Issue No. 2
Annnnnnd….we’re back!
The Creative Factor continues with our coverage of how people use design practices to improve the way we do business, reimagine the products we use, and transform the way we live. We’re going deep-into-the-minds of designers to understand how they use their creativity to drive change and navigate the changes that impact their worlds.
First up, Halli Thorleifsson, the founder of design agency, Ueno. A few weeks ago at Ueno’s downtown New York City office, Halli said that many corporations aren’t properly organized when it comes to the product design, brand, and marketing teams. We said, tell us more. The full conversation runs below.
Then we check in with Julie Campbell, a visual designer whose original GIFs have been viewed 1.6 billion times. That seems like a lot to us, but what exactly does it mean? We explore what one-billion-plus GIF views gets you these days.
Finally, we end on a run of design news from around the world: Boris Johnson’s brand guidelines, Oatly’s marketing push into Asia, the untold story of the women who made the Internet, and a new research report that argues companies must realign their purpose around creativity, not solely customers.
Have something we should cover? Or, nearly as important, a go-to recipe for our end-of-season tomatoes? Let us know. See you next week.
Matt McCue & Amanda Tuft, Co-Founders / Editors@thecreativefactor.co
When he’s not being amusing on Twitter—“I have two beautiful children, out of three total—not a bad ratio. #blessed”—Halli Thorleifsson leads Ueno, the 60-person design agency he founded in 2014. It was just named one of the fastest-growing companies in the country by Inc., thanks to a 349% three-year growth rate on the way to $14.2 million in 2018 revenue.
Ueno has worked with Google, Airbnb, Apple, Uber, Facebook, Slack, Red Bull, and Dropbox, among others. From this vantage point, Halli has observed that when corporate product design, brand, and marketing departments operate in silos, the result is wasted effort, ineffective collaboration, and a disjointed customer experience.
What’s a solution? Merge these three departments into one cross-disciplinary team, says Halli.
Can you give us a sense of what you’ve seen when large companies have product design, brand, and marketing teams working together but reporting to different executives?
Product designers are very good at solving product problems. In the Bay Area, these are typically the biggest design departments. These are tech companies, so it makes sense there are huge product teams and design departments. But it’s a young profession and most product designers have no or limited experience in brand or marketing. They often design functional things that have no emotional, brand component, or they don’t understand how it is going to be marketed.
The branding department is usually people who have started off in more traditional branding. They love working on a big canvas, but they have a hard time understanding how they can work within a mobile screen in a way that doesn’t take away from the functionality.
Then you have the marketing departments, which are similar to the brand designers. They want a big canvas, but they maybe don’t understand the product side. Or don’t want to.
You have three pretty different types of people. They are disconnected. One team finishes their job, another team takes over.
Where do you notice the tension?
It starts at the beginning. There is a new product being worked on, and it gets divvied up so the product team starts working on their thing, the brand team starts working on their thing, and they don’t talk that often. When the branding is done, they chuck their work over the fence to the product designers, and the product designers are forced to think how they work the brand into the product. Then the marketing team is usually the last person invited. They get to see something that is pretty much finished, have little input in it, and are told to sell it.
Clockwise from top left: branding and product development for Zero, a fintech company; an example of the playfulness that imbues Waze Carpool; discovering new adventures via the Lonely Planet website; the sleek design and branding of Cowboy, an electric bike startup.
If you had the ear of the CEO, what would you recommend?
To merge these three departments, because they are all ultimately doing the same thing. Pair a few product designers with the branding designer and marketing people. Have a small cross disciplinary team, rather than everyone siloed. I would recommend that the product, branding, and marketing teams are all involved from day one.
When a company has a VP Product Design, VP Brand, and VP Marketing, do you run the other way?
No, no, no. Just because they have these different teams, they can still work well together. Often, they don’t, but sometimes they do. Airbnb understands branding really well. It flows through everything, not just the branding team. Apple is maybe the most famous case. At their best, they have a brand where everything you touch feels like Apple. These companies have a cohesive experience.
What ends up happening in many of these cases is that there is an insider view, and the brand team says, The brand is great, but the product sucks. Or vice versa. But the customer never thinks about it that way. They just have one perception and think, This thing sucks. Or, This thing is great. Or maybe the worst case, they don’t think about you at all.
Is that a reflection of companies structuring themselves in ways that make sense internally, rather than in ways that best suit the needs of customers?
Yes. One way to see if a company thinks about themselves first or their customers first is to look at the company website. You can often see their organization chart is almost directly mapped onto the website. It’s not tailored to fit user needs; it’s tailored to fit the internal teams. This is the part of the website the finance team owns; this is the part of the website that another team owns; and this part of the website was created because everyone needed a place to put their sh*t.
It’s a problem with the web, because, in theory, it’s limitless. If you were making a pamphlet, you wouldn’t think that way. You’d cut down, cut down, cut down, because there is a limit to the space. With the web, you get these areas where people at companies think internally, It’s not worth the fight. Give them what they want. There is no prioritization.
On the flip side, a company that puts the customer first would create their website totally differently. They would put the customer experience number one and everything that confuses it or makes it worse gets cut or changed.
How would you quantify the business loss from siloed teams?
There is a lot of churn and wasted effort. But much more importantly, there is loss in terms of customer experience. Customers don’t get the best possible version of what this could be when they get the siloed approach. I would focus on that type of loss, the customers you lose, or the customers that could have been more loyal to you.
Our job when we work with our clients is to help them improve that relationship, to help our clients create a long-term relationship with their customers. A relationship built on mutual understanding and mutual gain.
We [customers] are all looking for those types of connections, and when we find them we tend to become very loyal. And the only way to create that relationship is if the entire experience is created like it comes from a singular vision, a singular voice, even though hundreds or thousands of people may have worked on creating that experience.
The brands that connect with you emotionally and are able to fulfill some kind of need are the ones that people go to again and again.
Julie Campbell goes by “Jewlybeads” on Giphy, where her 59 GIFs have been viewed 1.6 billion times and counting. “What a ratio,” says the 24-year-old visual designer who recently started working at Zendesk in San Francisco.
On the way to the ten-figure club, Julie’s dad, Rick, assumed duties as Views Watchdog. “Almost. A. Billion. Whoa that a lot”, he texted her when the number hit 990.5 million in early January.
A few days later, the number increased to 998.1 million. “Pretty cool”, Rick wrote, punctuating the text with a smiley face emoji wearing sunglasses. Then he began refreshing the GIPHY page for the next few hours until it finally happened. “BILLION...Congratulations,” he messaged Julie, citing the day (January 14) and time (3:44 p.m.). Since then she has added another 600 million views.
Julie says the views have brought a sense of validation that her work is “somewhat relevant.” But she doesn’t receive so much as a nickel for her views on GIPHY, or when anyone else uses her GIFs outside the platform. “I wish,” she says. “I knew what I was signing up for. It would be cool to be paid for it, but it was never my expectation.”
She also has never tried to parlay those 1.6 billion views into a higher freelance rate. If she tried anything, she’d discuss the possibility of a collaboration with GIPHY. Her work posted on GIPHY has been seen by more people than she ever imagined, but that hasn’t necessarily translated to anything life-changing. In 2019, billions of social views don’t mean what they used to.
The State of the GIF
Giphy is a digital platform where users can upload their GIFs, files that support both static and animated images, on their personal pages for free. In 2018, GIPHY served up more than seven billion GIFs and stickers to 500 million people every single day. Launched in 2013, the private company has raised $150 million and was valued at $600 million during its last funding round in 2016. GIPHY, which makes money via advertising, was not profitable as of March.
GIPHY defines a view as “every time a GIF has been served through GIPHY’s services or technology...A GIF view on GIPHY is a sign of relevance, share-ability, and popularity.” While the view definition is a bit loose, the important takeaway is that views indicate relevance and popularity.
Who owns the GIFs? “You own all the content you upload to GIPHY, but you give us permission to use your content on GIPHY and everywhere GIPHY can be found,” GIPHY states on its site. (GIPHY did not respond to any questions for this story.)
As for who can use the GIFs: “Generally speaking, you're only allowed to use content that you find on the site...solely for personal and non-commercial purposes,” states GIPHY. As is the norm on social platforms, it is free to use GIFs in the manners above.
GIF creators should be credited for their images, but it’s not uncommon to see someone credit GIPHY as the source, rather than the creator. Or not credit the creator at all. GIFs don’t have source names printed on them. As an image travel across the internet, to Slack channels, Twitter feeds, and beyond, the creator’s name can get lost in the digital ether.
A Question of Source Credit
Julie has evolved quickly as a GIF maker. Her first cuts in 2014 were basic flashing colors. Over the years, she has carved out a groovy style that blends bright colors, pop culture references, and motion graphics. Her pink-on-pink Nicki Minaj “Prague” meme has been viewed 5.9 million times, while her Gay Pride Hello Sticker with wavy, rainbow-colored “Pride” text has passed 16 million views. (Editor’s Note: Matt commissioned GIFs from her when he was the Editor of 99U.)
She originally joined the platform to get the GIPHY link, so she could post her GIFs to Facebook. While she can’t pinpoint a conclusive reason why her GIFs have taken off, she thinks it might have to do with being a certified GIPHY artist and being able to use hashtags alongside her images. One thing is clear: “I didn’t do this with the intent of having 1.6 billion views or getting money from it,” she says.
If GIPHY were to ask Julie her thoughts on how to improve the platform for makers, she has some ideas. “It would be cool for the GIF to have a banner at the bottom with the usernames. Like when you reblog something on tumblr, it always shows the original source name,” she says.
Then there’s the question of whether creators should receive something when their GIFs are used by others: “It’s tough because GIPHY, as a platform, has some percentage of images from artists who spend a lot of time making that work. And then there is another percentage of screen recordings of TV shows and video clips—would those people deserve the same pay percentage for basically stealing something off YouTube and editing it pretty simply?”
She adds, “I guess that wasn’t a suggestion. It’s: Who is getting paid here?”
Perspectives / The Culture Round Up
What if there literally wasn’t a word to describe your product? You invent one. Non-dairy darling Oatly created a whole new category for plant-based milk—and a Chinese character, with Edelman—to expand into Hong Kong. Savvy move, as “fibrelicious” can easily get lost in translation.
Playbooks are being updated at 10 Downing Street in London. Here’s your guide to Boris the Brand: Be Italic. Be Regular. Be Boris. (Hey, it takes our mind off American politics.)
What happens when we interact with people whose view of the world is different from our own? The world does not end. In this fascinating and relevant episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, Columbia Business School professor, Adam Galisky, discusses the benefits of reaching out to people unlike ourselves.
On the nightstand: Broad Band: The Untold Story of The Women Who Made the Internet, from Claire L. Evans, an illustrated history of modern computing and the internet, from the women who helped create it: “By the mid-twentieth century, computing was so much considered a woman’s job that when computing machines came along, evolving alongside and largely independent from their human counterparts, mathematicians would guesstimate their horsepower by invoking “girl-years,” and describe units of machine labor as equivalent to one “kilogirl.” This is the story of the kilogirls.”
ICYMI, Forrester’s “The Cost of Losing Creativity” report details why brands must invest more in creativity to stand out from their competitors. “When brands...deliver creative differentiation in all their digital, physical, and communication experiences, marketing will fundamentality realign around creative problem solving as its core offering,” reports the research company. Here’s why Forrester says Creative Experience is the new Customer Experience, which, for acronym aficionados, is CX is the new, uh, CX.
Forrester surveyed more than 100,000 customers to measure how well brand experience strengthens customer loyalty. For the fourth straight year, the results showed flat growth among the 300 U.S. brands in Forrester’s CX Index. Customer experiences via web or apps are virtually indistinguishable, concluded Forrester. Brands must look beyond functional customer experiences to differentiate themselves and drive growth.
One reason brands must take a new approach is because of pervasive digital sameness. UX interfaces look similar across competitor groups, from airline boarding passes to food delivery services. “What can make one brand different from another when the experience is built from the same common technology platform, designed to solve the same user or category need, and programmed for the same two devices?” asks Forrester. “Creativity.”
Forrester also discovered that brand adtech/martech spending is disproportionately high, in relation to creative costs. (Forgive us for writing “martech.” It is what it is.) Between 2017 and 2022, Forrester projects brand adtech/martech spends to grow by 20% combined, compared to 2.9% for creative agency services. This leaves little room for brands to build upon their tech investments and expand creatively. “Technology has become a commodity, while culture, creativity, and strategy make all the difference,” Vittorio Bonori, CEO of Publicis Groupe Italy, told Forrester.
So what’s a brand to do in this sea of sameness? Forrester recommends shifting budgets so tech and creative spends are more balanced. By doing so, brands can rethink Customer Experience as Creative Experience. “A key characteristic of this new moniker is the broadening of the channels and executions associated with it,” writes Forrester. “Where customer experience is predominantly associated with owned digital channels, creative experience includes all conceivable brand touchpoints: advertising, content, experiential, digital products, customer service, and more.”
