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Track Listing
I Crave Paris – Aeroplane vs. Friendly Fire vs. Flight Facilities
Where I’m Going – Cut Copy
We Used To Wait – Arcade Fire
All is Love (My Gay Husband Remix) – Karen O
Bulletproof (Acoustic Version) – La Roux
Sleepyhead (Acoustic Version) – Passion Pit
10 Mile Stereo – Beach House
40 Day Dream – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Excuses – The Morning Benders
The High Road – Broken Bells
Everywhere – Paul Devro
1901 Bo Flex’d (Passion Pit Remix) – Phoenix
There is XXXX (Within My Heart) – You Say Party We Say Die!
Undercover Martyn – Two Door Cinema Club
I don’t normally just re-post snippets of other people’s blog posts but this quote from Clay Shirky is particularly inspiring. It’s from a larger article on woman’s role in the work place but I find it to be relevant to anyone who is bold, self-confident and out-spoken.
“To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.”
As regular readers of my blog you’ll know that a few months ago I start Sabbatical Saturdays. The premise being that I wanted to find the time for some concentrated thought on a discipline outside of my current employ. My Dad is doing a sabbatical now but it’s right at the end of his career. Stefan Seigmeister does a sabbatical for a year every seven years. I decided simply to take every Saturday off to throw myself into reading, reflecting, writing etc. After seven years I will have taken a whole year off.
Well I’m a few months in and it’s been great, but what I’ve been reading is about making ideas happen. I’ve been reading the Scott Belsky book on the subject as well as a raft of creative and innovation management theory. Everyone has great ideas but few can make them happen. I set out to spend more time thinking and what I ended up thinking about was about doing less thinking and more doing. The irony is not lost on me. I’m very fortunate to have a career where I get paid to think and do all day with the help of a great team, so this concept isn’t foreign to me.
In short, I’m not abandoning Sabbatical Saturdays I’m just declaring Sundays “do day.” Saturday is for thinking and Sunday is for doing. So what have I done you ask? Well I’ll save that for another post but it has often been said of Creative Technologists that we sketch with technology so I will be publishing some of my “sketches” shortly.
Bill Bernbach said, “Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed—but dull?” This quote has inspired me to not worry about making everything look perfect (this is hard for me, I’m a perfectionist) but rather just make my sketches interesting. “Do day” is for doing and making not always for perfecting the perfect idea that will cure cancer and make your toast. In other words I’m putting my sabbatical thinking and experiments online in beta for other to participate with and hopeful make better. There’s no grand goal with this, just an experiment in thinking and doing. More to come.
It’s nice to see some debate swirling around the interwebs these days on what a Creative Technologist actually does. Having read a sampling of the articles I’ve seen a distinction difference between what an ad agency CT does and what a software or tech CT does. Most software and tech CT are more like creative CTOs. They do a lot of the hands on coding, development and database management while also moving the product forward. Seeing that I work agency side I’m far more qualified to comment on the ad side of working as a creative technologist.
In my experience an advertising agency creative technologist is more of a generalist who sits between creative, strategy and technical execution. In my own personal day-to-day I work early on with the strategists and planners to define a client’s digital strategy. Largely we look for the social object that the customer will be attracted to. This hopefully will also be the emotional connection with the brand. Even though I have “technologist” in my title and am responsible for pushing innovation in our company it doesn’t mean I don’t still care about connecting with people in a relevant, original and impactful way. Without a solid social strategy finding the big ideas becomes a lot more time consuming and muddied. Technology can do anything you want it to do so it’s best to be very clear up front what the strategy and goals are.
With a strategy in place I usually sit down with an art director and copywriter to start on the conceptual phase of the creative. Ad legend Bill Bernbach first paired art directors and copywriters together to enhance the idea so it only makes sense to have a creative technologist in the room especially when the creative solution is likely to have a large digital component. We crack the big idea and then work on communicating and selling that idea to our clients. At this point our specialities kick in. The art director works on the visuals, the copywriter on the language and I work on prototyping the idea and showing the consumer interaction.
Now, technology can often be intimidating for clients, but everyone likes a great idea, it’s important not to sell the technology but rather sell the creative solutions that will drive the business forward and resonate with consumers.
Once the idea is sold it becomes my responsibility to make sure the execution is so technically seamless that the end user never notices it. It’s always a temptation to build in every bell and whistle into an execution but if it doesn’t support the overarching idea and doesn’t build community with the consumer then it should be left off. Like art directors need to know how to get the best work out of photographers, directors, typographers and designers, I need to get the most out of developers, information architects and coders. Any digital build requires a big team to pull it off and without some creative technology oversight the idea can either be too tech heavy with no creative or too much creative flair with no intuitive consumer functionality that begets community and brand affinity. Nike + and Nike Chalkbot are very technically robust executions but at the end of the day what was really built was community and brand affinity.
One of our most recent projects that I’ve worked on was an interactive Twitter mural for Canadian Tourism. Our challenge was to communicate a sense of urgency to travel from the States to Canada. Most Americans think Canada is all well and good but don’t see it as a destination that they need to see this weekend, even though it’s only a few hours away. In working with an art director and creative director we decided on an out of home interactive billboard that would showcase Twitter updates from Canadians and visitors to Canada. These updates would be in real-time. This brought a little bit of Canada to major cites across America and delivered the brand message through an authentic tone of voice.
It was an extremely challenging technical build involving many moving parts of; back-end moderation, touch screen user-interface, mobile iPad forms and the OOH projection hardware, but in the end it became a fun immerse experience for people walking by which drove a ton of interest in the brand.
Ultimately it was the creative that made the idea so strong. As the popularity of the Creative Technologist role grows it’s my hope that it will always be a role that strives for more meaningful social connections through technology and not just technology for technology sake.
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Track Listing
Mfumu – The Very Best
Madan – Salif Keita
Exodus – Tamatan Tila Herbie Hancock
Se Tche We Djo Mon – Orchestre Poly – Rythmo de Cotonou
Greetings – Joni Hasstrup
Diaraby Magni (Live at the Independent) – Vieux Farka Toure feat. Yossi Fine
You Better Ask Yourself – Femi Kuti Mopse Remix
Obama Ubarikiwe – Samba Mapangala
Sisi Mbon – Honny and the Bees Band
Chevorolet – Taj Mahal
Africa – Amadou and Miriam
Julia – The Very Best
