Brittney Urich: Connecting Content and Design – Episode 57

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Brittney Urich has been connecting content strategy to UX design from the very start of her career.

As a senior user experience designer at Ogilvy’s Denver office, Brittney educates both her clients and her colleagues about how content and design support each other.

Brittney and I talked about:

• her background in professional writing, content strategy, and UX
• her work at Ogilvy bridging content strategy and UX practice, both internally and with client education
• how she ensures that “content is in the room from the get-go”
• Ogilvy’s Operating System (OS), their holistic service aimed at integrating all of their agency capabilities
• their flexibility and adaptability in working with clients
• the make-up of their experience design team: researchers, data strategists, designers, UX writers, content strategists
• her unique role in spanning content and UX practice, and similar hybrids among her colleagues
• how they assemble teams for each client project and the “need for content and design on almost every project”
• the importance of integrating research across a project’s lifespan
• how they balance and allocate internal domain expertise across projects
• how their engagement managers and project managers work with clients
• how her work as a startup founder first inspired her to connect design and content
• how Ogilvy built their experience design practice, having integrated a Denver agency called Effective into their organization

Brittney’s Bio

Brittney Urich is a senior experience designer at Ogilvy, where she specializes in helping others understand content strategy and implement it on design projects. She is passionate about crafting digital experiences that solve problems in a human-centered, empathetic way.

As an advocate for the integration of user experience design and content strategy, she regularly speaks and host workshops about how the two disciplines work together. When she’s not working, you can find her hiking, exploring national parks, or cheering on Michigan State University’s basketball team.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

Over the past several years, content strategists have discovered UX design, and UX designers have discovered content strategy. Brittney Urich has been bridging those disciplines from the very start of her career. Brittney is now a senior user experience designer at Ogilvy, a venerable creative agency that has been around since the mid-1800’s. We had a fun conversation about how Brittney works with both her clients and her colleagues to show how content and design support each other.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 57 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with this Brittney Urich. She’s a a senior UX designer at Ogilvy’s office in Denver, Colorado. Ogilvy is a big agency. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later on. But, Brittney, welcome to the show and tell the folks a little bit more about your background and what you do there at Ogilvy.

Brittney:
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for having me. So right now at Ogilvy, like you said, I’m a senior user experience designer, but my unofficial title there is also content strategist, so I get to be a little bit of a hybrid. So my undergraduate degree was in professional writing and that was a pretty heavy emphasis on content strategy, but we also took some design classes, and so I really found that I loved both user experience design and content strategy. So what I do now at Ogilvy is actually teach different people how to integrate content strategy into their design process. And I might come at it from the content strategy side and be working with other designers, or I might be working with a content strategists as a formal designer on the team. But really I’m working on marrying those two practices on whatever project I am on with Ogilvy.

Larry:
That’s cool. So you’re doing client work but you’re also doing a lot of internal education working with getting UX people up to speed on content strategy and vice versa content people up to speed on UX practice.

Brittney:
Yep. That’s right. So I work on client projects 90% of the time, but there is a bit of internal education. It’s just a lot of times that comes from working on projects with people if they’ve never worked with a content strategist before and they’re trying to figure out how to integrate content into their design process or vice versa. If it’s content strategists that are used to working on projects that are really content strategy or UX writing heavy that maybe haven’t always worked with designers. So a little bit of internal education, but also a lot of client education because not a lot of clients realize that content is a pretty big part of user experience and it’s why people are there for the designs in the first place. So I get to do a lot of client education, which I love.

Larry:
Yeah, no, and I think that’s something that like… I was at Confab last year, and I was just at LavaCon last week, and at both conferences, UX writing was huge and it’s come of age in the discipline of content strategy anyway, and it’s well known, but still a lot of educating to be done out there. How do you do that? Are there common issues that come up, kind of entry points into that education process that get the conversation started?

Brittney:
Yeah, I think that… I always try to start from the very beginning, right? If we’re going to be doing a design project, let’s make sure that content is in the room from the get-go. As we’re talking about brand expression and from a visual perspective that might be, what does it look like, what kind of style aesthetic are we going forward, do we want it to be minimal, do we want it to eat bold? Well then how do we marry the voice with that so that we don’t just have this bright bold personality as a visual design. We’re also going to be a little more fun and energetic when it comes to our voice and tone.

Brittney:
So I love to get people in the room from the get-go and thinking about not just what does our brand feel like from a visual perspective, but what does our brand look and sound like and how does it talk to you at the end of the day? So I think the key there is just making sure that everyone is involved with as many points in the process as possible so that you can be aligned.

Larry:
That kind of gets at the whole unified customer experience nowadays is that it’s… And that idea and I love that you’re baking in content from the very start. I think most agencies I think are doing that. Do you have a feel for that? It seems like most agencies are doing that and most of the people I talk to are. But I get the sense from the way people talk that that’s not always the case. Is that part of your education process that people have worked with other agencies that aren’t as content first?

Brittney:
Yeah, that that’s definitely part of the education. I think that a lot of times, at least when I come in on clients, they expect content to be filled in and sprinkled in at the top after we’ve actually designed the pages, and we know what wants to be on the page, but we already have the content for that page. So we’ll just slap it on at the very end. When the reality is that the way the content is written or the format of the content is actually going to be dictating what we’re designing and if it’s the best layout to have things in different cards versus like a block paragraph versus maybe some icons and little columns and pictograms going on. The way that you write that content is going to determine the layout of the design and vice versa.

Brittney:
So I find a lot of times that clients are surprised that we want to be talking about content so early because they tend to think that once it’s been written, it’s done. And then that’s all there is to it. But we kind of have to bring them in and, “Okay, let’s rethink this. How could we transform this to make it a better experience from all sides?”

Larry:
You got me thinking about like… I’m old enough to remember the old Mad Men era almost. I only worked in New York for a while and had a lot of friends in that world. And the way you’re talking it’s like that sort of you present a comp and then you just finish it up and it’s done and then you publish it kind of idea. Whereas nothing happens that way anymore.

Brittney:
No.

Larry:
And exactly. And you have to integrate it all the way through. Well that’s interesting. So what kind of projects are you working on? Is Ogilvy kind of a full service agency now or do you have any particular market that you serve or a focus to your practice?

Brittney:
Yeah. I’ve sit on the experience design team, but what Ogilvy has rolled out in the last year or two years is what’s called The OS, which is a full integrated service offering an operating system that sort of integrates all the different capabilities. So we try to make sure that we’re making brands matter both online or in print or in ads or in however that might might be. But we try to look at it from a holistic perspective. So how do we think about the same brand translating in a print ad versus a TV spot versus our web experience and how do we make that cohesive throughout. That’s one of the things that I see a lot with clients is know they have all these different pieces, but it’s not necessarily telling a cohesive story, or they have a really good ad that’s driving people to their website. When you get to the website, you’re met with an experience that just doesn’t match with what they’ve been selling. And that’s a really jarring experience for a lot of users after you’ve built all of that brand trust. So we tried to eliminate some of that right now looking at it from a holistic perspective.

Larry:
Let’s see. So your relationships with your clients, are you typically at least involved from end to end and all those things like magazine creative or TV creative or exhibit stuff or something like that? All those various destinations or messages by which they might end up at your website or something else. How do you stitch all that together? Are you working with branding people and other folks in the organization or is there a sort of a central like client person that’s stitching it all together?

Brittney:
Yeah, it totally depends on the client. Our experience design team is much more project based. So we’ll come in and we will be doing one scope of work for x many weeks depending on what we’re doing. And that might be redesigning a section of the website, redesigning the entire website, working on mobile optimization for it. That might be doing app design for Android and iOS so that it feels a little more native than the current app does. So we come in and plug in at whatever point makes the most sense for our clients. So we want to make sure that we’re tailoring that project to their specific needs and not just redesigning a website for the sake of redesigning a website.

Brittney:
But being a part of the broader Ogilvy system allows us to, when we have those clients where we have the bigger, broader relationships with, I might just come in even if it’s only one other designer and I might come in and lend a hand as we’re designing a new web experience or a microsite just so that it can feel cohesive with whatever the branding team has been working on. So sometimes we’re working in our own little universe with just the experience design team. But most of the time we’re actually plugging into the different projects and brands that the broader Ogilvy is working with.

Larry:
Got it. I’m curious about… Are these mostly media kind of media campaigns or do you ever do more… do you build apps for people or other digital products for your clients?

Brittney:
Yeah, we’ll do a lot of app building. We do have a development team that sits in New York. And so if we want to develop things in-house, we will. But within our experience design team, we have researchers, data strategists, designers, UX writers, content strategists, so we can really do just about anything. But the last couple of projects I’ve been on, I have redesigned a mobile app for both Android and iOS. I’ve just rolled off of the mobile optimization project. So making sure that our websites are great for mobile experiences of all different screen sizes. So we will really do pretty much anything and everything as long as it helps create a better experience. We’re really focused on creating human centered design, and as long as we’re staying true to that promise, that’s what we’re going for.

Larry:
Yeah. Interesting. You’re reminding me of my… My last guest was was Kylie Hansen at Microsoft. She directs a big UX group that works on their Azure cloud stuff and their AI stuff. And you reminded me of the difference between in-house. Her job has an equally ambitious and deep and broad span. But it seems like in an agency setting, you must have a lot of learning opportunities because you’re working with so many different kinds of clients in different kinds of projects. Do you each have kind of like a broad set of skills that lets you do that or do you kind of have team members you call on for particular projects?

Brittney:
Our core has been for the last few years finance and healthcare. So I’ve gotten really familiar with all of the different financial terms that I could possibly use on a digital experience. But we do have a lot of people that have just the domain knowledge with certain clients where they’ve been working in the tech sector or the healthcare sector and we know that they’re going to be the best fit for a certain project. But because we have people divided up by role, if we need a researcher on a project, I know that I’m going to grab one of my coworkers that sits on the research team.

Brittney:
I’m sort of one of the few hybrids at our practice where I do design and content so I could be plugged in on either side or both on a project, which is a lot of fun. But for me, I’ve been specializing in finance tech for the last pretty much two years. I’ve not really had a huge opportunity to get into the healthcare sector. But one of the things that I really love about working for an agency is being able to pick up that that knowledge. It’s always a learning curve. There’s always something new to be learned or taught or shared with a client and that’s why I love it. That’s one of the most fun things I have.

Larry:
It seems like there must also be a lot of opportunities for a kind of cross disciplinary pollination there. They share things from one sector to another from one practice to another.

Brittney:
Absolutely.

Larry:
Tell me a little bit more about… Because to me the way the field of content strategy has evolved… I’m totally focused on content strategy, but it’s really hard to miss UX these days because that’s such an influential discipline on what we’re all doing these days. So you mentioned you studied both in school. Are you a little bit of a unicorn in that sense in the way you stitch that together? Or are there other folks that span both content and UX at Ogilvy?

Brittney:
I haven’t found anyone that span specifically content and UX, but we have people that span UX and research or data strategy and UX design. A lot of our content strategists focus on both content strategy and UX writing, which like we talked about, UX writing is more of a sub-discipline within content strategy, but we have some people that are really, really strong on the writing side of things, but have the domain knowledge about content strategy and some that are our content strategists that are going to be looking at things from a higher level but also know how to do UX writing.

Brittney:
I think that… I don’t know if I call myself a unicorn because I know there are plenty of people that have my degree that had a similar exposure to both content and design. But it’s something that I love being able to do because you’re right, you can’t really avoid UX design these days, but I feel like content strategy has been making enough noise that you can’t really ignore that either. And my whole spiel is and always will be that they’re both part of the user experience, right? People are coming to your website to read and learn something and digest information and that’s not going to go well if the content on the page isn’t effective and vice versa. You can’t just put a Word document worth of content on a page and expect people to read and understand it in a quick and easy fashion.

Larry:
Exactly. And I think the big, big enterprises have all figured that out. I’ve had people from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and they all kind of operate very similarly in that sense of they all integrate. But they all have a way that their teams come together, and content design or content strategy is always a part of that. How do you put your teams together for each project that comes in? Do you sort of look at what the client needs, what your skill set are, kind of build a team or do you have to learn on the fly a lot or how does that work?

Brittney:
Yeah, so we have a resource manager. Her name is Sarah. She’s great and she looks at the projects as they come in and sort of decide whose skills are going to be the most useful here. If it’s a really, really content heavy project, we might have someone that’s full-time that’s going to be doing content strategy or user experience writing. But a lot of our projects tend to be designed with a side of research and a side of data strategy and a side of content. Because we want to be attacking things from a holistic perspective. And so what she does is she figures out who’s going to be the best on the team, also who happens to be available and isn’t on other projects at the time. She assembles teams that way.

Brittney:
But we have been able to sort of pull from all of the different aspects just depending on what the project is. There are some clients that want to do research at the very beginning and they want to do a couple of rounds of user testing. There are some clients that have been doing research in-house and they want to just do testing of the designs at the end. We kind of plug and play depending on what people need, but I have found that we’ve had a pretty good need for content and design on almost every project I’ve been on, which has been great.

Larry:
Yeah. That’s interesting what you just said about how much did the clients drive that kind of decision making? You were just saying, some of them preferred to do research up front more, maybe usability testing at the end. Do you have any best practices that you’re trying to push or or better practices in terms of when and how you involve research in projects?

Brittney:
Yeah, I mean if it were up to me and I think most of our office would agree, I think research needs to be involved throughout the entire process, right? We call on… Once we’ve done all of the research, researchers are going to pass it off to designers, content strategists, what have you, but it’s infinitely more valuable to have that researcher stay on throughout the entire project and be reviewing the designs and be reviewing the content and say, “This is what we heard. This is the pain point that we’re seeing in the journey map. This is what we’re hearing from testing and I think you need to change it.”

Brittney:
And then when that researcher leaves that project, you sort of lose of that knowledge, right? You’re getting it second hand, and you might have a document that’s telling you if you’re all the things that you should be doing or should keep an eye out for. But it’s not the same as being the person that’s pounding the pavement, sitting in on the interviews with users for 20, 30 hours that has all of that background knowledge. So I personally think that it’s invaluable to have a researcher on throughout the entire project. Even if they’re not on full time during the design process, it’s just nice to have that domain knowledge and then have someone that then knows what they need to be testing later on.

Larry:
Yeah, no. The way you said that perfectly illustrates not just the research role but the role of the content person, the role of the interaction designer. I mean they all have… And again, back to comparison between enterprises and agency work. Like in enterprises, the kind of the best practice in the biggest, most well-funded places is to have that team together as a unit throughout the project and kind of sidestep that issue you just mentioned. But I can see the exigencies of running an agency you probably have to allocate like… What’d you say her name, the resource lady?

Brittney:
Sarah.

Larry:
Plugging people around. Is there some sort of like administrative or bureaucratic duking it out there to try to get that talent on your team and keep it? Or how do you… Because you’ll have a sense of like, “Man, I wish I had that researcher here.” Do you ever have to wrangle those kind of resources or…

Brittney:
I think that she does a really good job of understanding what the project needs are throughout the entire project. And so we might have like a content person for example. I might be only part time in the middle of the project once pages had been written. And I’m just there if someone says, “Hey I think we should change this” or “We are changing this design. How is this going to affect the content?” But I’m not going to be on it necessarily full time. We do a really good job of making sure that we have the balance of that. There are some clients that don’t always want content or data strategy or research done.

Brittney:
And I think that it’s not so much an internal, how do we get these people on our team? It’s more of a educating the client as to why it’s important to be having these people on the team in the first place, which is what we try to do every time we have a kickoff. We do sort of a full day of education of here’s our goals for the project. Here are the people that you’re going to be seeing and here’s their roles and why that role matters, and how it’s going to affect you at the end of the day. So I don’t know that it’s as much internal like “Man, get me a researcher back on this project.” But I think that it’s more with the clients making sure that, as we’re talking through scopes of work with them, making sure that they understand the importance of having all of those people on the project.

Larry:
Right. It just reminded me of another difference with the agency world. It’s like whoever the account person is probably has to set those expectations about like, “Look, it’s going to be a lot better if you budget for research in here.” Or I don’t know how they put the packages together. But is there some of that going on? Are you communicating with the account people about if you really want this project to go, you really need a dedicated content person, or a researcher, or whatever you see?

Brittney:
Yeah. So we’re really lucky in that we have like a full service sales team and they handle most of the projects. They look at the ask of the client, the scope of work and here’s what we think this needs to have on the team in order to be successful. So usually by the time something’s been signed, we’ve determined who’s actually going to be on the team. It might fluctuate later on. But we know who we think we need to have on that team to be successful because we are more project based within the experience design group. We don’t have necessarily account people. We have a couple higher up account managers.

Brittney:
But we have a project manager, what we call an engagement manager that’s on it day to day, and they’re the ones that’s working with the client, working with the team, making sure everything’s running smoothly and making sure we’re hitting deadlines. And they’re really the ones that are making sure that we have the people that we need to have in the room when we need to have them. But we’re lucky in that our sales team sort of irons this all out ahead of time so we’re not going into an engagement and going, “Hey, be really nice if we could do some research on this.” And I think it’s just because we’ve been doing it for for so long that we know what we need before we even start projects.

Larry:
Right.

Brittney:
In an ideal world of course.

Larry:
Yeah. But everything you said makes perfect sense that having that, it sounds like your sales team, it’s… Because I’ve known other agency people who have the sales guys who would just do whatever it takes to make the sale and then you figure it out later. It doesn’t sound like that’s at all the case at Ogilvy, so that’s great.

Brittney:
Yeah.

Larry:
Hey, I wanted to take a little sidetrack, but you mentioned when we were talking before, even before you left Michigan State, you’d done a startup there. We talked a little bit about how that was sort of the seed of your integration of UX and the content strategy practice. Can you tell me a little bit about what was your startup and what were the UX and content things that came up that led you to stitch them together?

Brittney:
Yeah, so my company was called Connector. It was a mobile application that essentially connected any students on campus to events. So anyone could create an event. Anyone could RSVP to that event. And the goal was to create smaller communities on a massive campus. And I went to Michigan State University, so there’s 50,000 students there. And my friend that I founded the company with, we were talking one day and we said, “What are the odds of us ever having met on a campus with 50,000 people if we didn’t happen to be in this class with 20 people in it?” It’s pretty slim. But knowing how well we got along and knowing that we would have never run into each other anywhere else on campus, we thought, “How can we change that? How can we alleviate some of the stress of freshmen that get there and realize there’s 8,000 people in their class and don’t know how to make connections with them?”

Brittney:
And so we’ve tossed around a couple ideas. We settled on an app and we thought, “Okay, how do people connect?” This was before Tinder and everything else started to happen, and Twitter and Instagram were still taking off. And we thought, “Okay, it’s kind of weird to just friend a person that you’ve never met. What’s a logical way to meet someone?” And we settled on events and so we thought, “Oh, okay. Michigan State has 800 clubs on campus. All of those clubs can post events. I can post an event for studying for my chemistry class that I can meet people that are in my chemistry class.” And then we just kind of played around with it and we downloaded Sketch. Both of us had taken a web design course on a couple of content strategy classes at that point. But we’d never used Sketch or Adobe XD or any of these things that exist now. And we thought, “Okay, well we’ll put some screens together and see what we can do.”

Brittney:
So we ended up going a little overboard, did probably 120 different screens and then entered ourselves in a pitch competition called Tech Week Chicago, got accepted somehow, went down there, and pitched it. Because we had created a prototype and envisioned everyone that we were showing it to thought it already existed. I mean Chicago is a pretty big hub for schools, colleges, universities, you name it. And people were asking, “How do I get this? Where do I get this?” And we thought, “Oh we could probably do something with this.” So we went back to Michigan State and said, “Hey, what departments of this will fund it?” Got some money from the university and ended up hiring a development firm to build it.

Brittney:
But the entire time we were building it, one of the things that was most important to me was, what words are we using? Right? How are we labeling the tabs? How are we labeling the different types of events? What types of events exist? And I mean we had I think 300 different types of events that you could pick from or classes or activities that you could invite people to do with you. And it was just really important to me that all of those made sense, and all of those were the most logical thing for people to find or search for. And at that point I was sort of like, “Oh man, you can design this thing, but if I don’t know what the discover button does or the alerts are for, then I’m totally lost.” So that was sort of the first like seed planted of okay, if I’m going to do the design, the content is just as important on this page.

Larry:
That’s great. I love that you… I’m really curious. Did they cover taxonomy and ontologies and things in the program you were at at Michigan State or did you have to… Because a lot of what you’re talking about there, did you have to learn that on the fly as you’re doing your startup, or was that part of the curriculum?

Brittney:
A lot of it we learned on the fly. My degree was professional writing and there were two tracks. There was an editing and publishing track and a digital and technical track. The digital technical was more content strategy UX writing at a very basic level, and that’s where I sort of started to fall in love with it. I picked my degree because it was the only degree that had writing in the name and I went, “Okay, I like this. I’ll give it a try and see if I like it.” And I thought that I was going to love the editing and publishing field. And as soon as I took my first content strategy class, we read Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson. And I went, “Whoa, this is a whole new world. This is what I want to do.” But they were all pretty basic level classes. I know now they’ve split into a full experience architecture and content strategy programs. So I think it’s a little more robust. But a couple of years ago, that was not the case. It was still all emerging. That book was brand new.

Larry:
Yeah. I don’t watch it super closely, but I gather that college curriculums are evolving really quickly trying to keep up with this stuff. Just here in Seattle, just at the UW alone, there’s multiple programs that deal with that. Well that’s cool. So whatever happened with that startup? Did you launch an IPO and then retire to Ogilvy or…

Brittney:
Oh, so we retired it a little while ago. We sold it to a couple of colleges at Michigan State University and gave them the ability to post all of their events for students and see how students were engaging with them. Had a couple of colleges that bought it, ran it for a few years after I graduated and then retired it as I started to work, not just at Ogilvy but in general after I left. It’s one of those things where it has a special place in my heart and I love it, but you look back at some of the design work you did and you go, “Oh man, how is this ever going to work?” The same with the company in general. I think it was a really great learning experience for both of us.

Brittney:
I mean it was the first time I had ever worked with developers at all. So actually watching the entire process of something that you’ve just dreamt up and sketched out on a piece of paper to turn into an actual full app was a great experience. But I think it was something that we both knew wasn’t going to live on in the long run just because there are so many other competitors in that space now that exist. Even Eventbrite alone has come out of at least nowhere for us. We were like, “Oh man, what is this?” So I think it’s been a great learning experience, but it’s been retired for a little while now.

Larry:
Exactly. Yeah. Well congrats on it. That’s great. I got to admit to little envy here because like… The first book you read when you discovered content strategy was Kristina Halvorson’s book. I’m going to go full old guy here and just say back when I was doing this, you had to make it up. Because I started doing web stuff like in the mid-nineties, and we were just all waving our arms and trying to figure things out.

Brittney:
That’s what I feel sometimes now too.

Larry:
Well I think that’s still the case. I talk to like really experienced content strategists who admit to a lot of impostor syndrome and “holy crap, we’re just making this up as we go.” But there’s that. But there’s also like… Well the woman I talked to last week, Kylie Hansen at Microsoft, she can demonstrate for example, that if you integrate content design people into a product team, that you can double your usability of that product and also increase net promoter score by eight points. Anyhow.

Brittney:
Oh wow.

Larry:
Whole bunch of data. Actually as we speak, I haven’t published that episode yet. I’m a little behind on my production. But anyhow, you’ll appreciate some of the data in there. There’s actual data that supports the practice of UX design in content and yeah. And so you as a fellow evangelist of this field give you some more ammo there.

Larry:
Hey Brittney, we’re coming up on time. I want to make sure. I always give my guests the opportunity. Is there anything last, anything that we haven’t talked about yet or that’s on your mind or that’s come up during the conversation that you want to make sure we talk about?

Brittney:
Yeah, and maybe we touched on a little bit earlier, but you’d ask like how does a place like Ogilvy end up with an experience design practice, right? And that that for me is one of my favorite, Oh I guess I’ll call it a story, right? It’s one of my favorite things to talk about because our company used to be Effective, and our experience design group, so Effective, has been around for about 15 years now. And when I was first moving out to Denver, I was looking for user experience design agencies. And I was really looking for places that would also have content. I called up one of the alumni from my collegiate, had a small agency here that was more graphic design focused, and said, “If you had to pick a user experience design agency in Denver to really, really go after and try to work for, where would you go?”

Brittney:
And she said, “Oh, you want a job at Effective. If you’re going to do user experience design, you get a job there. I don’t care how you do it – make it happen.” And I out of the blue, reached out to our former CEO and said, “I would love to work here.” Did not happen until many months later. But that was the reputation we had was a really true experience design group that really everyone, whether or not they were in the practice respected, but we’d also been owned by Ogilvy for about seven years, which no one really knew. So I think that when we rolled out Ogilvy and broader WPP decided that we were going to be one Ogilvy about a year ago, people were really, really surprised that Ogilvy had an experience design group and that Ogilvy had the capabilities to be more digital.

Brittney:
And the reality is we’d been a part of Ogilvy for so long, but we were just doing billing work as Effective. And Ogilvy has really shifted to become more deeply digital in their services. I mean, it’s not just us. I mean they have a specialty mobile app development group. They have people that focus on just SEO and SEM, other development, social media. It’s one of those things that people don’t necessarily tend to think of when they think of Ogilvy. But I mean when I came out here it was, “Oh, you want to work for Effective? And they are part of Ogilvy, and that’s where you should go out of all places.” I don’t know that I should have taken just one person’s advice, but I was very sold on it. I was like, “Great. If Ellen thinks that I should work in Effective, I’m going to work at Effective.”

Larry:
Well it sounds like that worked out pretty well.

Brittney:
Yeah, it’s been great, but it’s just one of those things that I don’t think people think of. And usually when I have conversations with people they go, “Is Ogilvy traditional advertising? Weren’t they around in the early 1900s, 1800s?” And I’m like, “Absolutely. But we are totally part of their capabilities offering now and we’re really pretty digital.” That’s one of my favorite things to talk about just because it surprises people.

Larry:
No, I love that because when I was in college, I studied magazine journalism. One of my favorite magazines of all time has been the Atlantic Monthly and that’s the oldest continuously published magazine. I think it goes back to about the same era that Mather, the predecessor to Ogilvy and Mather, and then all of the things that came. I think they go back to like 170 years ago and the Atlantic Monthly is now theatlantic.com. It’s one of the most progressive, savvy, digitally forward-thinking media sites out there. And similarly Ogilvy, the guys that go back to the 19th century are now this cool leading-edge digital agency. So that’s pretty cool.

Brittney:
Yeah, I always like to plug it because people talk to me and they’re so surprised. But no, it’s what we do. It’s why I love what I do because we’re not just focusing on design or the UI of things. It’s a little bit of everything and that’s what makes it fun. And that’s what makes it a full service, human centered experience.

Larry:
Yep. No, and I think, yeah. Because so much that we can’t just discard old media and old ways of doing things as we adopt this. There’s a lot of wisdom and lore and relationships in old companies like it, and it’s very cool that they’re… Sounds like they’re doing a good job of crossing the digital divide and making that digital transformation.

Brittney:
Yeah, we’ve been calling it digital transformation, so it’s like you’ve been listening in.

Larry:
Oh yeah. I have a whole, anyhow. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Brittney. This has been a really fun conversation. I really appreciate getting to learn more about your work.

Brittney:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Larry:
You bet.