Stop Saying "Digital"

A close friend of mine is the creative services manager for a high-profile agency in the US that has won a lot of hardware and has an excruciatingly high standard for creative recruitment. I was talking to this person today and she said this:

"The team from ________ was a little less experienced, and heavy on the digital, light on the creativity"

I naturally have a bias in this type of conversation, but this time I was genuinely taken aback. I have always been frustrated with the fact that my creative contributions to this industry always required an adjective. No matter how many posters I make for a wittily named DJ night, or how often I drop pop culture references just as obscure and pretentious as my broadcast brethren, I have almost always been described the same way:

"This is Aiden, he's one of our 'digital' creatives."

Throngs of faceless CCOs and ECDs will, when speaking at a 4A's meeting or accepting a Titanium Lion, profess that 'there is no line' at their agency, and that 'digital isn't an afterthought' at their shop.  For many of them—likely most—this isn't true.  There is a line. There exists a prejudice. There most definitely is a glass ceiling.

The unfortunate truth is that, for the majority of agencies, the definition of integration has so far been a one-way street. Most agencies are perfectly comfortable throwing traditional talent into digital assignments (even if it results in disaster), but virtually never staff in the opposite direction. They will spend years teaching a young AD/CW team how to take a commercial from script to air, but won't extend the same courtesy to established creatives in the same agency who started their careers with websites instead of film.

This applies to shops big and small, halls hip as well as hollowed. 

If you had a candid conversation with the creative leaders in these places, you'd probably get a similar story out of all them eventually—that digital folks just aren't really conceptual; they are incapable of separating themselves from tactics and thinking about the big idea.

Now, in fairness, if you look only on the surface, this argument might have a thin leg on which to stand. Scanning the portfolios of most digital creatives, you see the same tired shit—flash sites, banners, a lame social media stunt that had been rehashed beforehand by 20 other teams—and that isn't sexy. 

But below the surface, if you actually talked to most of these people, you would find that they are uncannily similar to their traditional counterparts. They love art and/or cinema and/or literature. They dress funny. They talk, ad nauseum, about agency gossip, winning awards, and the like. They drink a lot. And, most importantly, they have a lot of clever ideas that never get mounted to a foam core board and dragged in front of suits.

The reality of the situation is that "digital" rarely gets a fair shake. The deck is stacked against it from day one. The budgets are a tiny fraction of the campaign, the mediums are infinitely more complicated from a production standpoint (and constantly changing), and most of the time it's done at a completely different agency than the brand work, and forced to take direction from an unknown traditional campaign team that "figured everything out" three weeks before they were briefed in. 

So, yeah, a lot of digital portfolios are "light on the creativity," but it's because we, as an industry, set them up for failure. It's not that digital creatives can't conceive "big ideas," it's that we have shackled most of them to non-conceptual desks and force-fed them big ideas created by other, more highly-ordained, teams. It should be no wonder that finding people who have evidence of doing both in their work are so damned hard to find. 

Beyond this is the word "digital" itself. It is the year 2011. Ask yourself what isn't digital, and I would speculate that you'll come up with a pretty small list. Television delivery has been digital for most of us for the better half of the last decade. We're shooting television commercials less and less on 35mm film and more frequently on REDs and Phantoms. Short run color jobs have brought "digital" even as far as offset printing. 

Everything is digital, and everything is not. The king is dead, God save the king.

"Digital" is now, in my opinion, the most damaging term in the pervasive industry lexicon. Not only is it an albatross around the necks of likely thousands of smart, untested creatives, it's also completely meaningless.  

Let's all stop saying "digital" (except, of course, in the rare cases when it actually applies). Imagine the changes:

Instead of hiring "digital" creatives, just hire creatives—if they can't be creative in both traditional and interactive medias yet, that's fine—cross-train them. If you don't think that's possible, then they probably aren't that great of a hire to begin with.

Instead of presenting the "digital" work, just present the work. Imagine how many meetings this is going to eliminate. If you think that you're not going to have enough time to show all the ideas, you're probably showing too many.

Stop hiring "digital" producers, and just hire producers who specialize in what you're trying to make. Do you make a lot of websites? Hire producers who know how to make websites. Do you make a lot of banners? Hire producers who know how to make banners. It's not as if these skills were seamlessly interchangeable to begin with.

And, finally, stop trying to be a "digital" agency, or even an "integrated" agency. Just be an agency. Ideally, a good one.

Ad Age reminds me how much I paid for essentially nothing.

Creativity

Quick! I better set fire to another c-note so I can see the same shit MediaBistro and AdFreak are posting for free. (Seriously, when did the bar for Ad Critic get so low?!) 

Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking. It was barely worth it when they still sent you a printed book every other month.

If you must spend $99 on an online ad archive service, might I recommend Lürzer's Archive?

Good riddance, guys.

In Response to Peter Merholz

This is a response to Peter Merholz's article on the Adaptive Path blog entitled 'The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design.' It's crap. Here's why.

I am an experience designer working in one of the "soulless holes" Peter refers to. In fact, at this particular agency, I've just started the UX capability. I am currently a department of one.

If there is a tiny shred of truth to this rant, it’s this: the agency business still places an unhealthy cultural value on the vision of the copywriter/art director team, and lacks an appreciation or understanding of the value of utility.

The key to shifting these perceptions and changing the fiber of the industry is trust.

The thing about trust is that it has to be earned.

I could scream from the hilltops how wrong everyone is about what I do. I could print out thousands articles from Boxes and Arrows or compile every great marketing usability study and put them on the desks of my fellow creative directors. I could hire Donald Norman himself to come walk around the halls for a few weeks and say brilliant things.

It wouldn't matter; people change slowly, organizations more so, and industries slower still.

So I toil to earn that trust as part of a small but growing number of new-era creative marketers who wish to shift the paradigm away from the caricature Peter paints in this post. Unfortunately, it only takes one dude at a cocktail party like Peter to spout some self-righteous shit and undo a couple months of hard work.

The irony of this entire affair is that the vitriol that Mr. Merholz spits about the advertising world is born from the same stuff that makes up the creative director ego.

Peter’s tirade is really about who get’s to call what they do “UX.”

It’s practically identical to the frustration my fellow art directors and copywriters have had in the past with the idea of we UX people—who conduct research and design for familiarity instead of disruption—being called “creatives.”

This article reminds me of a couple of times during my career where I have worked with academically trained UX designers who were completely new to the ad agency environment. Inevitably they became frustrated with the lack of research opportunities and that data isn’t driving the design process. They struggled with the small scope and relative lack of importance in their projects—constantly designing the environmental responsibility section of a corporate website, but never designing the new pharmacy bottles for Target.

They start to realize that this department, while based in the same principles of what they have read about and studied academically, is something different than what they imagined they would be doing. It isn’t Cooper or IDEO. They aren’t designing iPods. They’re making advertising.

Peter actually outs himself in the article:

This post really is about a deep frustration with seeing my friends join such agencies only to find themselves miserable, and working with clients who have had terrible experiences with such firms, and because of that are suspicious of any form of consulting. 

This little outburst isn’t about purity of purpose or the lack thereof. It isn’t about philosophy at all. It’s about branding.

And while my work may not be as important as designing a child-friendly interface for a pediatric insulin pump, or as glamorous as designing the shopping experience for the 5th Avenue Prada store, I’m content with my toil.

So I say, to the Peters of the world—shelve it. We’ve read all the same books and blogs that you have. We have just a pure a drive to design for people. We’re just working in a much tougher industry. 

Throughout your life you’ll probably encounter ads a lot more often than you will that Prada store. You should be thanking us for making that shit a bit more user friendly.