John Maeda always has a ton of insight on the creative process and in this talk he doesn’t disappoint. One of the most interesting points for me personally was his thoughts on “struggle.” As creatives we seek to struggle and this is a major distinction between creatives and people who have suppressed their creative sides.
It is frustrating to struggle day in and day out but the only thing worst is to not struggle at all. Personally I’m currently seeking more struggle. Specifically, the kind of struggle that has me up at night and mumbling to myself. It’s the kind of struggle that drags on for months and fills up sketchbooks. Sometimes it’s painful to bash your head against the wall struggling with a creative challenge but sometimes banging your head against the wall is what jars the ideas loose.
Given my fine arts background in media-based installations I really wanted to like this approach to launching the Ford S-Max in Europe. We’ve recently seen a lot of building projections as ads, and admittedly this one does take it up a notch, but maybe the ad guy in me is having trouble really seeing the value this brings to Ford. How does this story connect to the rest of the Ford brand story? Will this narrative continue on in other forms of media?
I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one. For now I’m grateful that Seeper and Ogilvy are experimenting in this milieu. Hopefully we can all help to step-up each others game and remember that when we use flashy technologies and artistic collaborations, that the brand story still needs to be woven into the narrative.
Using a matrix like this would be a great way to brief creatives. Or at least it would be better than asking for an interactive viral hit with 18 key messages.
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.
