The legacy of advertising is one-way communication — publishing and broadcast. It conceives of people as an audience, passive spectators whose behavior it would like to control through the messages it pushes out to them.
The legacy of user experience is computer operation. It conceives of people as users, active operators of some useful thing.
It is tempting to try to subsume one of these legacies within the other.
It is possible to claim that networked computers are a new marketing medium, a newer cooler form of television. This attitude results in experiences with the qualities of video games. There’s interactivity, but it’s shallow interactivity. The audience doesn’t fully interact with the organizations employees so much as it interacts with an experience pushed out to them. Similarly, advertising can be subsumed within UX, which means that messaging about how a company can be useful is pushed out to users along with the online services offered as part of the experience. This attitude creates c-clamp experiences. Interactivity and content goes in the middle, messaging goes around the edges.
If we want to transcend video games and c-clamps we need to keep the best of each legacy, but shed the reductive views of people that guide their respective approaches. Organizations must stop thinking of people as audiences or as users of experiences, and re-conceive them as participants in the life of their organization, through the medium of brand.
“Brand-participant” is awkward, but someone will eventually come up with the right word.
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Advertising is more sensitive to brand than UX is, but it must learn to stop projecting brand out to customers as something exterior to be seen, and instead to think of brand as extending the organization’s culture out to customers who participate in the brand in the role of customer.
UX is more sensitive to service, but it must stop being so self-effacing. Most of us prefer interacting with people with palpable, authentic personalities to people who are trying to please us by conforming to our opinions and wishes. UX often forgets that brands are intrinsically pleasing, and that allowing the particularities and quirks of brand to influence and stylize service (not only presentation) not only helps the organization differentiate and position itself, but it improves the experience.
What is needed — and what is happening right now — is both advertising and UX are searching for a new ideal that can subsume both
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