Interaction Design & Advertising: The new Mad Men come from Silicon Valley

The new Mad Men come from Silicon Valley.

The future of advertising is in digital media, as people stop reading newspapers and people turn off their TVs in favor of Facebook, advertising agencies are struggling to redefine themselves as fast as the audience their trying to reach. In the last few years we have seen agencies build IxD teams from scratch. But it has been a challenge for designers to insert themselves in the copywriter/art director led process.

In this talk we will discuss why the IxD community needs to take notice and take this as a great opportunity for our discipline to move forward and learn from fellow creatives. We'll share winning strategies for including design thinking in an industry known for creating more problems than solving them.

Panelists:
Mauro Cavalletti - Executive Creative Director at RG/A San Francisco.

Aynne Valencia - Former Product Design Director at AKQA San Francisco

Jonathan Woytek- SVP, Director of User Experience at McCann / MRM

Michael Lemme – Creative Director at Duncan/Channon


Moderator:
Guillermo Torres - Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe


Topics include:
- Design thinking vs. advertising
- Building a UX team in Advertising
- Developers and Designers, the new kids.- Process- User research vs. market research
- Innovation vs. trends
- When the product is the message
- Agencies doing consumer websites- What can we learn from advertising
- What advertising can learn from design

Sponsored by Sprout

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Add a Comment

Comment by Michael Lemme on November 17, 2009 at 7:46am

Product (or service) design and product (or service) marketing – when done well – should be seamless. Both ultimately inform identity/brand. A person or organization gets your attention, makes an offer and then delivers on it or not – all in both practical and emotional ways.

If the marketing or product are interactive it’s a good idea to involve thoughtful interaction designers. Even better if the same team is helping to think about the whole picture.

Comment by Josh Damon Williams on November 11, 2009 at 12:18pm

I'm really curious to see how this panel shapes up. I complete see Dan's point, but I also know there are a lot of designers who identify with IxD working in the advertising space. IxDA SF's co-leader is on the panel, and I think her perspective working in both interaction design and advertising will reveal an interesting (or at least discussion-worthy) overlap between the two disciplines.

IMO, while this event is going to scratch everyone's itch (unlike the December party!), it's not a fringe topic either.

Comment by Dan Saffer on November 10, 2009 at 10:10am

I wrote up my thoughts about why I think this isn't a topic that IxDA, as a design organization, should not be hosting. Feel free to disagree:

http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2009/11/design-art-and-advertising/

Comment by Roland on November 9, 2009 at 5:22pm

As an IxDA event sponsor, I'm particularly interested in learning what IxDAers think of opportunities to work with advertising. My company's platform allows creatives and designers to build rich, interactive content without writing a line of code. While this frees them from being dependent on developers, the need for IxD does NOT go away. To the contrary, we're finding that creative teams are using it to build online ads and we see an opportunity for IxD to improve these experiences. We'll be sharing a demo of our platform at the event so you'll have a better idea of how the platform works and if it might be a help.

Comment by Guillermo "gish" Torres on November 3, 2009 at 9:27am

Hey Dan, your reaction underlines why this discussion is important for the Ix community. We can scoff at advertising, all we want. But the truth is that Advertising means thousands of jobs for our community. IxDA should be advocating and nurturing the creation of this Ix teams in other industries, and advertising is just one of them.

Agencies are already doing a lot in terms of innovation in interactive media. R/GA worked on Nike+, AKQA worked on USPS's augmented reality box finder and earlier on Xbox's dashboard interface. You can question the quality of the final product, but these are all projects that any designer would love to improve and work on.

Comment by Dan Saffer on November 2, 2009 at 9:33pm

Advertising? Boo!