What would an industry-leading ads experience look like, for us?

Challenge

Our client knew their ads experience was trailing competitors. They wanted to look to Gen Z to understand what they value in digital interactions with brands to help them shape both the future of their ads experience and the future of their platform in tandem.

Approach

We distilled down their lofty goals into three research questions:

1. How do Gen Z’s attitudes, values, and expectations for brands differ from older generations as a result of social media?

2. What attributes lead to a successful consumer-brand interaction for Gen Z on [client] vs. the competition?

3. How does Gen Z’s relationship (mindset, goal, behaviors, product experience) with [client] differ from competitors?

And designed a multi-modal approach to answer them:

• Canvassing news sources and academic research

• Interviews with subject matter experts

• A diary study with 21 Gen Zers in the US and India

• In-depth interviews with a subject of 12 diary participants, including a context mapping activity

• A small survey (n=98) to validate qualitative findings

Outcomes

We created a framework to outline the ideal ad experience: one that aligns trust, excitement and mindset.

We outlined 3 core mindsets that we observed across platforms and mapped a lesser-known mindset to our client: they were trailing the competition because the industry-leading experience was designed for a different content consumption mindset.

We designed started concepts that would shift the ad paradigm on our client’s platform to one that reflects the mindset and behaviors users most often exercise on our client’s platform.

Industry
Technology

Team
Design director
Principal strategist
Project sponsor

Role
Selecting methodology
Managing recruitment & budget
Designing research activities
Managing asynchronous data collection
Moderating interviews
Analyzing + synthesizing data