CP+B's laughably dated "Sr. Experience Designer" requisition
The most prominent listing is one from Crispin Porter + Bogusky for a "Sr. Experience Designer," which I found a bit surprising. Apparently, among other requirements, they are looking for someone in which an "...almost perverse obsession with InDesign is a must." Other applications may be an option, however, it continues; I guess they're just starting to hear about OmniGraffle.
Nowhere, however, is a mention of being conceptual, having passion for emerging media, or even understanding (let alone integrating with) traditional advertising and campaign development.
This really irked me. I may be completely out of line (in CP+B's defense, they may just be looking for someone to gruel through a corporate website redesign, but why did you hip, snarky bastards take that work in the first place?), but this just seems like an ancient way of organizing an agency in an era when Pepsi is canning (no pun intended) their Superbowl ad in favor of increased digital spend.
I've made this rant before, so I'll keep it short. "Creatives" are supposed to be people who are highly conceptual, relevant, smarter-than-the-room folk who know their mediums of creation inside and out. A great broadcast CD knows how to make a great commercial because they have been on a bazillion shoots, have worked with three dozen directors, and know exactly what a flame artist can do with the $190k left in the budget. A great copywriter is someone with command of the english language in many ways. A great print campaign comes from someone who used to stay up at night dreaming of sick die-cut folding paper pieces for their local ADDY call-to-entry mailing.
Ergo, great digital creatives are people who wrote code and fucked with new technologies and are generally geeky people fascinated with how you can bend the medium of technology into media. That is to say, they're interaction designers (or experience designers or whatever your firm calls them).
Yes, every shop is taking on more and more boring corporate website work that needs some people who can just crank out wires and user flows and conduct research in the typical software design definition of Ux/IxD. But, seriously, this is advertising. Agencies should be hiring experience designers who love advertising, or else they're just asking for internal politics and wasted effort/money. And they should be moving the people who "get" this stuff into your creative departments, and empowering them to think creatively about technology.
The day is coming when your TV spots are going to need to be interactive experiences too. As well as the bus huts and the billboards and your print ads. The more agencies continue to separate the mentality of "advertising" (the idea/the campaign) and "technology", the more they are dooming themselves to irrelevance (or, at least, marginalization).
So, in order to be a good sport, I've decided to help CP+B out, free of charge, and rewrite the job requirements for this position for them:
- 5+ years of experience in advertising. Yeah, we expect you to be able to generate typical Ux Deliverables, but if you don't also love a good TV spot and don't subscribe to at least one traditional media mag, we probably don't need you.
- An almost perverse obsession with emerging media and how it can be applied creatively. Required thinking goes beyond designing another damned augmented reality app—we need some ingenuity.
- The ability to generate wireframes and functional requirements that clearly communicate specifications, coupled with the ability to sell an idea on a single slide of a pitch deck. That slide should be well designed, too, so you should be comfortable with InDesign and Photoshop.
- The ability to meet the gold standard expectations we have of our entire creative team, and work in a collaborative, simultaneous workflow with art directors and copywriters. We aren't going to let you just hand off wireframes, you need to be a creative.
- Be funny. Our agency represents some of the best snarky, funny, attention-getting marketing in the industry and we expect you to be funny too.
- An ability to work like a machine when necessary, which will be a lot. You don't get to be good by going home every day at five.
Hope that helps, guys.
