Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

I’ve written a number of rants here on the accomplishments of the User Experience Practice. Not only in terms of being a practice that has always had he focus on the user and human behavior, but, as a result, having a complete view of people’s journey; a view that gives creative solution a visceral understanding of human behavior, as opposed to merely attitudinal consumer insights laced with flat helicopter-macro trends that ad agencies had to work with in the old days. As advertising agencies have had to learn how to go from creating ads (messages) to acts (experiences), not only was having a UX background a great asset personally, but also a key ingredient to the betterment of the communication industry overall.

However, at the same time, I also had been asking myself what the UX community is really up to. say. The last 5-10 years, it has been my impression, that, in terms of the toolset used by Information Architects, Information Designers, Interaction Designers, etc. not much has changed. Sure, UX people have adapted to doing what they do for new devices that have entered the market, but fundamentally, the process of how we go about unearthing user insights and defining and testing experiences, not much seem to have changed, including who UX people work with and how they position themselves in a larger organization.

So it is with great interest that I came across an article by the godfather of UX Jared Spool, who basically poses the question if a new way of working with new sets of skills is required. I found it interesting, but it also sounded like a late wake-up call. In the article I find a confirmation of my previous stance pure-play UX shops have been stagnant for too long. The question Jared takes on and shares with us is one that agencies (digital and fullservice) have been dealing with and solving for quite a while. While the proposed team constellation he describes makes sense, it really isn’t really news to teams in full-service and digital creative agencies that have been dealing with overlapping job descriptions, disciplines, almost unmarriable structural problems for like 10 or so years already. Those who have had the source of business, have made changes to their team structure in similar ways as Jared proposes already.

To be fair, many have failed and had to try again, and many seem to have given up, going back to an old-school model, hoping Armageddon won’t come after all, and I don’t think many figured out the magic bullet. So the article still does the job of heating a debate that needs more action, more trial and error.

Still, I think it is a great Jared shared the state of thinking on the UX team in a larger context. For, a) it shows that while there might be a (somewhat outdated) acrimony between the “ad” agencies with the UX agencies, there are actually things that keeps us from realizing full potential on both sides that we can join forces on, and b) it’s nice that even thoroughbred UXers got their wake up call to start innovating again, and maybe once more be the subject matter force behind fundamental rethinking the role of the communication industry.

That said, after realizing the potential of a new team skill structure and opening the gates to more “collections”, my dear hope is that UXers will join forces to use their skills and knowledge of micro-behavior to find new tools to create overarching behavioral insights that can be more easily used for a differentiated brand experience strategy as opposed to just user experience strategy, regardless if they are pure play descendents of the library sciences or connections planners from a reformed traditional agency world, or social media ninjas who come from the concept development area.

We are all probably damaged somehow, doesn’t mean we can’t all be good.

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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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For us, it’s all about behavior. Many tools exist to research behavior, but a new service by SeeVolution really caught my eye on Mashable today because of its ease of use and accessibility.

SeeVolution is a real-time analytics, heatmap and alert system that overlays all the data on the user’s website and you can do it with an easy include on your website.

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In his article Tim Richards of Razorfish explains some (not so) new paradigms on how to approach experience planning and design. It’s a pretty good description of how to approach UX in general, and I am glad he took his time to spell it out at bit, especially the seperation of roles of planners and creatives. Also, more interestingly, his approach tries to marry the oh-so-traditional, but important need to be storytelling with the more functional user experience view of just documenting the experience.

Read the whole thing here.

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