobs could still be interesting, but how about a little bit of a different idea? Does it have to be so formulaic? Playing some music and entertaining is not always enough to really make a difference, even if the perfomance is great!

Wanna see what really happens when you don’t have hired people create this fake effect? Watch the Performance by virtuoso Joshua Bell in a Washington DC subway station, covered by the Washington Post. A sobering experience for the artist: 3 people listened to a free world-class performance which sold out at the concert hall for 100 bucks a pop that same night. Here is the take-out.

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