Industry / Social Media Week NY Panel
Should agencies think like startups? Thought leaders have debated this topic for the last year or so, and now some agencies are putting those thoughts into action. The result is a new generation of agency products that harness the energy and attitude of social and digital media.
Most agencies share key ingredients of agile software companies, like designers, programmers and project managers. But do they have they essential patience to iterate and persist throughout a profitable product’s lifespan? And is coding products in-house just a great exercise, or is a viable new business model emerging?
Brian Morrissey, Editor in Chief of Digiday, will moderate a panel of agency innovators that have experimented with the open social graph and worked to develop their own in-house tools, toys and applications. Register here.
Agency Panelists Include:
Matt Britton / Founder & CEO – Mr. Youth
Andrew Zolty / Founder & Creative Director – Breakfast
Tim Nolan / Creative Director – BBH Labs
Work / The Magic of Online 2011
This was awesome to stumble on to today. My work for Zyrtec’s Parks Unleashed was listed by Mashable as one of the top 10 ads that harnessed the magic of online last year.
Industry / Post 100
It seems fitting that my 100th post on this weblog is about change. The essence of a weblog is that it is a dynamic, living document that reflects the author’s thoughts and narrative on an ongoing basis. I began this blog in February of 2005 to serve a few purposes:
- A place to archive my work, and my ever changing roles in these past projects
- A platform to comment and or rant about the advertising, creative, and marketing industries
- A reason to use WordPress and increase my meta data over the Internet.
Back to my initial point. Today marks my first day at BBH Labs. I will be working as the Creative Director of Labs with the ever innovative Saneel Radia (follow him here @Saneel). Labs is BBH’s global innovation unit. It has been tasked with pioneering new outputs and approaches: exploring emerging platforms and behaviours on behalf of brands, and developing new agency models along the way.
This opportunity excites me for many reasons, the first of which is that it brings me back to the very first days of what drew me to the web. Exploration, innovation, an the sense of being on the brink of something new. Technology and culture, now more than ever moves at the speed of light (quite literally, in some cases) and with this Moore’s Law lifestyle comes the challenge of being one step ahead. I welcome the challenge.
Issues. Culture. Bugs. this was one of the randomized taglines that ran on Word.com back in 1997, and it totally rings true today. Future forward!
Industry / The importance of #TheFail
Our industry is so focused on success, that we rarely see how important it is to fail. Failure allows us to take a wider view on what is generating success, it allows us to identify the weaker links in the chain, and it creates an opportunity for us to learn from our mistakes.
In a large, global agency environment there are so many moving parts, and for years this ecosystem has masked failure on the individual level, deep inside redundant “systems“. These large “systems” of redundancy provide cover for individual performance. The blame then gets attributed to the system itself, rather than the individual. This removes any direct action, or re-action to the failure.
The self cleaning oven was a great invention, and in someways large agencies have this function built in. The sheer mass of staff allows agencies to quickly call in support staff to step up as relief pitchers in the late innings of the game for the save. The problem here is that all that is remembered going forward, was that the work got done, and the only downside was that the project went over budget. At the end of the day, the weak links still hold on to elevated positions, they are not penalized, nor are they ever identified as a detriment to the agency. They have been saved by “systems“.
Failure should be embraced and used as a means of pruning staff rather than something that is swept under the agency’s rug.
Industry / The Banner Brief
Banners are a necessary evil in our industry. We all know that they are quite restrictive when it comes to being creative, but that does not mean that it is impossible to pull of something awesome. Rather take this as a challenge. Here are a few things to keep in mind on your pathway to success.
Interactivity
Highly interactive banners increase brand awareness by over 60%. Be sure to employ appropriate levels of interactivity within your creative. Keep in mind where your banner will live and devise compelling uses of animation and sound to distinguish yourself from the rest of the host’s page.
Use of space
By use of space, I mean use of “white-space”. The page your banner will be served on already has a ton of information on it. Create an oasis. Think about how you will separate your message from the content on the page, and make your work stand out.
Compelling Images
Steer clear of stock photos. Time and time again, I can spot the same straw cabana sitting on a dock, near the crystal blue water. Typography and branding work just as hard as that overused image
Creative Message
Short, clever copy that draws the user in and leads them down the path to action is what you want. This is the first step in generating a click through.
Call to Action
“Click here” was a great line in 1997, simply because users were all about clicking and exploring. The web was still new to them. That ship has since sailed, think of what you are offering and tie it into the call to action. Make is fun, mysterious, or thought provoking.
Intelligent Branding
Consistency is the key. Make sure the “carpets match the drapes”. Brand retention and brand awareness is just as critical a measure as a click through. Make sure your brand look and sound the same in your banner as it does on your brand’s website, television spots, and print media.
Bold Headlines
Let’s face it. Banners are small, and people hardly have enough time to read the content of the page your banner is sitting on. Distill your message to be concise, sharp and actionable .
Be Funny (if you can)
Humor is engaging and memorable, especially on a platform like the web. When you can take a lighter more playful approach to you brand communication. Light-hearted comedy plays well on the Internet, use that to your advantage.
Need some inspiration?
Try poking around the good old Internet. Bannerblog is a good place to start. Another great tool for scanning the online advertising landscape is Moat which is a clever new search engine for banners.
Work / Parks Unleashed
A custom Youtube brand channel, talking dogs, Queen Latifah, and over two hundred Samsung Galaxy Tabs to give away? WTF???? Keep in mind this was all orchestrated and launched for an OTC / Pharma brand… there in lies the true innovation.
Our client was looking for a new way to engage with their audience, as well as to become top of mind with allergy sufferers during the fall allergy season, that may not already be Zyrtec users. As creative briefs go, this one was actually pretty clear, do something buzz-worthy, that would be picked up by word of mouth, and become a PR story. The idea I had was simple… bring the notion of being free to explore the outside world, inside. Parks Unleashed is a contemporary take on a choose your own adventure book, brought to life on a Youtube Brand Channel.
One of the most innovative aspects of this project was how we as an agency worked. Gone are the days of the traditional Art & Copy teams. This project was conceived by myself, and brought to life by partnering up with a game designer, a user experience director, an interactive producer, a creative technologist, and a copywriter.
The list of “firsts” continued as we began to work alongside teams at Google and Youtube to to develop how the project would come to life. Never before has a level of game-play been seen on Youtube so a tight integration of work-streams was our path to success. From concept to launch the entire process was completed in an astounding two and a half months. For an agency as large as ours, and with a client like McNeil, this is never before seen feat.
All the content was captured during a two day shoot outside of Los Angeles, excluding the additional footage of Queen Latifah, which we shot weeks later here in Brooklyn. The narrative adds up to approximately 45 minutes of story and includes eight to ten mini games developed in Flash that are sprinkled throughout the story, and play off the people you meet along the way.
Our story invites our visitors to explore our park, filled with quirky characters, talking dogs, Queen Latifah, and a series of mini-games that lead them along paths to prizes including; Amazon Gift codes, and over 200 Samsung Galaxy Tabs. The channel launched on September 5th, and within the first 48 hours, Parks Unleashed received over 1,200,000 channel views, with only two key media buys active. The channel will continue to roll out in stages over the next few weeks, wrapping up early in October. Queen Latifah enters the park in stage three, and upon completion of the entire park, every user gets to create a custom piece of sharable video that can be shared around the web on all social platforms. See what Adweek said about it or the 1,000s of blog postings around it
Final Thought: None of this would have been possible without a truly amazing team effort by all. Many many thanks go out to my team at JWT New York, Google, Youtube, and our production partner HAUS in LA.
Work / Groupee
I designed this flash based application with Justin Crawford at JWT. The application makes connections via social media platform APIs like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and online event registration databases. Groupee then relates the people in the room in a fun and visual way. The idea of creating products between client projects is something that has always sparked my interest. When the opportunity arose to jump into this one, I took it. The plan is to license the technology and provide the platfoprm to events worldwide. There is a pretty good chance Groupee will be traveling to Germany later this year.
Industry / Bring the Magic Back
Now more than ever advertising needs to bring the magic back to our craft. The opportunities that technology has opened up to us as creative thinkers has opened up an endless array of doors. Storytelling has never had so many possibilities, and consumers have never been more available. Technology is not a gimmick, and the existence of a new technology should not be the solitary reason to use it.
Technology is another arrow in the quiver. It is another paintbrush. The 21st Century creative team must learn how to present “craft” using these amazing mew platforms. Magicians often worked for years to create a grand illusion that would define their careers, and pen their names in the history books. They invested the necessary time to constantly be learning, and to stay one step ahead of their audience. They were thinkers, performers, scientists, and illusionists. They were able to take the mechanics of a trick and translate that through showmanship into a performance that would delight and amaze. Nowadays, new technologies in mobile, second screens, and wireless location based data afford us the opportunity delight and amaze consumers. Let’s step it up.
It is high time that the advertising world recognize this dedication to craft and showmanship once again. It is time we practice our craft with dedication to the performance, and return the prestige to our work.
Work / #PITCHMODE
Client: #Pitchmode Studio: Universalscene
Well after one full day consisting of thousands of page-views there has definitely been a wide range of press, chatter, tweeting, and conversation about #PITCHMODE. Agency rags, Media Blogs, and Tech sites all chimed in, as well as a few hundred people on twitter. There has been so much talk about it and everyone seems to shed a different light and attitude towards it. The fact that so much discussion arose really interests me considering how quickly it was conceived, designed and developed, not to mention how truly simple of an idea it really was. The Egoist Network has also followed along and have been collecting the best of the best.
It began yesterday afternoon, when I was a few hours shy of completing a ten day pitch consisting of the typical late nights, and a furious delivery schedules. Sometime around lunch I fired off a tweet with one of my more popular hashtags, #PITCHMODE. Later that evening once all the files were approved, delivered, and prepped for a morning presentation I though back over the day, and while skimming tweets, I thought about how many of us in the industry all knows exactly what #PITCHMODE means.
#PITCHMODE is a call to arms, it’s a rally cry, and a quick and concise way of alerting our friends that we are “in the zone” and are doing what we are all here to do, sell great ideas. Whether you are a writer, art director, creative director, project manager, or producer, it is universal piece of language familiar to all of us.
As I began building the twitter search tools against the API, I quickly saw that the word was being used everywhere around the world. It really began to feel like a good idea to pursue creating a simple, solitary purpose site that could act as a simple aggregate platform to house these conversations. After it was up and running I saw that people actually took comfort in knowing that even if the were alone at the agency cranking, they were not alone. Somewhere, someone was working right long side of them in #PITCHMODE. Truth be told it was also an excuse to mess with some new publishing technology I was itching to use.
The Idea:
Design, program, and launch a single function Web application to support creative solidarity before sunrise.
Technology Platform:
#PITCHMODE Beta runs off of the Twitter API, puling in all content using the PITCHMODE handle and hashtag. Automated responses based on time, weather, and the content of tweets are generated by using triggers within the IFTT toolset. (http://ifttt.com) Once #PITCHMODE was up and running in beta the site became completely autonomous.
Uniform Resource Locator:
http://pitchmode.com/
You are not alone.
Work / JWT BBQ Truck
JWT wanted to satisfy sxsw attendees cravings for saucy cow and pig flesh at SXSW Interactive this year. To do so, the agency hauled tangy, basted animal carcasses (from Texas favorite Salt Lick) all around Austin in two special trucks—and showering free barbecued meat on the masses. You could even requisition the trucks for a special delivery by appealing to @jwtbbq on Twitter. The Web site, JWTbbq.com, has a “Truck Finder” Bing map to locate the trucks and a “Threat Meat-er” that lets you know when they’re running low on BBQ. To get your mouth watering, watch the ultraviolent animation here and here, in which pigs and cows slice and dice each other in inventive ways, all for your gustatory pleasure.
My role as Creative Director on this project was to get the two animations that would be projected on walls in a guerrilla style to an awesome place, as well as define the visual language of the collateral branding including the wrapping of the trucks, stickers, and napkins which in a very clever turn of events contained our disclaimer, as well as some brand messaging. Once again a small crack unit inside JWT put in an amazing effort to turn out a tasty project in a very shout amount of time.
Industry / SXSW Twenty Eleven Recap
Looking back at my SXSW 2011 experience, I have been trying to determine who and what exactly was the breakout of festival. Last year we of course had the birth of Foursquare, and the years leading up to 2010, Twitter was a huge component in the digital vs. real world . However this year, the breakout performer was not a person nor was it a product or even a platform, it was ADVERTISING.
Having attended the event since 2005, it was clear just after a few hours in Austin that this year advertising, and advertising agencies were definitely #winning. It was impossible to avoid the co-opted and sponsored experiences, free rides, and free food brought to you by major brands like Pepsi, CNN, and a wide array of advertising agencies including our very own collaboration with The Salt Lick.
Over the past two years the interactive portion of SXSW has outgrown the once dominant music presence and I am sure the SXSWi attendance will only continue to grow in the years to come. The event I once attended in 2005 is no longer the same, and I can definitively say we are not in Kansas anymore Toto. For better or for worse SXSW is once again changing and breaking new grounds.
Some of the evening events I was really stoked on were the Tumblr collaboration with Funny Or Die, at the HighBall, which was impeccably catered, I also had a blast at the Blackberry event where Diplo threw it down hard. The Barbarians TOS Violation was a good time, even though it was way too crowded, the Vimeo & Nikon jam was insane, , and the great people over at Mediatemple closed out the week with a monster bash featuring a live set from the Foo Fighters. Thanks You Austin for another fun filled week of great people, great panels, and great parties.
Work / Chicco USA
Having built up the relationship between McCann NY , McCann SF and Hush, we were approached for another great collaboration with McCann Worldgroup where we were asked to help launch Chicco (“KEE-KO”) – a prominent European baby gear brand – in the USA. To do this, we had to call on the range of our skills as designers, developers, technical strategists, animators and all around Renaissance folk. Taking point on the project, and in collaboration with Aerva, we figured out how to pull off an interactive experience integrating the worlds of webcams, websites, Times Square billboards, on-location cameras, and everything in between. The result: thousands of happy moms, dads and kids. See the site here.
As the Director of Interactive on this project my role included defining the primary framework, vetting technology partners, building the team to tackle this unique project, as well as help define the look and feel of the browser based application and user interface. Thanks to my lead Flash developer Nick Kircos and Jen Lu who served as the Interactive AD on this one. They really helped make the magic happen.
Industry / Agency Special Ops
Although I work at a very large agency, there are still plenty of projects I am attached to that make me feel as though I still operate within a small tight knit team.
I have found that there are plenty of opportunities to break the mold, push our limits, and drive both our creativity and technological prowess to the edge. Since I arrived in the final months of 2010 we have already rolled out a few impressive internal projects.
One product we launched was an internal “twitter-like” tool for polling and taking a quick transparent pulse of the agency. The second was a comprehensive data visualization application built in Flash 10 for the recent Social Media Week hosted at JWT New York. The third branded content project that will be taking SXSW by storm this year.. This goes to prove that even aircraft carries can make sharp turns and be nimble while navigating the seas of advertising.
Everyday surprises me with new challenges, and this is something I very much enjoy. I am fortunate to have such a solid team built around me, and each new day that passes new, more and more clever people arise, each stepping up to these challenges and delivering.
Work / Challenge your World.
Client: Challenge your World / Studio: Hush
More than a year in the making, the list of contributors to this piece is long in deed. Challenge Your World, a project conceived by famed art director Julien Vallée and in partnership with Motionographer.com, has been running even longer. The project is meant to stretch the mind and conceive of interesting ways we could help good old planet Earth.
Beyond the usual lending of creative direction, and digital production, I got to try my hand “literally” at being a puppeteer on this gig. I also created a bit of backstory for our Hero and Villian @JasonRadiation He burns down forests with the flick of a cigarette, pisses on helpless animals, and harpoons innocent whales. He’s sick! Twisted! Our hero is a fabulous flying Helmet chalk full of tubes and gears, pinwheels and dials, microchips and suction cups. When the Helmet spots an evil-doer, it lands on his head and promptly sucks the evil critters out of his brain…a lobotomy of sorts. So, when you’re contemplating dropping that wrapper or flicking that smoke, you better look over your shoulder. Enjoy.
Work / SA5 San Francisco
Agency: SA5 SF / Studio: Universalscene
It’s always nice when you can knock out some work on the side for some good people. SA-5 San Francisco, is comprised of some award winning talent that jumped from the McCann shop of the same city a few years back.
They needed a no nonsense simple way to display their work, provide some information about themselves, and more importantly update the site when new work was turned out.
We ended up with a nice one page scroll with a nifty nested contact form at the top.
Industry / Just cause rising.
Every once and a while in this crowded media saturated world a truly just cause arises. I have recently become aware of one such just cause. No right brain left behind (NRBLB) is that cause.
No right brain left behind is a collective of thinkers, dreamers, doers, creators, educators, and provocateurs in the creative industries. NRBLB believes that the power of an idea can transcend wars, politics, races, and economies.
The hope is that this collaboration will demonstrate the ability of our leading creative minds to step up to the challenges where conventional thinking fails.
It is not about creating more artists. It’s about giving the students tools to solve 21st century problems. We must understand that creativity is a key constituent that can no longer be neglected in the school systems.
Re-programming our educational system is no simple task, but I believe a very necessary one. Follow them on twitter or become a fan on Facebook today. You may also learn more on slideshare here.
Industry / SXSWi 2011
Well, it is that time of year again, and I have been spending my downtime judging this year’s candidates in various award programs. The stand-out monster is of course the 2011 SXSW Interactive Awards.
I am pretty sure I looked at roughly 300 projects over three categories. There were of course, amazing examples of work, as well as not so great submissions. Regardless the one thing I did take away is how huge this event grows each year. I have been either judging the awards, speaking on panels, or hosting events at SXSW since 2005 and the sheer mass of new people and number of submissions grows incredibly each year. Every year I think we hit a peak, the next year blows it out of the water. I am looking forward to me week in Austin this year and hope to catch up with all the people I am just too busy to see during the year. Best of luck to all that submitted. Kudos in advance to those who will be winning.
Industry / The New Kid on The Block
What is Quora? Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web.
By the looks of it, (and this is based for the most part on the sheer amount of followers I have received in the last week) the growth of Quora is taking off like wild fire. One point I would like to make is that without twitter I do not see this platform growing as fast as it currently has been. We are now so finely tuned into the real world, and firmly tethered to it by the mobile web, we as a culture are becoming ever more reliant on this level of uber-connectivity, and accessibility.
I almost feel overwhelmed by it right now. There is a real desire to stay on top of things as the roll out, for fear of missing something, but one lesson I have learned, is how important it is to tune out every now and again. As humans we are already teetering on the limitations of our ability to retain the vast amounts of information we encounter daily.
I do very much like Quora, as it is another layer glazed upon our social networked landscape, however I am not sure how tough I can hang with it right now. I think I need to figure out a play that gives me more in return than the investment of time it requires to sort through at the moment.
FYI: I might just be too interested in my Spotify Beta account at the present time to dedicate the proper amount of time to investigate Quora.
Industry / Risudual Digital Self
As most of you know I have recently made the shift from the world of the Digital Agency, and have taken on a Creative Director position at JWT. In the weeks leading up to the move I often wondered how it would effect the way in which I have worked for the past decade. As a creative in a small shop you tend to wear many hats, and I quite liked the idea of blending strategy, creative, and a producer’s sensibility. It somehow felt soothing to be involved in so many touch-points of a project.
After a few weeks here, you know what has changed about my process…. nothing. I still approach each challenge with the same mindset. I still not only look for the bigger idea, but also look to solve the execution, platform, and appropriate deployment of our work. The sheer size of our agency is nothing to be intimidated by, but rather it is a great benefit. Unlike most agencies I have been inside, we have an incredible arsenal of talent at our fingertips. As a Creative Director, it is how you move around the ecosystem and leverage the teams to your advantage.
I look forward to the diversity of projects that are available to me, and I continue to be challenged on a daily basis. I am tempted to say that Big is the new Small, but I am not sure that sums everything up the way in which I would like. What I will say in summation is that two thousand and eleven should be an exciting year, and to expect the unexpected from us.
Industry / Miami Ad School
Every now and then in this industry you get a chance to open up and talk to the next generation. There are very few programs available to kids today that are looking for an honest and focused approach to enter into advertising. The Miami Ad School is one of those very few. I was very impressed with the amount of progress this new division had made in such little time. A great deal of respect goes out to Meherna O’Brien for getting things up and running.
Just before the Thanksgiving break David Schwarz of Hush Studios and I spoke to the class about the intricacies of answering a Request for Proposal (RFP). We tried to give the students a glance into the many forms these requests take, and how it is up to you to define yourselves withing your response. We all know there are many ways to skin a cat, and how you are perceived by a client or agency partner is formulated withing the first response. Our goal was to inform and educate the students on how we as a studio crafted our replies by leveraging our strong points and how they should do the same. The crew was an energetic and curious bunch and I hope we had some impact on how they will approach their futures in advertising and design.
I guess since it has been tweeted from the source, I can mention the fact that starting next semester I will be teaching at this awesome incubator of a school. The class I will be conducting is called “Pop Culture Engineering”. What the heck does that mean you say? Well it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. The main crux of the class will focus around how popular culture plays into the advertising industry.
I am excited that I can finally bring together many of the worlds I live in daily. Internet culture and trends crossed with underground street style, and remixed with music, and high fashion. Needless to say, I am looking forward to it.
