Who OWNS Interactive at an Ad Agency?: Picas to Pixels (Part 2)

After countless conversations with advertising agencies struggling to introduce either trusted partners or build in-house digital capabilities into the fold of their client deliverables, I decided to write this a series of posts to help agencies turn picas into pixels.

In this series you’ll learn how to evaluate if adding Interactive capabilities is worth the effort, who should OWN Interactive within your agency’s organizational structure and how to find and vet out trusted and valued partners and staff.

Those Were (NOT) the Days!
Back in the mid-nineties download speeds were 14.4 baud rates (look it up kiddies). There was nothing elegant about the user experience. The IT department owned Interactive and the Marketing department was the client. Talk about oil and water. “Back in the Days” it was like the wild west. Every week the rules changed, new technology advancement spawned countless other great innovations nearly as fast as the bad ones simply disappeared.

It’s not What it Looks Like
With the advance of browser capabilities, computing power and authoring tools, the importance of the visual design helped shift the balance of power from the IT team to the marketing departments. For the most part it has now become a client/vendor relationship where IT (read development team) is serving the Marketing department (read creative team) as their client. The problem, unfortunately, is that marketing departments typically don’t have neither the understanding nor the appreciation for the complexity of producing digital works.  In addition, the principals of designing for print do NOT apply for the web.

The Missing Link
So IT shouldn’t own Interactive because they just don’t get design. Marketing shouldn’t own it because it’s heavily dependent upon technical execution. So who owns it? Wait, there’s more. Digital works are interactive in that you push a button and something happens; they are utilitarian in that the serve a functional role of the user. Enter UX design. UX design is an amalgamation of visual design, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, heuristics, taxonomy, library and information science, human factors and psychology. And because of the nebulous nature of UX, it is the most elusive element for advertising agencies grasp it’s importance. If you think about, the user experience is much different when your target audience is driving down a freeway compared to the user experience of casually perusing a magazine. Now throw in a media channel that mimics the video message of TV, audio voice of radio, content depth of print, 1:1 messaging of direct mail, oh, and the user can provide input that generates real-time metrics! This is like no other user experience in a traditional agency’s media arsenal. This is why UX matters- it is the missing link.

Can’t We All Get Along?
So, IT doesn’t own Interactive nor creative. Who, then? The answer is none of the above. Ownership of Interactive projects should rest with highly specialized teams of a triumvirate of marketing/creative, IT/technology and User Experience (UX) design experts where Marketing answers the “who and why”, IT answers the “what” and UX Design answers the “where and how”. It’s not to say that that the interactive team becomes a silo, on the contrary, you’re still the client’s brand steward and without the traditional media in sync with the interactive tactics, it becomes a disjointed mess. Ego clashes will occur. The Creative Director will want to ignore basic usability tenants for a creative end or a developer will push back on a design because it adds to their workload and all the while, the client is asking you to make the logo bigger <wink>. In the end, remember, it’s all about aligning the team’s input to with user’s intent on the site. Follow the WWUD principal – ask yourself “What Would the User Do” In a old school v. new school stand-off, ask that question and right decision will be clear. Remember, a beautiful, well branded site with dysfunctional usability is not a site – it’a a PowerPoint presentation.

Interactive is Old Enough to Sit at the Adult Table
In the end, you must rethink the agency organizational structure to include your interactive lead (in-house or partner) at the strategic planning level. It’s tempting to feel like an Interactive expert after running a couple successful projects. Don’t trick yourself! Interactive changes at the speed of light. Unless you are constantly reading, learning, eating, breathing and living digital, you will make very costly mistakes. You must create a collaborative process whereby input from the Interactive lead is provided at the very earliest stage of client engagement.

<< Part 1: Picas to Pixels Coming Soon – Find a Partner, Build a team or Both