This is a presentation I gave at the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal in May 2010. Ad agencies today are trapped between an old business model and a new media landscape. As people spend more and more of their time and money online, marketers are following their potential customers to the digital world. But the web is fundamentally more complex than any previous advertising medium, and has much more to do with software engineering than traditional advertising. Too often teams are still approaching digital as an extension of the decades-old, one-way communications model of advertising by merely creating interactive versions of traditional executions. User experience designers, information architects and usability experts are brought into agencies and segregated to roles as new media translators, but are excluded from the higher level strategy, planning and creative design process. They become subject matter experts who are limited to a single medium or field. This pattern won't change just by educating advertising professionals of the importance of the user experience - it takes a more fundamental change in the whole advertising industry - what people see as effective marketing, and how it is built. This presentation raises questions about how user experience design can contribute to a new, more integrated way of working across and through various media and disciplines.

1. User Experience Design & Advertising
Photo by Peter Blanchard

2. User Experience vs. Advertising
How advertising the world is changing?
Bringing the change to the design of
advertising

3. Karri Ojanen, Interaction Design Director, R/GA
New York, USA
Conceptology.org
@karrio

4. Photo by rooneg

6. Photo by rcrowley

7. Photo by Hugo90

8. Photo by Brian Giantz

9. Where’s the USER?

10. Advertising is short one-way messages
that can fit on billboards, in TV
commercials or, at most, print
brochures.

11. Photo by Stephen Poff

12. Advertising is about getting a customer’s
attention and selling an idea.
Therefore, marketers have always been
focusing on messaging.

13. (traditional) advertising design
≠
user experience design

16. Photo by antjeverena

18. The Web is much more complex than
other mediums. It empowers huge
volumes of information and
real-time interactions with customers.
Photo by NathanaelB

19. User experience designers
focus on interaction and functionality.
Photo by NathanaelB

20. The relationship between advertising
designers and user experience
designers.

21. messaging
vs.
functionality
audience
vs.
user
static design
vs.
functional design
Photo by Julia Manzerova

22. Advertising designers don’t see the need
for user experience design if they don’t
see the need for functionality and
interaction.

23. Photo by gaelx

24. “A revolution doesn’t happen when
society adopts new tools, it happens
when society adopts new behaviors.”
Clay Shirky

25. Photo by David Reece

26. The world has changed.

27. “In this new world, marketers can't
necessarily rely on a clever line or 30-
second story to do the heavy work of
building brands; they need lots of
multifaceted ideas, including ones that
go beyond slogans and metaphorical
narratives to offer something more
useful to the public. These ideas must
work in multiple formats, and on various
devices, with everything seamlessly
integrated.”

28. When designing an effective interactive
solution,
think of building an engine,
not a billboard.

30. Thank you.