Should clients have 100% veto power over designers and creative’s art direction and design?

Firstly they are paying for it, and secondly their product and brand is at the mercy of it. But the result is all to often that expert craftsmanship and brilliant work is being destroyed and turned into mediocre craft and ineffective communication at the hands of unskilled clients. Affecting all parties negatively.

Is only one party to blame here? Or is the problem more nuanced? With both creatives and companies having to be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths?

In my presentation Designing Identities I mention that:

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that the will of unarticulated people creates products that people themselves find uninteresting and boring).”

Aaron Winters requested the references to this, and I thought the feedback would be interesting for several readers:

1. The first reference is from the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman, where he mentions an art project where two artists ask people their preferences in regards to visualization and art. Collecting a range of answers these are then used as instructions for a series of paintings, which garnered terrible feedback. Directly externalizing people’s preferences turned ideas of beauty into something expected and boring.

You can find a larger reference to this statement on slide 17 in the slideshow below, or here.

2. The second and third reference are both from Malcolm Gladwell’s, talk at PopTech!

First Gladwell talks about a research project where a group of students were asked to choose their favorite of two posters; one impressionistic and one of a cat. The first group could just take their favorite poster and leave. But the second group had to explain what they liked about the image and then take it. The group that could just take the poster (without explanation) tended to take the impressionistic one, the group that had to explain their preference tended to take the one of the cat. Even more interesting was the fact that when the researchers called these people back after a while to ask them if they still had/liked the posters, the group who chose the impressionistic one tended to still like their posters while the people who picked the cat did not.

3. Secondly Gladwell mentions that some TV stations in the US turned down what would later prove to be some of America’s most popular TV shows after asking everyday people their opinion on the pilots. The interesting thing about this though is that what the focus groups would criticize and dislike was the things that eventually would make these shows a great success – the quirkiness, the odd things out, the exaggerated personality, the unexpected.

Gladwell points to several things:

- Having to explain our preferences changes them, because we start favoring the stuff we can explain.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preferences to the least sophisticated, traditional and expected.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preference from something we really would like, to something we don’t.

At the same time as these three references favor the work and craft of the designer or art director there are arguments favoring the clients perspective:

While clients are not skilled in the creative crafts most designers and art directors are not skilled business experts. And almost no one has as good an understanding of the clients business as the business themselves – shooting out brilliant ideas is one thing, solving business challenges and generating value inside a foreign context a completely different one.

Donald Norman in his article “Design thinking: A useful Myth” suggests that designers, in the context of design thinking, do not possess “some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought”, but they do offer an outside perspective.

And I would ad; have a greater propensity to push one self out of the excepted and into the unexpected.

People skilled in the creative crafts are indispensible in the role of solving big communication challenges for companies who need disruptive and innovative solutions. But it is not because they, as Norman says, possess some unnatural ability to have all the solutions in the universe – it is because they help clients remove blinders, and push them to explore opportunities in what will initially be perceived as uncomfortable spaces.

And this is the problem; it is not that the creative work is to good or to bad. The root of the challenge is that creative professionals need to understand that their work is as much related to removing blinders and luring clients into the uncomfortable. If they are not able to do that from a business perspective and on a layman’s level in regards to the design craft, then the product or solution they provide will seem natural to them but be without explanation and relevant context to the client.

The way brands and agencies have combined new technology with their sales, marketing and design strategies, give the impression that technology is outgrowing the creative and communications industry almost ten to one.

A descriptive example is the OMO/Unilever campaign being run in Brazil at the moment (read it here: popsop.com / brandchannel.com). Where they are putting a large GPS tracking device into 50 boxes of a new OMO detergent. And then having teams follow customers as they take it out of the store. At home the people are given a small video recorder and asked to video tape personal moments of family happiness.

To me this presents several missed opportunities. First of all having teams following 50 boxes in a large country as Brazil seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Secondly the prize seems to small, thirdly asking people to share their private and personal family moments with the world might be difficult (at least when you are only inviting 50 random people to participate). And lastly; this is detergent, people don’t care, and the context surrounding detergent is probably more connected to housework or clean stuff than the universal value of family happiness (I rant, and am not familiar with the target group, but there it is).

What the campaign does unveil though, and is a brilliant example of, is how bad we are in the communications and creative business at using technological innovation to do our own innovation. We seem to spend large amounts of time and resources on picking out a technology, fitting it into a marketing campaign (and avoiding the hurdles it introduces), rather than using it to innovate our own concepts.

What I am saying is that new technology hasn’t brought with it new ideas, we are just using these new opportunities as vehicles for old communication strategies.

Donald Norman suggest that technology always comes first, and then it creates a need. I interpret this as technology in the beginning will always be rudimentary and difficult to use – innovation in application and design follows in the footsteps of the technology (and I might be a bit impatient).

But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, we need to be aware that we are still talking to people in the same old way – even if the format available has changed completely. In a former post I mentioned the mobile industry having been the only industry to see that what they have been doing has been completely wrong – it is time for the other industries to follow suit.

With the energy, innovation and ideas we are seeing from engineers, start-ups and even companies established production and logistical chains, the creative business is presenting itself as conservative and slow to react.

The creative business might be the most boring business.

The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result; it’s a description of how we get there, not what we will end up with.

The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.

As always the individual slides can be found on flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation on slideshare.net/helgetenno/designing-identities or below.

Digital is expanding yet again, from the first editorial version, to a second social version and now the third installment; integration.

Some arguments:

1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.

Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;

“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.

2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.

Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf

But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.

The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.

“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.

4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).

Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”

Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.

Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”

Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.

With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.

The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.

Digital’s introduction to retail, be it a slow one, will accelerate as the understanding of the width of web and mobile broadens from being all about destinations, to integration into every aspect of business:

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.

—

A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

In the communications hierarchy, there are four main field’s positioned in relation to each other. Could visualization introduce a way of understanding their role and ability in relation to each other?

During a short talk with Ji Lee at Gulltaggen 2010, he presented a hierarchy where advertising is at the top, then marketing, brand and at the bottom design. I’d never thought of placing these four fields into such a structure, but loved the concept, and it made sense to position them in relation to each other in this way.

Trying to design this idea, I ended up drawing a pyramid and started adding context to each stage…

Advertising
At the top of the pyramid, advertising can be at least three things:

1. Positioning (Al Ries, Jack Trout),
2. Creating an anticipation of the experience outside the experience itself.
3. Direct sales

Advertising is a great tool for selling anything from low interest products to aiding in creating or changing the perception of a brand. Advertising is tangible, but swift and constantly changing. Its stories and messages are focused on getting people to perform an action. Advertising is designed from briefs defined by guidelines, strategies and goals further down the pyramid; it’s top level communication.

Marketing
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services. It’s executed through individual actions, but fundamentally it’s the overall strategic program, defining, coordinating and executing on all levels of the organization. Marketing is the sum of day to day activities putting products to market and activating people through promotion and sales. Marketing is designed to achieve company goals and is constrained/directed by brand and design.

Brand
There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are brand experts, from Neumeier’s “gut feeling”, to Yakob’s “The collective perception”. One thing is for certain; brand value exists in the mind of people engaging with it – not the company itself. But still, there needs to be guidance and direction to this value. The brand strategy defines how the company should achieve the right set of values. Branding aims at creating an advantage in a market place filled with identical products, as Helen Fischer quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Love is overestimating the difference between one woman and another”. The brand direction defines a framework and guides the rest of the company’s promotional and sales activities, but it is not fundamental, it is not the core company idea.

Design
The fundamental idea behind the company comes from its design. From identifying how to offer value in a specific situation, to designing the product (or service), how it creates value, its unique, identifiable identity, its story, form, interaction etc. From the initial value proposition to its tangible product the design defines how it creates value, how it performs, and how it remarks itself in the marketplace.

Design in this context is not just the visualization of an engineered product; it’s the comprehensive identity of the company or product – from the ground up.

–

By looking at the pyramid we can identify the role of each field of communication and how it relates to the other fields. (Advertising is created on the basis of the marketing strategy, which is the consequence of the brand and design platform. The brand is an enforcer of, or supplement to, the design – or lack of design).

It’s also important to note that job title does not define which part of the pyramid you are working on. Great ideas come from great groups of people, not labels. The point is: Understanding the role of the job at hand, and how this job is positioned in the greater complexity of the communications strategy.

The way we measure stuff today is tailored to prove the value of what we do today. Which invites us to understand that as we move forward, marketing will become dated if the way we measure marketing isn’t kept updated.

But what do we measure?

Digital is a giant recording machine, a sensor. If we are able to record everything in real time, we should also be able to prove value in real time. And so we try, but end up measuring the wrong stuff. We treat the Internet as a direct sales mechanism, measuring traffic. While the real potential slips between our fingers: We should be identifying and appreciating the value generated from relationships, not decreasing the cost of infrastructure.

Finding out what people did (visits, clicks, time etc.) is uninteresting at best compared to why they did it and what kind of value it created.

The goal of measuring stuff is simple, and split two ways:

1. Figuring out if we created any value? (which is interesting)
2. learning from it in order to improve and innovate (which is the real value)

This set of videos from IBM touches upon and shares some inspiring insights in regards to using data differently than we are doing today. This is closer to being interesting in regards to finding solutions than most of the stuff I’ve seen so far other places.

“Really smart organizations are already making sense of what they know as they come to know it. And then make really fine grained decisions, accurate decisions”- Jeff Jonas

“The more we instrument the world, the more sensors we put out, the more data we collect. You might think that we’d become inundated [flooded] – but actually – it’s the opposite. The more data you have, the clearer you see” – John Cohn

“The organizations that are most competitive are going to be the ones that can make sense of what they learn as fast as they learn it”- Jeff Jonas

(videos found via Flowingdata)

In an online world full of nuances and variables, is the universal mindset of mass media affecting our ability to make people deliriously happy?

Mass media forces brands to find one consistent voice, communicating one story or one set of values to a large part of a population. This mindset is valuable for the mass media industry, which is fine. But online/organic/cloud based services’ and applications are not mass marketing, not media, and by that needs, or demands, a different mindset.

Where as display advertising survives on a marketing relationship approach (generic and universal) services and applications for organic platforms need a more individual and personal product relationship approach. This means that any destination – from your online web site to your smart phone application or a participation / dialogue initiative has to be built for the niches, not the idea of universals.

Malcolm Gladwell, at TED in 2004, talks about Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist that reinvented spaghetti sauce with the result of making the American people happier. Moskowitz can be attributed with discovering that there are no universals in the food industry. That reality is too diverse and can’t be identified by one or some universal principles.

At the end of the presentation Gladwell references one example with coffee, where he says that if he was to design one brand of coffee to fit everybody, it would rank at a bout a 60 on a taste satisfaction ranking from zero to a hundred. But he was to divide us into coffee clusters of three or more, he could tailor coffee to each cluster, which would heighten the rank to about a 75 to 78. The difference is “coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy”.

“When we pursue universals in food, we are not only making an error, we are doing ourselves a massive disservice” – Howard Moskowitz

As Gladwell also notes: Moskowitz introduced to the food industry what people in science had been working with for a long time; the move from the search for universals to the understanding of variability.

In our eagerness to understand online marketing we have borrowed a range of shortcuts from the different industries. Many of them have been interesting and valuable choices, especially in the parts of online that resembled traditional media, but a lot of them have been failures.

My point is that we need to approach online marketing with an understanding of variability. That we can’t see online / organic marketing as mass media, but as individual relationships. That both individual devices, destinations and dialogues demand personalization and tailoring built in as fundamental features.

A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to ad some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr.com account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

Delivering immediate effect might not be the best business model for designing long-term valuable marketing initiatives.

Advertising is known for getting peoples attention and affecting people’s anticipation of an experience or product. Advertising is media related, the effect is purchasable through unlimited scope.

Advertising is direct, unwanted, often irritating and too often exhaustingly repetitive. It’s short compact stories or direct messages, highlighting exaggerations and often packaged in a clichéd pun. It’s responsive, and provides hot bursts of immediate effect, which cools down quickly.

Brilliant storytellers used to change millions of minds for decades, today they gather millions of views on youtube.

In my mind, advertising is faced with a challenge; it’s own business model, label or sales pitch: We move people and products – fast.

There is a need for long term marketing initiatives; digital concepts and ideas need to carry the longevity of product relationships. Which also implies a different way of measuring value. (What are the metrics identifying the value of a relationship? Are they the same as used for our ability to traffic people back and forth from, and around in, cyberspace?)

The question is, if the advertising industry is in a place clients come with the preconception to create long term marketing initiatives, or if one needs to alter the idea of what the advertising industry does if we are to acquire and lead these projects.

As a friend of mine, David Reid, told me yesterday, referencing a quote by Martin Sorrell: “We are not in the advertising business, we are in the marketing communications business”.

I would say Zeus Jones and Berg London certainly aren’t advertising agencies, but they are doing some of the most interesting stuff out there in this regards. On the other hand you’ve got Razorfish, CP+B and AKQA proving me wrong.

Any ideas?