One inescapable fact—yet somehow beyond the ken of almost all digital publishers—is that an enterprise based on a volume ad strategy by definition destroys and denies content and user-experience value, while excellent content and UX strategy is an effective ad strategy. Digital publishers, however, tend to be fully invested in the idea that their product has no value whatsoever beyond lending some inarticulate gravity to the actually important stuff on the page: the ads. Failure is the new black.
Tell me, where are the automobile dealerships where the cars and trucks are free for the taking, but in order to get one you must navigate a carnival midway maze of booths where hawkers from partnering jewelry companies, tax services, and sportswear brands ply you with offers along the way? There are none. Auto makers and their dealerships aren’t that stupid. Their profit model is based on selling their product. Oh, and what about the grocery stores where everything on the shelves is free for the taking, but the aisles are filled with shoe salesmen, credit consolidation service agents, and pharmaceutical reps who follow along with you, working to get you to purchase what they’re offering? There are none of these either. Grocery companies are smarter than that. They’re invested in their products.
Well, digital news and magazine content publishers are that stupid. They pay armies of skilled reporters, writers, editors, designers, programmers, artists, and researchers to produce their distinctive product…and then work to sell it according to an ethos that proclaims the product has no value.
As you might expect, there are consequences to this destructive approach. You see, when an industry profit model does not include the product, the industry and its market get rather turned inside out and upside down. It becomes a race to the bottom.
Dystopian Publishing
Online publishing is largely broken because media outlets are built to seek profit not from their product, but rather from the distractions and obstacles they conspire to place between the customer and the product. It’s a strategy that destroys quality, destroys confidence, and destroys the product consumption experience. It’s irrationality on parade: publications set up to destroy the very things they are supposed to deliver. It should come as no surprise that such a product tends to sell poorly.
This model is the ideal for digital publication success today. Expend enormous energy and capital in producing a product, and then devote nearly all of your strategic energies toward the advertising value model that will deface and obscure it.
Digital publishers don’t need a cleverer and more elaborate ad strategy. Digital publishers need a value and UX strategy for their product. But they’re oblivious and disinterested. This fact becomes clear when you ask a couple of very simple questions:
Q:
Why not romance highly valuable content and create an excellent reading experience, and then put the ads at the end of articles where they’ll be seen with satisfaction?
A: If ads are at the bottom of the page, they’ll seldom be seen!
(I’m not interested in content or experience quality)
Q:
I see. Why must the end be “at the bottom of the page”?
A: Duh! That’s just where the end has to be!
(I’m not interested in how clever and delightful experiences can be designed for digital environments and devices)
Q:
Oh. And why won’t many people ever get there?
A: People don’t read whole articles very often.
(I don’t know and don’t care how to improve my product)
Q:
I see. Then why do you publish whole articles? And why don’t you work to improve the content and reading/user experience so that readers will read whole articles very often?
A: *crickets*
The real answer to the last is that content publishers do not, in the end, believe in the power of their product to command productive commercial activity. Yet to answer honestly would expose publishers for what they are. They’re professional demagogues; claiming to produce an important and viable product, but actively denying its value and investing no confidence where the metal meets the meat. Left to the results of the quality of their product, they know damn well they’d perish.
Here are a few questions I think are fairly interesting: Why do writers write whole articles? Why do publishers publish whole articles? Why would a publisher publish something that they don’t believe will be consumed fully? The answer is that digital publishers are merely going through the motions while their actual business is to throw lots of ads onto web pages. Avoidance of the substance and consequences of this activity compounds an irrational and destructive situation.
Publishers: There’s nothing wrong with fitting ad strategy and revenues into a publication profit model. But why rely solely on strategies that work to destroy and deny content quality? Why concentrate on strategies that, despite whatever success they generate, are 50% destructive? Why not work on strategies that are inherently 100% productive? Why so willingly concede your industry to advertisers at the expense of your own quality?
Publishers: Advertisers do not currently have your interests at heart, for they can currently succeed as you fail. As with everything else in the world, a strategy based on healthy self interest is the only one that can allow for mutual success. Why not build an enterprise founded in and dependent upon the quality of your own product and let the success of your partners flow from that?
The Answer: The Emperor Has No Content
If the content is valuable people should pay to read it. Modern publishers don’t care about content. They nearly all acknowledge they’re headed for a cliff, and they’re relying on a destructive and hypocritical strategy, which they do not control, to save them. That race to the bottom is gaining momentum and everyone but the publishers and their readers are profiting from it. And rightly so.
For the first time in its 100-year history, AIGA has decided to consider and apply actually relevant criteria for evaluating entries in a design competition. Not surprisingly, and as if on cue, the old guard cries foul.
Yesterday, designer Paula Scher published an essay in Imprint magazine that took issue with the reformatting of the principal annual AIGA design competition, newly renamed “Justified.” This competition will apparently do what no AIGA competition has ever done: have the jury consider the results and effectiveness of the work as a part of its evaluations. This is bold and odd new territory for AIGA, but better late than never, I guess.
So in light of this clearly un-AIGA-like departure from what she has grown to love, Paula Scher put pixel to screen and wrote a response piece that artfully combined soaring condescension with flimsy straw men to craft a grand, hydra-like, multi-headed insult to AIGA administration and members, competition participants, and all of their professional clients. She called her essay, “AIGA: Unjustified.” Yep, clever (she’s a designer, after all).
You should read it; it is a petulant and myopic tantrum disguised as an obtuse essay that repeatedly tosses jibes at everything and anyone who detracts from or does not serve the ego-fueled cultivation of design celebrity among an insular clique of peer artists ever consumed by the fetish of artistic self flagellation. Basically, it’s a defense of traditional AIGA culture. But I repeat myself.
One designer summed up her arguments rather concisely and appropriately as: “Having objectives is hard. Just reward me for making things I think are pretty.”
Indeed.
A comedy tragedy of errors
Given the competition description and criteria for “Justified,” Paula responds with the obtuse question,
“…did you notice that words like beauty, creativity, surprise, innovation and inspiration are nowhere to be found?”
Really? Her question here begs another compelling one: why should anyone suppose that these admirable qualities are unwelcome or irrelevant in an effective design effort, or should be considered outside the context of the “Justified” competition? Indeed, should we each propose to imbue our client-project design work with these qualities only if they’re listed in the RFP or creative brief we’re offered at the start of a project? No, it’s simply stupid to make these obtuse assumptions. Yet, this is precisely what Ms. Scher has done.
She goes on to completely miss the point and then beat up her own mistake- (or purpose-built) straw man:
“‘Justified’ changes the goals of AIGA’s only remaining competition. The goal of the new competition is not to inspire the design community to better design, but to ‘explain design’s value to clients, students, peers and the general public’ by ‘justifying’ the work. The justification is part of what is being judged.
I’ll just come straight out and say it: if educating clients is the goal here, this competition probably won’t achieve it’s goal [sic], and moreover may have bad consequences for the designer who hopes to enlighten their clients about the ‘value’ of design.”
No. Either Paula misses the point entirely or she purposes to flog her own fiction. I’m going to surprise myself and give AIGA the benefit of the doubt here by pointing out that, contest specifics aside, they’re endeavoring in this contest to encourage the development of actually useful skills among their members. For, in fact, the ability to convincingly describe the beneficial results of one’s efforts at cultivating success IS a professional responsibility and must be developed through practice. Paula Scher disagrees. Odd.
It requires a willful pessimism to assume that the presented case studies will have no impact on potential clients, and a certain willful myopia and distortion to assume that the contest itself is meant to do nothing more than “educate clients.” I’m no fan of AIGA and even I can find the genuine value in the exercised results of what AIGA is doing here; yes, even if they’re missing the point, too.
I agree that design contests are a waste of time and distract from what matters in the design professions, but it is the substance of Paula’s criticisms and what it reveals that is so shameful and disappointing. She goes on to criticize, malign, and marginalize, in various ways, all of the imagined goals and possible outcomes of a results-oriented endeavor (she does know that design is a results-oriented endeavor, right?). The result of which is that she betrays her (and the traditional AIGA) fundamental definition of design and what purpose it should serve. Her clear view is that design for prescribed aims is a naïve and worthless endeavor; design should be eschewed for artistry, and so should simply be beautiful, daring, innovative, and surprising for its own sake—client’s interests be damned. Screw the client; I need to work on my celebrity status and get some accolades from my peers, yo!
Not surprisingly, Ms. Scher demonstrates her obviously shallow understanding of results, of customer habits, of clients, and of the designer/client relationship with this vacuous statement:
“The ‘Effectiveness’ criteria are scarier. It’s rare that clients and designers will totally agree on what makes a design successful. That’s because, for the most part, clients and their audiences are most comfortable with things that already exist. Relying on sales as a demonstration of success or popular response as a criteria ensures a predictable mediocrity. It’s counter to AIGA’s goals toward better design.”
Firstly, why on earth should it matter that a client agrees with the designer’s professional understanding of design success? Initially, this is a matter for the competent designer—who should only ever take up with clients who are willing to invest in the designer’s expertise rather than be limited by their own ignorance. Later, the success will be self evident. So, again, the straw man argument. And the market public has demonstrated time and time again that it will respond to excellent, new, disruptive design. Secondly, sales ARE the appropriate measuring stick for retail success. There are other measures of market success, and these should be accounted for, too. It’s a shame that a lauded design professional would assume otherwise. Thirdly, aiming for market success in no way ensures predictable mediocrity. Rather, a designer working with clients who demand success-destroying practices and deliverables that obviate the designer’s professionalism and expertise is what ensures predictable mediocrity. No designer should entertain such unprofessional relationships or projects. Yet Ms. Scher assumes that this is all to which a designer can ever hope to aspire.
Well, given that AIGA has ever been led with this manner of unprofessional ideal, distorted view, and distracted practice, one can understand how Ms. Scher would make such assumptions; despicable though they are.
The list of myopic, vacuous, and insulting observations by Ms. Scher is far too long to list here (read the article yourself). However, in her entire essay, she made but a single astute observation:
“There have always been many complaints about these kinds of competitions in general. Work that was awarded tended to be pro bono assignments, or personal promotion pieces, or in other areas where a client didn’t interfere much. There might be a lot of work that wouldn’t immediately — or perhaps ever — have a measurable effect in the marketplace. It could be dismissed as ‘design for designers.’”
Ya’ think? This is, in fact, the fundamental problem with design competitions; they tend to ignore anything practical or results-oriented and focus solely on the subjective artistry and masturbatory qualities of the work. Thanks AIGA—design as self pleasure is sure to have a grand impact on everyone’s rent payment and payroll this month. You stay classy!
Paula made her morality and ethos abundantly clear when she observed that,
“The AIGA membership never believes that their clients respect them.”
Wow, thanks, Paula, for encapsulating the predictable results of AIGA membership in such a concise manner. I’m sure the aspiring design pro community is now clamoring for inclusion in this august preparatory institution. Sarcasm aside: no, really; thanks. You’ve likely just saved the careers of an entire generation of design professionals by revealing what it means to be an AIGA member instead of a competent and prepared design professional.
Finally
Culture creates consequences. This is what you get from a celebrity-driven, art-misrepresented-as-design culture comprised by folks ever distracted by design competition (there’s no such thing as a design competition, by the way) and subjective peer accolades. There should remain no question why I have for years been a vociferous detractor of AIGA and the distorted values the organization represents and perpetuates.
I sincerely hope that Paula Scher’s exposure of what AIGA has for 100 years worked to effect has a consequential impact on today’s design aspirants. As for AIGA and its apparent referendum on design-as-art culture—you reap what you sow. Good luck with your new competition.
