Human Centered

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Human Centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a managing director of experience strategy at VML, and your host for the show. Thanks for giving us a listen. Today, we're diving into a fascinating topic, the future of websites. As technology evolves at a breakneck pace, the way we have interacted and will interact with brands online is constantly shifting.

This creates an interesting tension. How do we leverage the power of AI in emerging technologies to create innovative and personalized experiences while still maintaining the human connection that is so vital to brand relationships? To help us navigate this landscape, I am so thrilled and thankful to welcome in Dave Altus, who is our chief experience design officer at VML. Dave is a leading expert in experience design and has a deep understanding of how emerging technologies are shaping our digital world. Together, on this show, we're gonna explore the limitations of current platforms, the state of play in web, the influence of AI in web three, and the ever changing expectations of consumers.

We'll also get into how brands can leverage these trends to create meaningful and impactful experiences on web. Dave, so glad to have you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Nick. Oh my god. We've been waiting to do this for so long. Thank you for having me. I'm so pumped for this.

Let's get into it. I love it.

Let's do it. For those that haven't had a chance to meet you yet, just give me a quick, you know, thirty seconds on Dave and what you do at VML and what your background is.

Nick, as you mentioned, I'm one of our chief experience design officers, and I have been with VML since 02/2004. And if you go back that far in our history, that was really at the beginning. Almost all we did at VML were website. So I'm fortunate enough to have seen this epic evolution in how platforms have evolved, how people consume this content has evolved, how we as an agency have adapted to delivering these experiences. And so I just think it's one of the most exciting times as we look forward, you know, one, three, five, ten years from now and how technology and AI are gonna start influencing everything that we do.

And in all honesty, completely turn over the pond. Everything is gonna change. Everything that we know is gonna change. And so it's our job now to make sure that our client partners are ready for that change. It's gonna be cool.

It's gonna be big, and it's gonna be hard.

And I was talking with, Brian Yamada, who's one of our chief innovation officers for those listening to the show and haven't heard that episode. It's a great episode, and we were we're kind of likening this this time that we're in to the early days of the Internet, where you you knew something was coming and and coming with a force, but you really couldn't put your finger on, alright. Well, how is this actually going to play out? And I think now that we've gone through that first cycle of evolution, we're in that that same sort of feeling like this is this is a game changer. This is not just a a a small stair step forward.

This is this is a rapid and really large leap. So given all of the changes and the the technology advancements and the expectations of customers, you know, coming out of that. How would you describe the current state of the industry as it relates to websites?

Oh, man. That's a that's a big question with a a bigger answer, I think. I loved in the early days, I got into the .com when we were hand coding pages, and they were being delivered over dial up, and every page had to have no more than a 30 k page wait. Times have changed so much. Content management systems and big platforms like the Adobe Cloud didn't exist at the time.

And so everything we did was magic. We were wizards, and it was just amazing. But at the end of the day, everything was just a brochure. And we moved into Flash. Flash allowed us to deliver these really engaging experiences that happened at the same time that we were getting into DVD interfaces and CD CD ROM experiences, and everything was a lot more contained within the real estate of the viewport.

And then here comes enterprise websites, companies that really saw the value of having these large repositories. And, you know, that's where advertising was driving people, Nick. Mhmm. You'd go in and see an ad. The first place you would go is to the.com to get a little bit more detail.

I actually still think that's very, very true today. And that's ironic because how many times have I walked the halls of our own agency and and have heard people say, man, websites are dead. They're irrelevant. And I I would have to agree that in many ways, that's a true statement. They have become irrelevant.

And I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a dart at something that I both love and I hate, and that is the design system and the platforms that deliver these systems. Why do I love those? I love them because they came on with a promise of global website governance and efficiencies for the content delivery at these epic enterprise scales. I mean, shoot. Many of the clients that we work with have upwards of 750,000 discrete pages on their website.

So you need you need an enterprise level platform to manage all that stuff. The reason I hate them, though, is they have become this restrictive albatross, a monkey on the back of all of our clients. And now what we're seeing is it's very hard to evolve, and it's very hard to change. And we end up, I think, I'm gonna use the analogy of polishing brass. Hey.

Nick, brass is a beautiful metal. When it's polished, It's still brass that doesn't hold a lot of value. Mhmm. So we get into a lot of these optimization modes. Our website gets a little tarnished.

Our brass gets a little fingerprint on it. So we'll optimize it. We'll move the button a little bit. We'll see if we can optimize the the click through rates of this flow just a little bit better. Mhmm.

And we've gotten into polishing brass over and over. The problem is it's still brass. At some point, we're gonna need to smelt that down, and we're gonna need to go to a whole new metal. And we're gonna need to upgrade these experiences big time. But it's almost too difficult.

These platforms are too big, and we've invested too much money in them. Mhmm. And therein lies the problem. And therein, we're at this fulcrum right now where the industry is gonna force change. It's gonna force a lot of those systems to be torn down.

So we think about Web three and, you know, the injection of all these new the AI functionalities. We talked, in previous episodes about, you know, agentic AI where agents can become kind of a part of people's lives. And and even you're seeing it in, you know, traditional Google searches. If you, you know, are asking a question, it'll pop up an AI, generative response to the answer for your question along with all the links. Talk about the implications of Web three and all of those new immersive technologies as it relates to the future of websites, but also directly the the role that you play, thinking about what does the experience look like and and feel like.

How do you design those sorts of things in that world?

Man, we're going back to the days we used to say content is king, and I think we're heading back to those days very quickly because of everything you just described. Mhmm. Think about a website today. We are we are in this mode where I see an advertisement. I see something that compels me to to go to a.com.

I land on a relatively static experience. Yeah. Yes. There may be video. Yes.

There may be some interactivity. But at the end of the day, what we've been doing as designers for decades is UI polish and then UX organization. We're organizing these hundreds of thousands of pages into some kind of a labeling and taxonomy schema to help people do what? Forage through a navigation until they hopefully find what they're looking for. Mhmm.

It's still a very passive and static experience. And you know what? I was talking to one of our colleagues and one of my best friends, Eric Looney, and he had this great quote. And that is that the web is being deconstructed and reformed because people are bored. And that's exactly it.

Websites are dead because they're boring. They're just these giant archives of content that we're asking people to sift through. Mhmm. Along comes AI. ChatGPT revolutionized things, and we're seeing people moving more and more of their search behaviors into AI.

And that has a dramatic impact into all of the other facets of how we deliver on web, the performance content, the SEO and SEM, the organization of the sites themselves, and how we're tagging that content. At some point, very soon, we're gonna start to see AI speaking to the AI on these websites, and there's gonna be a lot more automation. And this is where Web three comes in, a lot less centralization of these contents sitting on a website as it stands today. And so with Web three, I think we're gonna see more and more evolution of these agents and brand agents that are gonna sit in the middle and will be engaging with these agents who then go out and pull that content forward into a more relevant and timely experience. And, Nick, I think I think this is three years out.

This isn't a long time.

Right.

AI for sure today is not what we think it is, which is the scientific sci fi version of it. Skynet's not quite there. AI is not quite there. But soon, brother, soon, we're gonna see that kind of advanced intelligence in these ecosystems, and I can't wait for it.

So in that mindset, though, how can brands navigate the transition? Because if you think about the pathway from where we are now and you kinda talk the state of play to where we may be in the next few years, where you are seeing, you know, AI to AI discussions. Customer's still gonna want what the customer wants, answers to questions, being able to actually achieve whatever their jobs to be done are. And if web is the the the landing place for for something or maybe, you know, the the technology that that they use to get the answers to those questions. As somebody who's kind of building the experience potentially from the ground up, if you you you see an analogy of melting it down to to reform, how do brands navigate that transition?

I think you have to start prepping a lot of those foundational things. For example, privacy is a big deal right now. Privacy with cookies, you know, being becoming obsolete very quickly. Mhmm. What replaces these ways of authenticating people?

AI is gonna play a role with that, but the first thing we have to do is we have to start thinking about how do we get privacy compliance without authentication and without cookies, and that's gonna force clients into thinking about, you know, zero or first party data. Mhmm. And that's probably gonna happen through, like, loyalty programs or when I'm starting to get these relationships evolved with these AI assistants that will handle some of that, cookie based knowing who you are and what you're into, and then it will, again, talk out to these websites. So, again, a lot of it is that foundational stuff that we need to do with the content and the content design so that we can be ready for AI as it comes. The second thing is is, one of our partner agencies here in the WPP network is GroupSJR.

I think they are poised with one of the next evolutions of how to engage with web content at an AI level. And they've got a product that is relatively new to market called GX Manager, generative experience manager. And it is an AI overlay to a website that sits in an iframe today, but it will continue to evolve to be even more integrated. Mhmm. And it basically trains itself on all of those discrete pages of the site.

And so now your way of engaging with that content without necessarily throwing away everything you have today, it'll index all that, and you have a much more chat GPT style interface, and it's pulling back experiential content based on what you're querying. That's gonna continue to evolve. Like I said, AI isn't quite where we need it to be to be, perfect and seamless, but our network has at our hand at our fingertips this amazing new tool. That's gonna be a step change into where we get truly agentive AI assistant driven.

So in the design process, as somebody who kinda takes the the the strategic briefs and kind of, you know, fuses the the ultimate experience around the brief and ultimately the, the business objective that that sits above it, It's gonna change a lot of the process on how you would think about creating the types of content, the images, the copy, ultimately, the, you know, customer journey throughput. It's keeping it obviously contained within websites for now, but the whole way of doing work in your world changes when you think about that future, doesn't it?

Absolutely. You know, we've been dealing with atomic design for a long time now at the design system level. Again, there's value in the design system. We think about the small pieces that get assembled. Atomic content is also something that's not necessarily new, but that's gonna be more and more valuable.

And how we tag those content snippets, These content fragments are gonna be more and more valuable because those are the things that are gonna be delivered into these more relevant AI experiences. And, again, if you think about the evolution of AI and the connection of that AI into wearables, which is gonna help that AI understand where I am and start to be contextual. I saw a beautiful prototype done by another agency that I will not name, but I'm jealous of it, where they were prototyping out an experience where they were surfing through social media, and they found a look that they liked. And they were able to circle the look and then feed that look into a brand agent. The brand agent was then able to compile based on its product offering different fit ensembles that would match that, ask the person if they wanted that put into their cart, yes or no.

And in this case, it just so happens that that, was a sport. And so it was able to then say, I also noticed that you're at this location. Do you wanna go play golf? And if so, I'll book you this appointment at the golf club. I'll have this outfit delivered to your hotel so you can see how everything is connecting.

That's the dream. Can we do that today? No. Can we do that in five years? Most likely.

And so we never went to a website. We never went to a website, but the agent was branded.

I'm gonna pull on that thread for a minute because you're talking about a wearable. And then you think about what we have probably been, you know, asked at nauseam over the years, which is, well, how's this gonna translate mobile first? And I feel like we're also in an interesting time where, you know, mobile first is is certainly still very much the state of play. But even as we're recording this episode coming off of, the Super Bowl and you saw the commercials for those meta glasses that are are becoming a little bit more mainstream now that they've done the splash of the Super Bowl ad. Wearables were still feeling like a a little clunky, a little future facing, and not not quite ready for prime time.

Do you suspect that, like, when we think about the future of web design, that we're going to more rapidly expand outside of, yeah, I gotta do the desktop design and all the different screen variations that come with that. Yes. I've gotta do the mobile design and all the potential screen variations of that. But getting into that next layer and that maybe next evolution of AR where wearables, you know, how does somebody, interact with the, quote, unquote, web when they're not on a phone or they're not on a desktop? Does that cross your mind at all as you you get into this next phase?

It totally does. And that's, again, where this atomic content idea is gonna be even more relevant. But when you think about getting rid of the screens and the wearables and the on location, you know, we're thinking a lot about the screenless experiences. You know, at what point do we stop designing in the viewport? Now, again, are we close to that?

Yes. Is that something we have to worry about even in the next five years? Probably not. Another interesting story. We were doing some brand new concepts for a new client.

Traditional mode, let's deliver three concepts. Two of the concepts were pushing the envelope. They were much more experiential. They were still desktop and mobile and tablet, but they were a lot more, breaking the molds of what a design system would allow us to do under normal design systems. Mhmm.

The third one was very structured, very rigid. We had components. We were putting pictures in boxes. It was very familiar. We almost didn't show that one because it was too commodity.

It was too much of what's expected. Guess which one the client bought? They bought that one, and they literally told us we bought this because we recognize it. And so for us to get to this next level, we're going to have to get a lot of people who don't like change to embrace change and whole new ways of doing it. Now we as an agency struggle with this because a lot of our clients wanna be followers.

We don't have that many that truly wanna be leaders and be the first to do something. And I and I understand that. You know? These are giant companies that Totally. That answer up to Wall Street at the end of the day, and they need performance.

But they're the ones that are gonna be the furthest behind if we can't help them get poised today for these kind of changes.

So imagine you're somebody listening to this show who works for one of those those large companies and is trying to, you know, inject some of that, you know, startup like mentality or the more scrappy, nimble, Let's test some of these uncharted waters. What advice would you give to somebody who's in that that sort of, an environment who is passionate and excited and maybe, like the example you gave, seize the value, but is is running up against the realities of I'm in a huge organization, and it just takes a long time. How how would you respond to that, or what what advice might you give them?

I think you actually said it in in that setup, and that is they've gotta pilot some stuff. Metrics matter, performance matters, results matter. So we need to look for strategic opportunities to pilot these initiatives in more controlled environments. And once we do that, we can then prove out the value and then pull that back into the system and say, this is really working, and we should start to scale that up. Scale is gonna be important after we test it in these controlled environments.

VML, has, like, the microcosm of of touching the entire journey and ends of brand experience, commerce, and customer experience all kind of working in concert when it's at its at its peak and at its best. What I find fascinating is that juxtaposition behind the functional and exciting immersive like experiences that try to provide customers, no matter where they are in their journey and balancing that with the emotional connection, the storytelling. And what I'm I'm not really wrestling with the concept of agentic AI and then future web experiences that are really powered by these these, you know, assistants essentially. But how do you wrestle with the idea that if the web is evolving to something like that, where there is a, you know, an emotional aspect to buying products and, you know, looking for brands to connect with, etcetera, but there's still, like, I'm coming to a place more often than not, at least in in the more traditional commerce world, to solve a problem, buy a thing so I can do a thing. And losing that that emotional connection when you're not doing the traditional browsing and absorbing of storytelling if it is so agentic.

How do you maintain those emotional connections in a future where you you were suggesting it's gonna be super efficient, efficient as hell, but maybe less emotional. I'm not sure if that's the reality of where we'll be, but I'm I'm curious about how you see that tension.

It's interesting these agents and in that little prototype I shared with you earlier with the, the fit and the Mhmm. That was based on a sports agent, and the sports agent had a personality. So the emotion was in engaging with this relatively humanesque agent, and and the emotion was there. The way it spoke to you was there. You know, text to voice is getting smoother and smoother and more and more real.

And the more it personalizes and understands and learns you as its human, I think it's gonna be very easy to maintain that as a brand representing agent, if that makes sense. Mhmm. So that's gonna be really interesting. And is it gonna be scary? Yeah.

Probably. You know, it's funny to go on going back together. We're not there yet. So we still have to think about and you and I deal with this a lot in our day jobs. At what point do you dial up experience versus dial up efficiency and task based, and let's get the information quickly, and let's let's get the sale quickly and get them through the shopping cart.

We deal with that every single day. Here's what we know. People still are emotional decision makers, and there is absolutely a time when it's very relevant to get in there. I know what I want. I just need to look at the features, pick my features, and then buy now.

There's absolutely a role for that, and that'll be handled maybe a little different, a little bit more conversational as these agents start to become more and more part of the system. But right now, we have to know where they are in the buying journey. If I'm still in the mode of being sold, then we need to be very emotional, and we need to storytell. Mhmm. We need to get in there and let them see that product and feel that product.

And at the end of it, be drooling because they want that product. Then they're ready to pick their features and buy now. We have too many clients that forget about that emotional part, and they feel like the advertising does that job. It doesn't. The advertising piques curiosity.

It's a spark. It's our job when they come into our digital ecosystems to close the deal through emotion so that they will then convert.

If you take that a step further and say, alright. You've peaked my interest. I come to the website in whatever form, mobile, desktop, or otherwise, and you're starting to storytell a little bit. We mentioned the the fact that in a, you know, cookie less world or a place where zero and one p data is gonna be, you know, basically the currency of the future in terms of personalizing experiences. How do you, in this current moment, as we progress into the, you know, the fast paced new world that we're we're kind of, provoking thought on right now, going beyond the, well, it's just the quiz.

Because just asking somebody what they want seems like a relatively easy thing to do. Like, let's infer where we can and signal, but as signals become harder to infer outside of just asking, hey. What what are you looking for? It's hard, and it's a challenging thing. And then, you know, you layer on the fact that how do you design something that is not just another quiz, but still resonant and still certainly driving emotional excitement and connection?

To take me through some of that tension because that's something that we're facing, you know, in our day jobs right now. How do you design something that is able to give the the AI engine such as it exists today enough to go on without just saying, answer these four questions, and we'll give you what you want. You know what I mean?

That might be the hardest question I've ever been asked.

Could you just solve that for us?

Yeah. I I don't know. It's so funny. Right now, we're confined by linear engagements. I land on a page.

I come from a certain location. I land on a page. Mhmm. And then we have some kind of an experience. And that experience you know?

I think about recently Acura. I had a fantastic quiz where the advertising drove through it, and the whole quiz was themed around meditation and wellness. So when you landed there, the experience itself was extremely meditative. You had sight, sound, imagery, and it was this complete experience. But it was a quiz.

And I remember our own team discussing that, and I'm like, oh, guys. This is great. This is amazing. And I remember people going, it's just a quiz. Yeah.

It is. And that's what we've got today is we still have to work inside that box. And so we still have the old tools at our disposal of sight, sound, and engagement. At the end of the day, we were still quizzing they were still quizzing in order to get to, an archetype of persona, which was nothing more than guided selling. Right?

Mhmm. So how do we start to do that? I think, again, that's where as these agents get more sophisticated and more integrated into our lives and our behavior, they're gonna be a lot more predictive. Now does that mean that when they start pulling things back into whatever query I do that it's going to be are they gonna pull back that same accurate quiz? I don't know.

I don't know if that's I don't know if that'll ever happen. Are things gonna get much smaller in these little bites? And the experience is the agent interaction itself, not the content that it pulls back. So that'll be interesting. Are we gonna lose the development of these truly dynamic stories through video and motion and interactivity?

And and now that experience is gonna be how I'm engaging with the agent. And is that gonna be our next step of evolving? Mhmm. Because, of course, you can see how voice is gonna be a big part of that. I'm now speaking to the website, and no longer will I be clicking through a content foraging path.

Yeah. Who knows how that's gonna play out? But right now, we're still confined with, let's do quizzes. Let's do interactive things. Glasses are gonna be cool as they evolve, but still they're gonna be limited right now.

Show me the weather. Identify a person.

Mhmm. And I think those are the utilitarian things like I mean, we were talking again not to to hearken back to the episode with Brian Yamada. He was at CES. The idea that, you know, you have computer vision attached to basically a poll for those who are sight impaired and, you know, between the the haptics as well as the computer vision, it can guide somebody who has, you know, a sight impairment through a crowded room to get to the bathroom. Because now you're you're layering these technologies together in order to create ultimately a solution and a tool that helps the human good.

And in this case, a a limitation that they have that may no longer be a limitation because of all this technology. What I'm fascinating, by in in that same idea is that obviously is is technology to an end. Like, it's it's something somebody would definitely be willing to use and potentially even provide some, you know, personal signals or preferences because it's I'm getting something in return. It's a very transactional element to be able to use that sort of technology. With websites where somebody's not bought a product yet or they're just searching for something or, hell, even the the in the agentic world, they're asking their agent to go find something.

The best practices are evolving for asking customers to give us information, the value of what we've said is authentication in order to get something out. How do you balance as a design lead the tension between I wanna help personalize, and I'm gonna need something from you to do that with the other side of being too intrusive or, you know, violating some privacy or being manipulative? Because we all know, you know, the more data we have, obviously, that's good for the business too. So as a design leader, how do you talk to clients about that that balance that you strike?

Oh, man. The second hardest question I think I've ever been asked. You're on a roll.

Here for you.

It's ironic. It's our job to have those conversations. I don't know how many of our clients are ready to have those conversations. And so we haven't yet had to really cross that bridge because we're still being asked for a lot of that commodity work.

Right.

Without a doubt, as these agentive models get smarter and more integrated into our lives, everything that we're doing today is just gonna become obsolete. So so, really, I'm interpreting your question in this. How do we help clients get to the point where they're ready to transition into that? Because at some point, they're gonna have to let go. And that's a tough thing to swallow because they've invested millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars in these giant platforms.

Now I'm encouraged because Adobe is one of our, very critical WPP partners. They have awareness of all this too. They're already working to incorporate AI into all of their products, whether it's Photoshop or Adobe Cloud.

Mhmm.

So they're they're already starting to prime the pump. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna, I think, baby step into it. The next thing is we're not gonna get rid of Adobe Experience Cloud. Mhmm. Mhmm.

We're gonna start moving into how AI that's embedded into that or even third party AI can start to work with those systems as we transition. So is that gonna really force us to change from a design perspective? Probably not super quickly, although even that's subjective. Years ago, I got I went to South by, and I got to watch a keynote with Ray Kurzweil. And, you know, he wrote Singularity book.

Amazing. And he was talking about the hockey puck of technology evolution. And at that time, almost ten years ago, we were right there at that little curve before it starts to accelerate up exponentially. Here we are ten years later, and I think we have come a long way. So we are gonna have to have these conversations very soon.

So I think it's gonna come down to almost business transformation planning first. You know? And this is something that's really important to VML's CX organization, offering these business transformation readiness services and consulting, if you will, of how to get ready so that it's not just, all that money we've invested into these platforms is thrown away. All the time and energy we've put into staffing up to support them is thrown away. We don't wanna do that.

We're gonna have to work with them to transition and be ready. The same thing applies to design.

And you hit on storytelling as part of that design. What do you believe are the key elements of storytelling on websites that resonate with users on a human level, thinking about where we are today, and we kind of have the playbook in, you know, certain ways for storytelling. Do you see the the actual strategy behind storytelling evolving a lot as well as we move into this this new world, or is it still the same, you know, general key 10 poles?

One of my favorite people on earth, Kalida McDade, who is our global chief experience design leader here at VML, is working with all of us, and we're actually shifting from storytelling into story living. And it's really exactly what you're talking about. Story living is how we live these stories, and it's the relevancy of how we engage with brands. And it's that timeliness and all the things we've riffed on with the agentive and understanding I'm at a certain location. And, you know, it could be that I'm even wearing my Apple Watch and it's connecting into my heartbeat and it knows that I'm anxious.

And so it's delivering something that's very relevant at that moment in time to me. That moment in time is something that's very, very different than today where I'm intentionally going to a website, leaning in, and I'm searching. Right. And so story living is gonna, I think, be the evolution of how are we understanding what people are doing, thinking, and feeling at that moment in time and then delivering the appropriate content in that moment. And it it could be that if we determine that Nick Bronker is anxious at the moment, that we deliver something that is video or audio that is designed to calm him, and that could be sponsored by a brand.

And so it'll be a whole different way to think about content design based on those moments in time and the connected ecosystem of our worlds.

As we think about the other thing that I think going back to the beginning where we're we're trying to create these experiences that that drive connection and work in concert with all of the other major pieces of the ecosystem where, you know, we talk about brand experience and how creating the right initial story to pique somebody's interest to get them into the website. How do we, you know, get them to engage on the website and ultimately convert those same, like, linear stair steps from I didn't hear about I didn't even know about this brand to I am a brand advocate and all the steps in between. It's not just gonna be the web is changing because it's changing at the same, I would say, relative speed as as all the other ecosystems. How does CRM evolve? How does search evolve?

How does paid media evolve? We're we're in this time where everybody is kind of in the same somewhat frenetic transition as the technology advances. So I am curious about as we think about how the role of websites evolve along with all of the other touch points somebody might have in their day or how the ecosystem collectively works together. Do you see web having and maybe this is a two two directive question. More responsibility, less responsibility, different responsibilities in relation to all the other things that are in our ecosystem.

So that between paid media, between CRM, between, between, you know, you name any other channel even in person. How do you see web kind of becoming more important, less important, or just different?

Bold statement here going out on a limb. You and I and everybody listening to this podcast will see the end of websites in our dates. We will see the end of websites. And so I think to simplify that, they're going to become obsolete. Question is when and what are those baby steps to get there.

Like I said, I think we'll see platforms like GX manager be that kinda next step where the website is still very much there. And these systems that sit on top of a website, they're still very friendly and compliant to SEO and SEM and all these things, but searching is changing. Everything that we do and how we look for information is changing. And so the website site will no longer be a destination. It literally will not be necessary.

Now you say, but, Dave, where does all that content live? Yeah. I imagine there's still gonna be these data data lakes, data houses that hold this content. They hold the offering of these companies, but it's the agents talking to agents that are basically pulling and compiling. But it's gonna be that Nick Brunker has his own interface.

Dave Aldis has his own interface. Yeah. And the agents are pulling the content owned by the brands into my experience. And I think at the end of the day, my experience may ultimately even replace a Coca Cola agent or a Ford agent, and it's gonna be the Nick Brunker agent. Your personal assistant that is just knowing you, and it's pulling the things that you like from the brands that are out there.

It's a very different way to look at it. Now let's talk about Ford for one hot minute. Yeah. One thing people love to do right now is go in and build in price tool and pimp out a ride Yep. And dream about that Bronco and customize it in every way I want.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you'll still be able to do that. It's just gonna be not necessarily housed on ford.com. So you'll be maybe finding an image to go back to my earlier prototype story.

I'll find an image of an off road vehicle, pull that into an agent, and say, man, build me build me my version of this. And it'll come back and say, alright, Nick. Based on what I know about you, you know, last month, we went out to Moab, and you love the off road stuff. So I I got you the the Raptor package, and we've pimped it out with the biggest tires on Earth. And you get the idea.

And it'll basically configure that thing for you. It'll talk back to the Ford ecosystem and understand pricing, but then it's also gonna know and, hey. You can get something like this at a dealer at the street from you because it knows where you are. Mhmm. And so it'll just be that middle it'll be that middle agent to connect you to the brand in a much more seamless and relevant way than having you go to a website and interact with stuff.

I am wondering if there is a step in the middle, like, where we are today and then what you just kind of articulated with with vision. The the middle ground is brands still have their owned property, but the owned property is actually manipulated completely around the individual, which again goes back to the idea of true one to one hyper personalization. But it feels like the way we're going. And I know there's no question really buried in this just kind of musing with you, like, talking through it. The idea that if you go to and we'll just keep the Ford example or if you go to, a Target or any other website, whether it's a retailer or a brand, There is maybe a general version like I know nothing, but as we get more advanced with the signals and all of the the ways that we can personalize, there there really isn't a, you know, singular odd.

I'm just gonna go to the brand.com. It was no. I'm gonna go to Dave Altus's brand dot com. And so maybe it is the, you know, the hierarchy of the navigation. Maybe it's the page structure.

Maybe it's the content of like, literally, it is a website designed for one. And I'm not sure if we I just my mind is, like, spinning right now about, well, what does that mean for people like us in our day to days where we still need the things and the brands still will need the the guts of it to help serve the customer and hell, maybe even design the the containers upon which Yeah. All this content lives. But you're right. We we may be short of completely decoupling websites from their brands and creating more of a one to one where the website still exists, but really it's just the container.

Everything else that's in it is personalized down to the person.

What's also interesting is if you're building a dashboard of content based on your querying in a certain way, and I'm in London doing something that's complimentary to it, the platform can now be smart enough and actually play a matchmaking role. Your ingredients plus my ingredients could be a new transformational product that benefits mankind. And so it could actually connect Nick and Dave. So you can start to see how the platform is still there. There's still a website, but the intelligence behind it through AI can be smarter.

We can take care of some of the things like too many authenticated experiences in a brand, and now there's just one. But what happens inside that experience is very different for you than it is for me because of the atomic content. Again, this is Dream Theater. It's not totally happening right now, but this is where we're this is where we're gonna be going in that kind of middle ground that you're talking about. Websites won't be totally dead for a while, but they're gonna get a lot smarter, and we're gonna get a lot more relevant.

I keep using that word relevant. Mhmm. Less less foraging less foraging and more tell me what you need. Here it is.

Before we close-up the show and we do fun facts, which we always do towards the end, is there one area of this this entire theme that that excites you the most? What are you most excited about in relation to where your type of role and where where your expertise is gonna go in the next few years based on all the stuff we talked about?

Damn. I love the challenge of all of it. Just about every brand that I've worked on has been a little bit more on the conservative side, a slower mover, like I said, tends to be a lot of these organizations just because of their infrastructure tend to be followers, not leaders. I love that challenge so much, and I love the fact that it never settles. It never ever settles.

Every day is a different challenge. Every day is a new technology opportunity to bring forward. I'm most excited about which client wants to be brave, which client is ready to be brave, and really lean in to what's possible and be at the beginning of it, not after somebody else already did it. That's exciting to me. And it's risky, dude.

It's risky.

No doubt.

I get it. But you know what? That's what I love about the career. Who wants to who wants to take risks with me? Let's go.

I love it. I just fucking do it.

I love it, man. And in terms of, like, maybe you off the clock, well, you're not thinking about design, for all of these these big brands and all the things we just talked about. I imagine you've got a lot of similar passion areas. Talk about some fun facts about Dave Altus.

Okay. I, I love, love, love science fiction and horror and fantasy movies. I'm a huge consumer of shows. I can't get enough. I'm also a huge video game player.

I've been playing video games since this will bait me big time. My first computer was a Texas Instruments t I ninety nine four a. Yeah. If you know, you know. Yeah.

My next was a Commodore sixty four. You know, and my brother and I would literally get magazines, and we would code machine language to get a Pong like game. You know? It was crazy.

So That's next level.

I've been playing video games since Zork. I didn't hear myself. I'm a huge RPG player. I'm not necessarily the big MMO guy, but I love to get in and build the character, build the story, grow, you know, grow that character up to be powerful and then start it over. And then I like to make shit with my hands.

I like to build things, whether it's I make my own handcrafted soap because I I'd love that. And then I also, like, build my own deck, attaching it to my house.

Yeah.

So I like to make. I like to do things that are intubile.

Sounds on brand. Keep

the brain down.

Gonna say it sounds on brand for you, both both your in your day job and off the clock. What's the coolest thing you you feel like you've made or the the proudest, moment you've had in terms of, like, hey. I made that shit.

Honestly, my decks. I remember years ago, I was driving. We were working on a client in Saint Louis, and John Cook was involved. And so I'm in a car with John and some other people, and we're driving from Kansas City to Saint Louis. And we were just shooting the shit about stuff.

And I said, oh, I really, really wanna put a deck on the front of my house. And and John's like, well, I don't get it. What what's what's stopping you? Why don't you just do it? And I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, what?

I can't do just build it. Just get out there and do it. And I'm like, I what? I can't do that. And he's like, I don't understand.

What are you what are you talking about? So I built a deck. I'm like, I love it.

So John so John was the reason. He's just like, dude, just go do it in in typical John fashion.

David, you're confusing me. I don't need to see the problem. Build the deck.

Home Depot is over there. Just go get the stuff and go. Right. Oh, man. Dave.

I love it. I love being able to figure anything out.

And you know what? You do that so well all day every day, and it's been an incredible, conversation. Super insightful as always. Thank you for finally, getting time on the books to do this. I know we've been we've been trying to get it on the books for all these months, and, it means a lot.

You spend spend almost an hour with us and and chatting about your experience and your expertise, and, I'm excited to to keep, communication lines open as this evolves. We'll we'll do this again. How about that?

Nick, I love you. I love the show. Thank you for having me on here, and I can't wait to do it again. This is great.

Awesome. Again, thanks, buddy. I appreciate you. And thanks to you all for listening to Human Centered as well. To learn more about VML CX practice and our approach to the work, you could check us out online at b m l dot com.

We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. Give us a rating and offer up your thoughts wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, and more. Have a topic idea or just wanna drop us a line? You can connect with me on x at nick brunker, or you can shoot the show and email. The address is humancentered@vml.com.

Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.