 Next up is one of our partners and we're really proud to have them here. They're all away from Silicon Valley. They came a long way to be here. You may or may not have heard from them before. They don't necessarily fit directly into this puzzle, but I think you're going to be impressed with this innovation and fabulous innovation and design agency again from Silicon Valley. So please give a warm welcome to the stage, the chief creative officer and the product manager from Y Media Labs, Stephen Clements and Shana Stewart. As was just mentioned, I feel a little bit out of place here because we're a design and innovation agency from Silicon Valley and we never make ads. I've never made an ad. We've never made an ad. We're going to talk about something else because our specialty is customer experience design and technology. So we're going to talk about that. And when Will, Will is our director of marketing, when he asked me to come on stage here and talk about customer experience, I thought no problem. No problem because I've spent the last 15 years or so of my career talking about it every day, talking about it to people who actually do it, clients and designers. And so therefore, after thinking about it for the last couple of months, I came to the realization that perhaps talking about it some more is a complete waste of time. And I might as well stand up here and tell some jokes instead. And so I'm a dad. These are dad jokes. I wrote them on the plane. I hope you like them. Waiter, waiter. There's a fly in my soup. That's not a fly. It's a QA bug. Like I said, design and technology. Waiter, waiter. There's a fly in my soup. That's not a fly. It's a loyalty program. Collect nine more and you get a free slug in your salad. Waiter, waiter. No, you see, so a friend of mine, his wife, is a flight attendant for United Airlines. That's not her, by the way, but she says that on every flight without fail, there's at least one customer who is so angry, so bitter, so mad that they start saying things like United is the worst airline. That's not her, by the way, just in case there's anyone from United here. United is the worst airline. You just lost yourself a customer and I'm never going to fly United again. And she thinks in her head, well, she smiles first professionally. And she thinks, sure, of course you're going to fly United again. You're going to go on Kayak. You're going to look at the cheapest flight. You're going to consider your mileage plan and I'll probably see you next time. And again, recently I was having dinner with my wife and she asked me the question, what are some questions that you've had from clients recently? Fun date night, I know, but that's what we do. And I thought about it for a second and I thought, yeah, okay, so there's one question that I've been asked a lot and it's come up over and over again. And it's this, we've been pitching customer experience design and it comes up every time. Yeah, I get it. It sounds cool. This customer experience thing sounds cool, but how will it move the needle? And look, I totally get it, you know, there's no point in spending all this money, all this time, all this effort on customer experience design and have it not move the needle or worse still move the needle in the wrong direction. And someone gets fired. That would be a terrible result. For example, I was recently at a meeting with the head of e-commerce from a major airline. Kind of brings it back to United, but this is not United. Otherwise, we'd be fired. And he said to me that their most vocal customers are in fact the ones who are most profitable. So it's the ones who complain the most, the ones who are so angry, so bitter. They're the most profitable and it's funny, right? And it really adds up to the fact that they end up paying for all this, all these extras that they hadn't considered. So extra legroom seats, extra bags, extra food on the flight. They didn't plan for any of this and it all adds up. It's all revenue. And so therefore those customers are actually their most profitable and it got me thinking, it got me thinking is all revenue good revenue and is it worth putting short-term profits ahead of long-term lifetime customer value? And so I got talking to Shayna here who's one of our brilliant data strategists and we started asking each other some fun questions. So Shayna, tell me design versus economics, those two things are very different. So are they related and if so, how and why? Yes, they're extremely related in my mind. When you think about what economics is, it's the study of human behavior and how it changes over time when exposed to different incentives. And you think about design, it's about creating incentives to reinforce a behavior. So think about purchasing a product or sustain usage over time. So you think about Instagram stories, highly addictive feature, a user clicks and is exposed to content immediately. In this case, the design is simple, it's intuitive and this is a positive incentive that reinforces a behavior that's the click. And you can really think about incentives in two ways. So you can have a positive incentive like in the case for the Instagram stories design that reinforces a behavior, but you can also have a negative incentive that will actually detract a user from doing that behavior. Brilliant. So what I think you're saying Shayna, correct me if I'm wrong, is it's a carrot and a stick. You give people a carrot to reward them for positive behavior and you hit them with a stick to reward them for bad behavior. Exactly. Got it. So the next one is how is our customer experience versus revenue. Are they the same thing or are they different? Sometimes. So I think we've all probably written this slide that customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, right? We all know that the companies that actually have the best customer experience are capturing market demand. But what if I told you that not all revenue is actually tied to a great customer experience? So think about, has anyone overdrafted their bank account for? I have. And it's awful. It's a terrible experience. But what if that was a great customer experience? What if they didn't charge a fee for you taking money that you didn't have? Is that actually good design? In fact, it's not. The overdraft fee is a good design because it's actually a negative incentive. Yeah. And so as a designer, you know, we do a lot of work actually in FinTech. I find designers trying to solve this by creating a fee-less banking experience, no fees, banking experience, and that is a complete waste of effort and time. And it's, you know, I have to coach them and their time is probably better spent on helping customers understand fees and helping them avoid late fees. That's a much better experience for the bank and for the customer. Brilliant. So the next one is habit versus profit. Are they the same thing? Yes. This is my favorite one. They are the same thing. This is where design and economics are on the same page. So habit is actually a sustained behavior that occurs over time. Sound familiar in product. That's actually the best outcome that someone could have. So that's because when you have sustained usage of time over time in a product, the user is actually performing an action that's tied to a monetary model. That just means more money for the business. So yes. Yeah, brilliant. And I think that's a really important one for my designers, especially to call out because we all want to create sticky experiences and talking about it, not just in a kind of emotional sticky way to clients, but actually talking about it in the context of how it will boost profit is really important. So thank you, Shayna. We'll come back and talk a bit more, but for me as a young idealistic svelte designer, this sort of thinking, this business talk is pretty intimidating, if I'm honest, but me also as a more seasoned kind of veteran pragmatic businessman, it makes a lot of sense. And it's taken me many years actually to kind of reach this state, I suppose, of business-minded enlightenment. And I finally come to this conclusion that clients don't actually hire us to make their customers happy. They hire us to make their businesses better. And sometimes when the stars align, it's the same thing. I'd say most of the time it's the same thing, but not always. And now I realize this might strike you as a little bit odd. You know, is this a creative person giving us a business presentation? I get it, but please stick with me and to kind of give you a bit of context so you understand it a bit better. Let me tell you the story. So when I really was a young and idealistic and svelte designer, I wanted to make things that were beautiful, just drop dead gorgeous. That was all I cared about. I wanted to create porn and not that kind of porn, but the kind of porn that makes products just look amazing. Visual aesthetic product porn. And I did this. I was lucky enough in my career to do this for Nike and Xbox and brands like that. And then as my career matured, I started developing a lot more empathy for customers, for the people actually using the products and experiences I was designing. And I wanted to create products and experiences that helped people that were loved, that were talked about. And I really wanted to help tackle those kind of critical life moments that people have, like buying a car, work I did for Audi, or buying a house, work I did for Trulia. And I kind of call this my experience design phase, if you will. And then when I matured again, I developed a much deeper understanding for the clients I served. And I began to appreciate and better understand their decision-making process and how really they were optimizing to make more money. And I did this, for example, helping the Home Depot double their mobile revenue in one year. And I call this my business design phase, if you will. And I think that all great designers have to go through this evolution. It's kind of the holy trinity of design, if you will. Aesthetics, experience and business. And designers that don't get it, that don't graduate along that path, I honestly feel like their careers become inevitably stunted because they don't really understand. They're not thinking about the business imperative. And I had that same advice a long time ago from somebody else. And I can't remember who they were. I can't even remember what they did. I don't even remember if they were in the same industry, but they said something similar to me, that how can you design if you don't understand business? And their suggestion to me was, why don't you buy some stocks? Because I had no interest in stocks and I still kind of fake it a bit. And so every time I get a new client, I buy like a hundred bucks of their stocks. So I bought in the past Nike and Activision and Nvidia. Nvidia went nuts. I don't know if anyone follows it, but I went up 10X so I made like a thousand bucks. So the drinks are on me, but it gave me as a designer an insight into my client's businesses. Something that I wasn't really aware of before. I started like listening to, you know, analyst reports and things like that. And we do work for first data specifically on their Clover point of sale systems. So those square type things you get in shops and restaurants and bars, you swipe your credit card on them. And we had this meet, so I bought some of their stock. I bought a couple hundred bucks of their stock and it nearly doubled. You see that 75% so that's good, right? But what we did is like we actually and I think I think this is true across the entire stock market, but there was that massive trough on the right which happened just before Christmas and it was like a number of things, a Mueller investigation, Fed rate, raising interest rates, stuff I don't really understand. And we went and had a meeting at first data right at the middle of that trough and it was with their main client and it bombed. They were not really paying attention. They were looking at their phones, texting each other like wildly because they were worried that you know the stock market was in free fall. And we weren't in tune with their business. You know, we weren't in tune with the problems they were facing and that the economics of that of their business. And it was it was tough, man. That was like a tough meeting. And in the past, I've heard many, many designers and sometimes creative directors even say things like money is evil. Business is for other people and these are all true by the way, I've heard that you wrote them down. Clients, they just don't think like us. And of course, these people all want to raise afterwards. And it's true. I think, you know, clients they don't necessarily think or talk like designers or for real people or real people for that matter. And imagine if they did and this is a friend of mine. He runs a blog. It's called What Real People Don't Say About Advertising. You know, and I don't know about you guys, but as a real person, I often find myself wishing there was more info or hoping for a more scalable solution. You know, and who is an absolutely thrilled when they fall into the correct segment. This is all shorthand, right? It's the lingo. It's the language. It's the way we communicate to sort of speed things up. So I get it. And you know, I'll be honest, like, designers aren't any better. You know, I've heard people say shit like this. You know, that must have been an amazing Kleenex website, right? Yeah. Okay. And what I've found what I kind of figured out after a while is that clients and designers, they're often talking about the same thing, but they're coming at it from different angles. And it leads to these really long, really contankerous meetings and conference calls. It's kind of like they're talking in different languages. So let me tell you another story. This is a true story. I was on one of those contankerous conference calls and I, my team were presenting a website to a client. You know, it was going round in circles and the client said, I want you to uplift the branding quotient. Literally, literally his words. And one of the designers, it wasn't me. I he said, do you mean make the logo bigger? And the client said, yes. I mean, there's probably a bit more to it as well, but the client did say, yes. So, you know, I know that actually, I just skipped the slide. Let me go back one. And it's this sort of disconnect that I think makes it really hard for anyone to actually buy or sell work. It's just a disconnect. And they're talking about the same things, but they're doing it in different ways. Designers are not talking about the client's priorities. The clients are struggling with what the designers are saying. It's confusing for everyone. So I know there's a lot of creative folk here from different places with different job titles. So let's play a little game. We call this say what. So, Shayna, you're the client. Ask me this question. Steven, why is this variation better than the other ones? So, I've had this question come up and the answer is usually or rather what they're trying to say is really have you tried other things and do you have data to back up your recommendation? Yeah. Exactly. How does this variation create more value without adding more costs? So, yeah, as designers, sometimes we forget that clients are running businesses. Crazy, right? And what we're trying to do or what we need to do is show them how we've considered their operational realities. Shayna. Then actually, how do you increase time to value for this potential customer? That's another one I've heard. So, okay, I get it. You mean how do we make this experience fast and quick? It's a funny language, right? Then we all talk. And so, as a creative director, I often find that my role is translator. That's my job. Day to day. And I've spent many years helping clients understand designers and many years helping designers understand clients. And one thing I've learned is it kind of comes down to this, if you will. Designers get obsessed with the details. They want to create an experience that's simple, human, one-to-one, personal, emotional, all those, all those good things. And then clients, well, you know, they love scalable, enterprise-ready solutions that are one-to-many. And they are quite rightly obsessed with how this is going to make them a gazillion dollars. But of course, these two things, I don't think are at odds. You know, they are each mutually beneficial. And it's not even like it's binary. It's a spectrum. People move along it. And I know designers who can think about scalable, enterprise-ready solutions. I know great clients who can think about simple, human, emotional experiences, you know, in design and technology. And they're the two, the two sides to the same coin, if you ask me. And it's made me come to this realization that design itself is really a tool for making businesses better. So here's what I want you to walk away with. You know, as designers and technologists, we're not artists. We're not creating art. For no other purpose and it makes us feel good. We're designing and engineering solutions that make businesses better. And that's our job. Plain and simple. So at Y Media Labs, where I work, I'm the chief creative officer there, we have this way of thinking built into our DNA. And every day, we strive to use our superpowers of design, strategy and technology to help build better businesses, to help create lasting impact for our clients one to one and one to many. Thank you.