MA Capstone
CAPSTONE ‘21: advertising in the digital age
How agencies can re-evaulate consumer strategy for targeted advertising
HOWDY!
I will preemptively thank you for giving this project a deep dive (or a brief skim). Hopefully you find these insights, opportunities and solutions just as interesting as I do. If you are here, you may be asking: “what’s this all about”? But, before I get into the “why” or “how” of how I got here, a quick note. 2020 was incredibly difficult yet, utterly eye-opening to what the Human-Centered Design (HCD) process can do, especially in a digital space. And because of the easy access to people, I was able to have honest conversations about real issues happening in advertising and social media today. Together, with my community partners, we were able to think of tactical solutions around an issue that permeates our lives, even across age groups. And now, how I got here.
So, what’s the problem?
The biggest issue with advertising can be summed up into one word: capitalism. Of course, that isn’t something that is going to change anytime soon. But beyond companies needing to sell and people needing to buy, advertising is a lucrative part of the economy. According to a Buisness Insider article in 2020, advertising was a $236B industry. In the same article, I noticed that out of the $236B, $166.8B of the industry revenue was from targeted advertising. Targeted advertisements are ads served to specefic users based on their online searches. This means most anything you do online can be sold to advertisers to target you.
Then I came across a Forbes article from 2017 that stated companies like Facebook, Youtube, Google, & Instagram make over 85% of their yearly revenue from selling users’ information to ad agencies. Looking at a numbers like that makes it crystal clear: advertising isn’t going anywhere.
With so much money in this industry and advertisements becoming more specefic on social media, the problem became clear. As ads become increasingly specific, people start to carry over these perceptions of self into their everyday lives.
How I Got Here:
The first time I thought about advertising in a critical way was when Cecili Thompson Williams came to speak to our cohort. She talked about this book, “Winning the Story Wars.” She said it was an entire book about advertising history, myths, and consumer psychology. Even more specifically, it was a book about how marketers have become the biggest mythmakers of all time. When I got that book, I flew through it. The entire book made me realize that what I had previously been doing for 4 years was mythmaking. We were crafting ideas to tell people a story to buy a product. And this made me think, what if the final product was really a social impact campaign instead of a product based campaign? What if the final product was finding a way to give girls more self confidence or to connect users to small local shops? What if the final product was actually not a product, but a system of thought that could change advertisements forever?
Design Goals
To start this project, I needed to get aligned going into the bulk of the research. The two main questions I went into this project with were:
How does social and digital advertising impact society’s behavior?
Where does the journey start and end within the advertising agency?
Then, after considering these questions and figuring out how I wanted to proceed, I found that the goal needed to be more specific. With a clearer design goal, the research would be more fruitful in the long-term. Eventually, the design goal became:
We want advertising agencies to reevaluate consumer strategy for targeted advertising.
A Final Word:
This project is on-going and just the tip of the iceberg to the ideas and solutions that can be made from this research. The final presentation is just a few ideas without information on implementation. Moving forward, I hope to find more creative solutions using the HCD methods and the research from this capstone project.
