New kid on the block

In late 2008, while serving as the lead designer for the Yahoo! Ad Platform, I noticed American Express featuring videos of small businesses across the US in premium display spots. This caught my attention because of my connection to small businesses, working at my family’s restaurants and brewery in Los Angeles. Witnessing this movement kindled a profound desire to be a part of it, fueled by my unwavering belief that the future is hyperlocal. At that stage of my career, I was well-versed in performance marketing and adept at creating scalable revenue-generating products and platforms for large corporations. My curiosity shifted towards understanding the brand and growth strategy behind fostering a groundswell.

I was surprised to receive a call from a prominent recruiter representing some esteemed, award-winning ad agencies. They sought a designer with a diverse background in digital product design, hardware, software, service, and system design to bridge the gap between traditional and digital advertising. To my amazement, I was also fortunate to have received an offer from Apple, an opportunity to lead their iAds design group.

As I pondered these incredible prospects, I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed and humbled by the recognition. However, amidst the excitement, a sense of introspection took hold. I realized that accepting the offer from Apple would have undoubtedly solidified my career path in ad tech, but deep down, I knew it wasn't what truly inspired me.

With earnest reflection, I followed my heart and embraced a more modest path. The call from the recruiter catalyzed self-discovery, leading me to prioritize a meaningful cause over conventional success. I chose to join Crispin Porter + Bogusky, not because it was the most prestigious choice but because it aligned with my core beliefs and values.

The decision to work on a movement I genuinely believed in, supporting local businesses akin to the one I grew up in, felt like a calling. While the allure of big names and grand opportunities was enticing, my heart yearned for something more profound – the chance to experience the making of a movement I believed in.

So, with humility and gratitude, I embarked on this new journey, hoping to contribute my skills and passion to a cause greater than myself. I knew it wouldn't be the glitzy and glamorous path, but it was the one that felt authentic to who I am. And ultimately, that humble decision led me to find a profound sense of purpose and fulfillment in my work.

When I joined CP+B, I was assigned to lead experience design for the following categories in the American Express ecosystem.

Small Business Saturday - Shop Small

At the core of every booming neighborhood, there are small businesses that galvanize a community. Shop Small started as an effort to spur the economy during a recession and achieved significant acclaim for creating a culture around supporting local businesses.

Nextpedition

AmEx was known as the traveler’s reward card, their Platinum card subscribers were highly engaged in using their travel rewards to book travel. However, the aging Gen X audience was shrinking and moving away to other products in the marketplace. Trending data indicated that the next primary market to target for travel spend was Gen Y (millennials). Nextpedition was intended to gain traction with a new audience to augment their declining memberships.

Plum Card

Plum card was AmEx’s first flexible charge card for small business owners. They saw this as a solution for the declining memberships in their Platinum card business (which could have been an early indicator of a declining middle class). It gave companies the option to delay payments up to 60 days. The card owners had to pay a membership fee and could earn cash-back rewards for paying off their statements early.

Open Forum

No system is complete without a forum/blog for their subscribers. Open Forum was a place where small business owners could learn and get inspired through articles, tips and editorial flourishes. Sharable content was critical for getting the word out and the ancillary revenue from add-on services for members was a critical feature of this platform.

Shop Small

Our assignment was clear; we needed to create a groundswell. This was the first time an ad agency attempted the bold move of designing and building a product to coincide with an ad campaign. CP+B, when helmed by Alex Bogusky, had a reputation for pushing the boundaries in advertising to achieve experiences that transcended two-dimensional surfaces, and this was the beginning of a series of apps that came out of ad agencies. When I started this project, it was unlike anything I had experienced before joining. The active brain trust of this account had over 40 people involved in the daily operations of design; there were only two engineers, and all of the designers were traditional graphic designers with one or two years of experience designing out of school. While I had been at companies with thousands of employees across dozens of campuses, the practice of agile methodology and daily sprints never exceeded nine people, even for a significant kick-off. This was a major culture shock.

Defining a problem

Personas

I learned at tech and manufacturing companies that there isn’t a single end-user when designing a service. A system has many users and many permutations of each user. In this case, the personas that we needed to understand included; the business owner (advertiser), their staff (publisher), their audience (consumer), and the internal AmEx user (service admin). This was very different in the advertising tech world - the targeting parameters are general for a broad reach and missing the range of EQ needed to connect on a deeper level. My challenge here was convincing the team that we needed access to more than one user to formulate a comprehensive understanding of the landscape. What we learned while generating the videos turned out to be the most influential research as we had to be in the field to learn about the subjects and their stories. The filming of the ads was precisely the type of field study needed for the UX designers to have deep empathy for the end users.

Deltas

The stories and conditional use cases were thoroughly analyzed and themed from the shoots. We needed to understand the pain points in detail before we could map out the problem space for any personas. Any designer could develop a series of ideas, put the visual polish on it, and wow the client; however, we needed a method to validate beyond surface aesthetics. Sometimes the concept is poorly understood until users find utility in what they engage with. I was searching for meaningful data and took the entire team on a ride through mental gymnastics. The key delta was educating consumers that they could join a movement by supporting it with their dollars. Amazon created a culture of the race to the bottom for retailers, and American Express wanted to convert consumer behavior to support local businesses and their membership ecosystem. Another delta was creating a low barrier of entry for small businesses to participate and get the support they needed for marketing, outreach, and customer service.

Pitches

The 40+ people became untenable at some point, and we broke it down into 5 pods that would internally compete with each other for exec attention. The team that won the execs' hearts would move on to the next round until there was one winner to pitch an idea to the client. The culture shock I experienced was made exponential when I understood this was the traditional ad agency process of getting ideas to market. This required the judges to be well-versed in the nuances of the client ecosystem. While that may not have been the case, it was the agency’s foray into designing applications and services, and it was considered as good as any process at that point. I’m not Don Draper in the image above. However, it’s not far off from illustrating the environment at CP+B. We had a panel of 6 white, straight men who judged everything. To be fair, this is a company based in Boulder, CO.

Gamify the experience

We sold through the idea of an engagement app; the next step was to develop the mechanics for a sticky experience. We knew their audience loved cashing in on rewards and found a direction we felt we could flex our chops on and create a new marketplace. We wanted to gamify the experience and make the users ambassadors for local businesses, reducing the friction for small businesses in participating. This was a 180 shift from what Yelp and other discovery tools were doing then, making small businesses do all the work while harvesting a percentage of their returns. As an entrepreneur from a restaurant family, I knew the dilemmas of operating on slim margins - we didn’t want to add more burden on small businesses. We wanted to design a feedback loop that would enable the community to support each other.

Game Mechanics

Before the age of natural language processing models and AI, we had to develop a rule-based system to determine intent. This early attempt was known as Semantic Frame-based Representations. We used nodes and links to represent concepts and their associations. What’s important to note is that this is at an ad agency, not a tech company. What I attempted here had not been done at an ad agency before, and I likely was not the right person to do this job. Still, I was so curious about how to emulate more sophisticated models in the presentation layer that I wanted to spearhead the project nonetheless. In developing the logic for the backend to process missions and rewards, we determined that we would also have to train frontend users on generating missions. Like design templates and style guides, this gaming semantic guide was an essential aspect of machine learning.

We imagined a series of these that could be layered to run concurrent missions, and we also conceptualized an unlocking feature for more complex tasks with more significant rewards.

Merchant Entry

The success of this system relied on extreme ease of use. We needed to minimize the cumulative steps for small businesses. Owners and managers didn’t have the mental bandwidth to navigate through a hairball of madness to verify their accounts and activate their businesses on a new, untested platform. We contemplated auto migration, however, as we will learn time over time, systems fail to integrate. Machines will go wrong, and even with successful migrations, there are casualties. We didn’t want to risk losing customers and decided that the gesture of invitation-only made the experience more desirable for small businesses to participate in. This coincided with the movement towards UX transparency, and now you’ll see both opt-in and opt-out of entrapment patterns in the wild.

Merchant Verification

Opting in meant that the small business would be verified through an AmEx service layer. If it’s not a verified small business, the service doubles as lead gen and allows applicants to subscribe to AmEx merchant services and card products. If a company is successfully verified, its public-facing data (hours of operations, contact info, type of services, products, etc.) will be passed to our gaming platform.

Small Business Marketing Support

We knew we could only achieve the front-end experience if we enabled a powerful publishing and distribution platform for small businesses. Giving them the power of publication was a massive step towards automation. We didn’t know it then, but many third-party services arrived after this exercise - had we focused on executing this feature in the form of an API, we could have sold a service. Syndicating content across networks is still a manual process today, and while many services automate the process, new publishing platforms will continually emerge and break APIs.