UXD in Advertising

Agencies today are often 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 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.