Craig Pladson

Minnesotan marketers get interactive. This has never been more apparent than it was this past Wednesday at the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit. The theme of the conference was “Celebrating the Digital Decade,” which served not only as a testament to the monumental changes we’ve experienced in digital, but also a celebration of MIMA being the oldest and biggest interactive marketing association in the country. MIMA has pioneered a local path that allows organizations to elevate their talent by offering premium programs that present high-quality speakers to share the digital love.

There were more than 60 speakers at this year’s MIMA Summit, who were organized into 10 different tracks for attendees to choose from: content and storytelling, digital decade, e-commerce and e-mail, marketing technologies, measurement, mobile and screens, the nonprofit perspective, social media, trends and user experience. Colle+McVoy sent a group of people from various disciplines in order to take in as much as we could from the 40 different sessions.

Outside the two keynote speakers (Avinash Kaushik + Chris Anderson), I spent most of the day attending sessions listed in the user experience track. With the hope of capturing the perspective of everyone who attended from Colle+McVoy, I solicited feedback by asking for two or three sentence descriptions of themes they identified throughout the day. The unpredictable nature of the Web and technology rose to the top. Avinash’s opening keynote talk set the tone, “Predicting what the Web will be in five years is impossible. What we learned six months ago is irrelevant today. Which is why we all continue to do this and why all of you are here. That’s what I love about my job.” Avinash closed by talking about how failure inherently follows the unpredictability of innovation. By failing fast, interactive marketers can swiftly adapt to the real-time changes in consumer behavior.

The idea of unpredictability carried over into the first session I attended, titled “The Future of UX” by Boon Sheridan. “You can’t put things in motion and predict the future of digital and technology because it changes so fast. Focus on the now. The reality is that we can’t solve for design problems that don’t exist today,” emphasized Sheridan. He continued, “Design for interruption. It’s impossible to perfectly guide someone through the digital ecosystem.” The idea of digital ecosystems has become a common phrase among UX professionals and digital strategists. Given the ecosystem’s unpredictability, Sheridan recommended starting all digital projects by storyboarding a few different use-case scenarios and then layering in the navigational and content gaps that exist. From there, teams can brainstorm possible solutions before initiating design concepts.

Edward Boches and David Armano also covered the unpredictability of innovation in their session “Group Therapy for Would-Be Innovators.” Boches argued there are three ways agencies can grow: 1) sell existing services, 2) develop new services for existing clients, 3) create new services for new clients. Innovation can fuel any of these growth strategies when the agency’s workforce is liberated to work on experiential projects. Due to the unpredictable nature of the Web and technology, the only way to keep up with the shifts in consumer behavior is to experiment. Learn by doing. And failing. Hearing these perspectives definitely solidified my perspective on how Colle+McVoy has started to formally harness innovation across the agency. My role may serve as a catalyst to identify opportunities for innovation, but it’s the makeup of the agency that allows us to produce ideas such as Squawq, Super Chatter and SXSW Talks.

My final session of the day, “Rethinking User Research and Usability Testing for the Social Web,” offered one final reminder of the unpredictability of the Web and consumer behavior. “We don’t know how to find out about things we don’t know about. People don’t act in the real world as we want them to in usability tests. People don’t live in a world doing one task with one device out of context,” explained Dana Chisnell. She said, “The Web has always been social, but it’s now more social than ever. The Web enables a powerful platform for human-to-human interaction facilitated by technology.” Because of this, Chisnell expressed the importance of rethinking how we gather people’s feedback as we create digital experiences. With the Web being an enabler of human-to-human interaction, understanding people’s online relationships is more important than ever. We need to stop looking for the things we know about in usability testing and challenge ourselves to find the things we don’t know about.

MIMA was right. The imperfection and unpredictability of the past, present and future of interactive marketing should be celebrated. It should be celebrated because our community has demonstrated an unmatched passion and interest in learning, failing and obsessing over how we can get smarter and better at what we do. There’s a reason people like Avinash Kaushik and Chris Anderson are coming to Minnesota. It’s because we’re humble enough to be obviously curious and we have some of the top brands and agencies in the country producing some of the best interactive work on the planet.