Design Thinking and Agile Execution with Marc Blanchard

As EVP, Head of Experience Design at Arnold Worldwide, Marc Blanchard is an experienced designer and creative leader with a 25-year track record of crafting transformative digital products and experiences for global brands.
At Arnold Worldwide, Marc works to enhance the agency’s customer experience offering across its portfolio of clients, including Progressive Insurance, PNC Bank, ADP, and De Beers.

He previously served as chief experience officer at Bounteous, where he led a team of 130+ designers obsessed with delivering digital experiences that help companies compete and win. He also helped codify Bounteous’ co-innovation method, a value-aligned and outcome-driven approach to innovation that combines the best of Agile, Lean and Design Thinking.

Before that, Marc led Havas' global experience design practice and helped establish Havas Cognitive, a service offering that helps brands tap the power of emerging AI technologies. Marc's work has been awarded by the Clios, London International and the One Show. He has judged the Cannes Lions, Clios, London International Awards and Webby's, and has taught design innovation at Columbia University, NYU and San Francisco State University. He has also spoken at events such as C2 Montreal, 4As CX Effect and the Argyle CX Leadership Forum, and is a member of the 4A’s CX Council.

Marc sat down with LBB to discuss the three projects that taught him the secret to effective marketing experiences

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Three decades in, I finally understood what makes marketing experiences work.

My biggest lesson took almost 30 years to percolate, so at the risk of aging myself, I have to take us back to the mid-1990s to set the stage. Back then I was a rookie ‘interactive creative director’ at Red Sky Interactive, a boutique digital agency in San Francisco that was experimenting with interactive online experiences vs. pure storytelling as a way to drive marketing goals.

In 1996, we created the Hewlett-Packard Pong Banner, the first-ever interactive banner ad on the web.

The next year, Nike asked us to explore a digital extension of their Virtual Andre TV spot. So we built an online game where you could go head-to-head with Andre Agassi’s avatar for a full five sets, using a tennis ball cannon instead of a racquet. He would trash-talk you every step of the way and never, ever lose.

Then in 1998, we created Absolut DJ, arguably the first branded UGC experience on the web. It allowed users to create and share their own audiovisual remix of tracks by DJ Spooky, Coldcut and UFO, brought to you by Absolut Vodka and synced with the launch of a global campaign.

I was starting to see a few patterns.

Creating these immersive, interactive experiences allowed us to move from just making brand promises to actually keeping them. Absolut’s ad campaign promised an exciting connection to the then-emerging DJ movement. Our piece delivered on that promise, letting consumers immerse themselves in the DJ experience and share their own remixes.

The way we came up with our ideas was totally different from the traditional ad agency model. It was a collaborative ideation process that included creatives, UX designers, and technologists, but also folks like legal, business and operational experts from the client side who could help refine and course-correct the ideas while we were still brainstorming. We were trying to nail down usability, feasibility and business value at the earliest stages of ideation instead of pitching concepts first and figuring those things out later.

Execution was very different too. We were often innovating with no precedents to guide us, so we were constantly testing our ideas with users, trying to understand their mental models, then making changes and iterating towards the best design solution before we launched anything.

In short, our work felt a lot more like product design than marketing communications. It was grounded in collaborative, cross-disciplinary, customer-centric ideation, followed by an iterative test & learn production process.

Fast forward to 2011. I was working at Havas, and we had recently won the global digital AOR engagement with IBM.

IBM was just starting an ambitious journey with their agency partners to build IBM Studios, a marketing innovation capability based on Design Thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and Agile methods.

That was one of the most exhilarating moments of my career. We were literally inventing a new way of innovating for one of the world’s most innovative companies. And it turned out that those ways of working we had developed intuitively back at Red Sky were not just a good fit for a small agency full of proto-internet nerds. They could actually scale to a $200B company with 400,000 employees whose entire business was based on continuous innovation.

The first studio had six Agile teams made up of IBMers and agency talent working peer-to-peer, a few more FTEs to run operations, and an incredible startup vibe.

By 2015, IBM Studios had grown to 100 teams. We had new flagship locations in London and Tokyo, global VP-level design leads, a globally scaled design method, and a 60-page playbook to help local offices stand up their own studios. At that point, the studio model was consistently delivering IBM’s most impactful marketing experiences and signature moments across the world.

So here’s my lesson:

Design Thinking and agile execution consistently produces the most meaningful, memorable and effective marketing experiences.

Occasionally you might get a stroke of genius from a single individual or a small creative team. But in the long run, nothing beats having a multidisciplinary team ideating together and iterating towards a design solution grounded in real customer needs. That’s how you craft a marketing experience that doesn't just make a brand promise but actually delivers on it. That’s how you build early trust in the brand. And more often than not, that’s a really effective way of turning prospects into customers for life.

When I look at the new pressures CMOs are facing today, this customer-centric, design-led approach becomes even more relevant in two particular areas.

First, the goal of customer-centricity is slowly but surely making its way from aspirational vision slides into the executive scorecards of the entire C-suite. When execs across the org are incentivised to work together to improve things, they need a customer-centric, cross-disciplinary, test & learn approach to innovation – from marketing to product to customer service to CRM. That’s the core of Design Thinking.

Second, GenAI is starting to hijack the traditional customer journey and a brand’s ability to control its own brand expression.

Companies carefully design their customer journeys, their branded experiences, and how their brand identity is expressed in every interaction. But what happens when most of those journeys and interactions are mediated by AI, either through an answer engine, an LLM chat or directly by an AI agent?

Between July 2024 and February 2025, traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources increased by 1,200 percent, according to an Adobe study. In the same timeframe, Deloitte reports that AI is now the #2 source of product recommendations after in-store.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that within just a few years, most branded interactions will no longer be delivered or controlled by the brand itself. Instead, they’ll be ingested, deconstructed, and reinterpreted by AI.

For a high-consideration brand, the most valuable consideration assets – things like demos, case studies, testimonials, feature comparison tools, configurators, educational content, free trial offers – will no longer exist solely in the controlled environment of the brand’s website. More likely, consumers will be parachuted in from an AI chat that the brand can’t access. Or the AI-reconstructed version of the asset will be surfaced directly in that chat. Or an AI agent will interact with the asset machine-to-machine and report its conclusions back to the consumer.

To create effective marketing experiences in that kind of uncontrolled environment, marketers will need insights, talent and methods that are more akin to product and service design than traditional digital marketing.

You’ll need to merge customer research with consumer research to understand the intrinsic motivations and mental models of people trying to accomplish their personal goals. You’ll need fluid thinkers collaborating across disciplines to design experiences that deliver on the brand’s promise – even when they exist within an LLM or agentic workflow. You’ll need creative technologists who can continuously scan for new enabling technologies. And you’ll need a highly agile delivery model that can quickly course-correct based on user testing when you’re innovating new interaction models.

With that mix of innovation-grade insights, talent and methods, you’ll be able to build marketing experiences that truly deliver on a brand’s promise and drive long-term brand reputation.