After 15 years in web, tech and UX, I went to work for an advertising agency. It was a shock. The creative and design process is completely different from much of what a keen UXer would consider right and proper and true. And yet, I’ve learnt a tonne about UX by coming at it from a completely different angle. Great advertising is all about provoking and building emotional responses to products. By contrast, the modern UX process has become very rational. I’ll be looking at what we as UX’ers can take from both approaches to create epic customer experiences.

1. What I learned about UX
working in advertising

2. About Dinosaur

3. Dinosaur
By connecting up the ads, mags, memes, jokes, groans, joy,
hate, data, customers, competitors, wins, fails, social streams
and the whole big, messy cultural soup that surrounds us all,
Dinosaur makes emotional connections between brands and
their customers to drive business growth.
Brand Advertising Social Performance

4. UX vs. advertising

5. Travel back with me to a more innocent age.

6. UX as a discipline emerged from engineering,
interface and product design backgrounds.
Such as;
• Apple HIG (Don Norman)
• Neilsen research
• UI design
• Psychological research

7. In time, those ideas coalesced into the
design process we all know and love
underpinning current UX practice.

8. UX processes are highly effective at
creating design efficiency
Efficiency consistently reduces friction
in performing user-tasks at both micro
and macro level
This is a very good thing

9. 10 years as head of product
meant that I learned this
stuff inside out.

10. Then I went to work at an
advertising agency

11. It was a shock

12. They. Did. Not. Give. A.
Damn. About. UX.

13. They. Did. Not. Give. A.
Damn. About. The. UX.
Process.

14. We use a different process,
a creative process
to create a User eXperience

15. The creative process is
emotionally led, often
messy, rarely driven by
the minutiae of A/B
tests and always
deeply human.
This is intentional.

16. It’s all about how you
make people feel

17. “In our factory,
we make lipstick.
In our advertising,
we sell hope.”
Peter Nivio Zarlenga

18. Yes, advertising is
emotional manipulation,
usually to sell stuff

19. It’s not efficient or rational but the
creative process produces work that
sells things to people very effectively.

20. “I warn you against believing that
advertising is a science”
Bill Bernbach - DDB

21. And yet, we use this emotional process
instead of a rational one to sell stuff.
Because it works
(as I will now show with data)

22. How emotions work in advertising

23. Binet and Field studied 993
ad. campaigns spanning 20
years, to find which are
most effective at creating
profit: rational, response
ads or emotional brand
campaigns.

24. This is a response ad.

25. This is a brand ad.

26. In the short term, as
you’d expect, hard
‘buy now’ ads
outperform fluffy,
squishy ads by a
significant margin.

27. But here’s where it
gets interesting.
Over a longer
timeframe, creative
campaigns are FAR
more profitable

28. In fact, the most
creative, emotion
driven campaigns are
11x more profitable
than the least.

29. And companies that run the most creative
ads outperform the rest by a huge margin.

30. Because response ads work like this:
There’s no residual effect when the ads are
switched off

31. Whereas if we appeal to emotion alongside
efficiency (brand + response), we build in a
subtle, but real, emotional effect over time.

32. Don’t believe me?
Thousands of products are sold for far higher
prices than commodity rivals for no other
reason than their emotional associations.
This is brand marketing 101.

33. Marmite vs. yeast extract
£1.50/100g vs. £0.78/100g

34. Marmite vs. generic
Adidas vs. generic
£199.00 vs. £17.71

35. What does this have to do with UX?

36. “I warn you against believing that
advertising UX is a science”
Frank Fenten - Dinosaur

37. Like all sales-related activity,
the end goal of (most) UX is to
sell more, at a better margin,
than the competition.
We persuade people to stay on
site, to sign-up, to book, to
convert, to buy.

38. Yes, UX is
emotional manipulation,
usually to sell stuff

39. But: we are very resistant to this idea
(partly because we are basically nice people who think that emotional manipulation is a bit creepy)
mostly because the UX discipline
emerged from engineering
and tech. roots

40. CRO, UX, A/B testing,
data science, persona modelling,
even ‘empathy mapping’

41. This is the language of efficiency
It’s not the language of emotion

42. And NEWSFLASH:
humans are not rational

43. People
aren’t
rational

44. Humans can’t
make rational
decisions

46. There is no process yet
invented that can optimise
for that many variables

47. The ad. industry knows this
The UX industry appears to
be trying to forget it.

48. The more intellectual you grow,
the more you lose the great
intuitive skills that make for
greater persuasion - the things that
really touch and move people.
Bill Bernbach - DDB

49. So, what am I saying here?
Get rid of A/B testing?
Eschew design systems?
Spurn evidence-led processes?

50. Dear
God
NO!

51. Strive for efficiency and
conversion and all that
brilliant stuff…

52. …but if you want really
great stuff to happen.

53. Make room for joy

54. Attractive things
work better
Don Norman

55. Why am I bothered?

56. Emotion + Efficiency =
Epic products

57. Emotion + Efficiency =
profitable products

58. But you need both
As I will now show

62. Tesla.
Ludicrous mode, dancing gullwings.
Unicorns.
Unicorns.

63. This mindset allows Tesla to
sell thousands of cars
before the factory they are
built in, is built.

64. And, by contrast,
the G-Wizz

65. But umm…
Elon musk crazy person.

66. But umm…

67. But umm…

68. But umm…

69. Not just the motor industry:
in almost every consumer product
category, the leading brands
differentiate on emotions,
not efficiency

74. 39%

75. Apple has neglected
UX and design efficiency
in its pursuit of the shiny

78. It’s not just status products

82. Oh yeah, software

83. Typeforms get it
Prototype gif

85. Jesper Ellesson
Freelance UI Designer at AKQA

87. So, what’s stopping us?

88. Who here doesn’t want
to work on awesome
products people love?

91. But look at this excresence

92. The same company that did this…

93. Also commissioned this.

94. The same companies that buy emotional advertising
are also saying no to emotional design budgets

95. That means we are
selling it wrong
(or worse, not selling it at all)

96. Weirdly, then:
bad UX often turns
out to be a sales and
marketing problem.

97. To get the budgets, UX’ers need to
combine emotional and rational
appeals in selling these ideas to our
target audience:
‘Management’

98. Oddly,
that sounds a lot like a
creative brief

99. So, if you want to build better products:
Spend some time
studying advertising.

100. Here comes the reading list…
Binet and Field, The long and the short of it
James Webb, A technique for producing ideas
Antonio Demasio, Descartes error
Don Norman, Emotional design
David Ogilvy, On advertising
& Confessions of an advertising man
Dave Trott’s Blog
Mark Ritson, Marketing week

101. Dinosaur
Creative communications
Manchester
M4 1FR
0161 831 0831
dinosaur.co.uk
Twitter: @dinosaur_co_uk