Happy 1st Anniversary to our XD blog Stop, Drop, & Scroll!
Let’s celebrate a wonderful 1st year with a look back at our top 5 stories
We started the DigitasLBi XD team blog with a pretty humble purpose — provide a platform to share the team’s thoughts on Experience Design as it relates to our lifestyles, our fears, our ambitions, our challenges, our biggest gripes, and everything in between. We wound up with so much more. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve produced over this first year, and I know it will only get better. Our focus is our people; our theme is who we are. Our blog is unique because of our team. DigitasLBi XD is a group of strong, smart, and independent thinkers in DLBi offices across the country who will continue to share their unique vision for years to come.
Please enjoy our top 5 stories from our first year, with added follow-up and updates on their topics.
We started this blog to share our thoughts with a broader audience, beyond our office walls. This publication will be our sounding board for our day-to-day learnings, our ideas for better XD, and our questions for challenging our peers and ourselves.
1. Expense Policies are a Woman’s Problem
Author: Dawn Bovasso
A few weeks after this article was published (and picked up by Fortune), I bumped into a friend who works at Google. He exclaimed that an email recently circulated around the company talking about after-work events, linked to my article, and discussed potential policy changes. “Should there even be after work events? Should Google cover them?” Tens of thousands of people were now thinking about this issue — at a company that has the potential to be a leader in policy change.
As it turned out, they weren’t the only major brand to start having this conversation. I ended up talking to Microsoft and Netflix, among others. Friends across the country were pinging me to tell me their employers were bringing this up in meetings. This turned out to be a new — and important — take on a patriarchal policy.
Though it’s impossible for me to know exactly where any real change has happened at this point, what matters is that so many people (hundreds of thousands, according to the metrics) now think about this whenever they use or modify their expense policies. Additionally, if a company like Google or Netflix implements a change, it could easily inspire other companies to do the same. For example, Netflix pioneered the unlimited vacation time policy, and others quickly followed.
So if the success of an article lies in its impact, than this was not only the most-read piece, but also the most successful.
2. Why Women Get Fired and Men Get “Asked to Leave”
Author: Dawn Bovasso
After this article was published, I paid close attention to the pattern of the comments. Almost all of the men responding focused on my behavior: criticizing how I handled the situation, and quick to call me responsible for my own actions and say I got what I deserved. Not that they were wrong for criticizing that particular action — which my now 40-year-old self also criticizes — but they completely missed the point that comparatively it was handled with bias. The comments were the very embodiment of male privilege, a myopic view that there could not possibly be sexism at play.
I ended up going back and reading comments from all of the articles I’d published, and the pattern was consistent. So many of the male commentators tended toward the “allgendersmatter” mentality, the idea that if I’d just behaved a bit better or had lower expectations, equality would somehow happen naturally. The blame is on us women for being too… everything, and for just taking up too much space.
3. We Miss Steve Jobs
Authors: Christina Goodwin, Samantha Chaves, Michael Histen, Adam Buhler
We were very excited to publish this group article, one of our first. Our team had essentially grown up with Apple’s imprint on our lives, many of us choosing our line of work as a direct result of Steve Jobs’ inventions. Hell, our line of work might not exist were it not for his inventions. His passing was a harsh turning point; a day we knew was inevitable, but secretly hoped would never come.
The reaction to the article was very positive, especially around the office. Folks told me their own stories of how Jobs influenced their world. These stories were evenly split between the influence of the hardware and software — how much it improved their daily lives — and the influence of his business acumen and philosophy — the famous quote that pushed us throughout our careers: “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world…are the ones who do.”
After publishing, I couldn’t have asked for better praise than this:
4. The Sexist Ads that Raised Me
Author: Christina Goodwin
As someone who grew up fascinated by the advertising industry, I’ve often wondered in recent years what the subconscious effect of sexist advertising has been on me personally. In essence, advertisements “raise” the youth who see them, and in looking back at the three decades I’ve lived through, I wanted to examine this topic. How did they effect who I am today? And how do they still effect the way I think about myself?
The ads in heated debate when this article was published didn’t get made in a vacuum. They were part of a bigger continuum, a sequence of advertising “events”, each leading to the next. I’m under no illusion that this ripple effect could ever be fully stopped, but perhaps if I put my foot in the water, or just dive in, I can help to turn the tides.
5. What it’s like to intern at DigitasLBi — Summer 2016
Contributors: Yolanda Lam, Melanie Liu, Rachel Lindholm
The goal of this piece was to share with the industry something I’m sure many young people are wondering — what’s an agency internship like?
What’s been most gratifying about doing this blog, but especially with this piece, is the empowerment people feel when they share their stories. When people feel empowered to speak from their perspective, they realize how important it is to voice their opinions. We wanted to publish honest feedback about the internship experience at DigitasLBi so that we can know where it’s working and where to improve. Having these folks on our team was a real pleasure. I hope anyone considering an agency internship stumbles on this piece and feels they can also make an empowered informed decision that benefits their burgeoning career.
What’s Next
This publication will continue to provide a safe space for our contributors (in and outside of DigitasLBi) to share their perspectives and have their voices heard. We hope to do as many personal pieces as we can, to provide insight into the unique individuals who make up our industry, and the inspiring paths they’re embarking on.
The views expressed in this post are that of the authors and may not reflect the views of the agency or company.
