Personal Ads Of The Future Have Arrived

March 16, 2020

This article was originally published at DM Magazine.

NPR radio recently hosted a fascinating hour on the history of User Experience (UX) Design featuring the former design editor at Wired and founder at Fast Company Design. The show’s guests called for a new design philosophy for the digital age to make smartphones and surfing the web more elegant and user-friendly — The Influence Of UX Design Is Growing. These Authors Say It Should Be More Positive.

However, the concept is not new. The show cited the book User Friendly, which highlights the history of user-friendly design which spans over a century of sweeping changes, “from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era.” As the modern age gave way to the smartphone era, the design of products and technological innovations focused specifically on improving user experience.

Consumers have grown to not only enjoy user-friendly accessibility, but to expect it. Coupled with the shift in customer demand, digital transformation has expanded across all industries, encouraging increasingly nimble, data-driven campaigns.

Success in the digital economy revolves around data. A marketer’s ability to capture it, leverage it and refine it will deliver actionable and impactful insights. Modern marketing uses data to segment and target customers, thereby predicting unique consumer likes, dislikes and future behaviours.

Adastra, a global data company with shared European and Canadian headquarters acquired Prague-based Proboston in 2018 to tap into its work in aesthetic, UX design capabilities, and launched Proboston North America to help Canadian marketers and brands unlock and drive insights from data.

User experience design (UX design) is the technique of creating websites, apps or products that provide appropriate and meaningful experiences to users. UX is often conflated with UI (user interface) design. However, is much broader than just the interface and involves characteristics not just of design and brand, but of usability and purpose.

UX design creates an experience for the end user that works at the primal levels of emotions and attitudes. At its core, good UX design requires an understanding of human behaviour, values and cognitive biases, as well as goals of consumers and employees using the applications

An underlying reality of many data driven marketing projects is that they don’t always reach their full potential. Project success is not solely about delivering the right data at the right moment. In fact, a common reason they fall short is from lack of adoption. Despite a project’s sophistication, if both internal and external end users are not fully committed and in agreement with the project’s overall mandate, it is almost guaranteed to fail.

Studies have shown that a good aesthetic user experience increases technology adoption by users, whether they are customers, employees, managers or executives. What is often missing is not functionality, but something that is tied to the sensory experiences of the end user.

If the end user of any system is not fully engaged in terms of usability , the project is unlikely to survive past its initial stages. We are beginning to see more companies understanding and embracing this concept of UX design and ready to implement it, creating a profound employee and customer experience.

Nevertheless, user experience is no longer a competitive advantage – rather, it is a baseline for success.

With emerging technologies being adopted as part of organizations’ Digital Transformation journeys, new types and larger quantities of data are providing in-depth insights into customer behaviour and satisfaction.  This allows organizations to adapt and improve their marketing strategies, enabling them to create hyper-segmented and personalized experiences for customers.

These custom experiences can include varying content, such as products or services, or can dictate which marketing channels are used to execute campaigns.

Personalized video ads of the future are here

Science fiction has been teasing the idea of personalized video ads and content for decades. Perhaps, most famously in the Steven Spielberg classic, Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character is followed along by a series of personally targeted ads as he walks (John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now). Fast forward nearly two decades and personalized marketing is becoming the new reality.

Emerging technologies and Digital Transformation are increasing both the velocity and variety of data which offers greater insight into customer behavior and needs. This can be leveraged to develop more personalized marketing strategies going forward.

Modern marketing is all about reinventing relevance by ensuring that people are seeing content that relates to their lives.

Data drives omni channel marketing, allowing for custom experiences based on user habits and preferences.  The use of customer relationship management (CRM) data and AI help elevate personalized video, enabling it to learn and hone its results over time to become more powerful.

For example, T-Mobile improved the effectiveness of its email communication to its customers using a personalized video platform called AmetIO. The platform realizes the power of AI and the cloud to personalize content at scale and tell a visual story to engaged consumers at an individual level. The use of personalized videos resulted in the fourfold increase in customer acquisitions.

Marketing is truly at a watershed moment. The combination of visual, aesthetically pleasing and UX design combined with an AI and Data-Driven Approach are set to explode across the landscape of brands and savvy consumers.