Kiss Technology on the Lips

You may or may not ever learn how to code. But it might be a good idea to know what an API is and what you can do with it. Or how the Internet of Things lets you talk to devices. Or what you can do with sensors and accelerometers to create more interesting live experiences.

I once had a fairly frustrating conversation with a creative director who'd expressed disinterest in knowing anything about technology. He didn't want to use social media. He had little interest befriending the developers in his department. As a result, he defaulted to the more traditional advertising solutions—TV, outdoor, and maybe some banner ads.

“Pete,” I'd say, “why are you so averse to learning a little more about digital and the new technologies out there?” His answer had a kind of perverse logic to it. “Because I know whatever I can think up, someone can figure out how to make it.”

What Pete didn't get yet about digital was this: Often it's the technology that drives the idea. He knew he could write a TV spot without knowing precisely how certain visual effects might be created. But the potential of digital isn't always as obvious.

Fortunately, this conversation took place on the same day that Google and Arcade Fire launched the viral sensation “Wilderness Downtown,” a very cool interactive demonstration of HTML5 capabilities and Google Maps. You activated the site by entering the street address of your childhood home. Once you did, Arcade Fire's new single began playing in the background, and it whisked you away on a nostalgic walk through the very streets where you grew up: http://bit.ly/wildnernessdowntown

So I grabbed Pete, marched him into my office, and had him enter his address on the site. I sat back and watched as he took in his personal version of Wilderness Downtown. His response was as expected. “Holy s••t!” My next question was obvious. “So, could you think that up?”

“Ahhhh, no.”

“My point exactly.”

“Point taken.”

If you're going to be a creative in a digital age, you have to pay attention to the new technologies. And this information isn't going to walk up and introduce itself. (I can hear some boss saying, “People, these blogs on digital, interactive, and social aren't going to read themselves.”) You need to devour information about new technologies like My Jibo, the personal robot. You need to educate yourself on the Internet of Things so you can work on ideas using connected machines and appliances. You should even spend time on Kickstarter and get a sense of what's coming in a year or two. Read. Learn. Repeat.

Make Friends with a Developer (or Vice Versa)

Every ad agency is set up differently. In some, the creative department consists of copy, art, and production. The “digital” department is on another floor or, in the case of some mega-agencies, in another building, or city. In this model, traditional creatives and technologists barely talk to each other. Not a great model for collaboration.

In an agency that's more digitally focused (even if it evolved from a traditional agency), you'll find coders, UX, and digital production people are smack in the middle of the same creative department as writers and art directors. But even in this new creative department, colleagues all too often speak a different language. On the desks of the “new guys,” the screens display lines of code. Makerbots and prototypes sit between cups of cold coffee. The techs aren't scouring the pages of Creativity for the latest ad campaigns; they're reading about beta releases in some Silicon Valley blog.

If your experience is largely with traditional media, you want to make these folks your partners, allies, and BFFs. The next best thing to writing code yourself is being good friends with someone who can; not just because they know how to build that idea you've been thinking about, but because they can add to it and amplify it, and even teach you what's possible with new technologies. With their help you can approach problems from new perspectives. The way the industry's going, traditional creatives are going to end up working with developers either way. But there's a difference between working two cubicles over and being actual partners, getting to know each other well enough to like and trust one another.

Once you can start to be as friendly with a coder as you are with your regular art or copy partner, you'll find you're far more willing to suggest half-baked ideas, to admit what you don't know, and to ask questions about what's possible. The same will hold true in the other direction. If your new developer friend is confident enough to be honest with you, and throw out ideas both good and bad, or suggest an entirely new approach, you'll both get to more interesting work.

Please note that if you're a developer or creative technologist, you need to do the same. The best CTs, at least inside an ad agency, aren't there simply to build and execute, but to inspire everyone around them with possibilities. So if that's your role, don't take any crap from the old school creatives. If you're not being invited into the process at the start of a project, or you meet resistance whenever you try to apply your knowledge, it's probably time to grab your iPhone and say “Hey, Siri, can you show me a list of jobs at agencies that'll still be here in five years?”

Evolve From T-Shaped to Square-Shaped

In recent years, as the agencies diversified their creative output, they sought more of what we called T-shaped people. The term refers to employees who are very good at one particular skill (the downstroke of the T) and who also possess some proficiency in many of the other skills required on an agency team (the horizontal stroke).

As a writer, you may not be able to build a prototype or a wireframe, but you need a damn good sense of how it's done, how these skills contribute to a project and to your ideas. If you don't have a good knowledge of how to work with UX, when to involve them, when you should lead, and when to follow, you'll be less effective as both a team member and as a creator. Remember that guy, Pete? Same thing here. You'll have better ideas if you know how they're brought to life and by whom. Remember, sometimes your new tech friend can drive the idea.

Digital strategist Mike Arauz suggests you take the T-shaped idea one step further and become square-shaped. Instead of absorbing basic knowledge about all the other skills outside your area of expertise, find one or two and become an expert at those as well. It'll help you become more of a recombinant thinker and increase your value to any creative organization. Go learn about drones, augmented reality, wearable technology, and personal robots. Become an expert at something other than art and copy. You'll make better contributions to open-ended assignments and be more sought out as a member of any team. It's like we said on the first page. You want to be the second-smartest person in the room about everything.

Wieden+Kennedy Creative Director Tony Davidson seems to agree. “I'm not even sure that the future is a writer-and-art-director team anymore.” In W. B. Spencer's Breaking In, Davidson said: “I get a sense that the kids coming through these days want to do a lot more. They want to be an animator, they want to be a director, they want to be a writer. I love the idea of a hybrid-ideas-person who can move between disciplines.”²

Also in Breaking In, Google's Valdean Klump described just how valuable this wider skill set is:

What impresses me most is the ability to make things. More and more these days, young people are coming into the business able to shoot their own commercials, create websites, program games, take photos, make animations, build Facebook apps, and generally act as one-person ad agencies. This makes CDs salivate because getting ideas off of the page is at least as hard as getting them on paper in the first place.…If you can make things and make them well, you will never be unemployed.³

Translation: Cha-ching.

Done Beats Perfect. Lean Toward Action

“Move fast and break things.”

That's the motto at Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg argues that too many companies hobble themselves by moving slowly and trying to be too precise.

The advertising industry could learn a lot from companies like Facebook and Google or successful companies in the start-up community. Ad agencies have historically moved at a snail's pace, requiring weeks—even months, seriously, months—to tread their way from strategy to creative development to testing to more creative development to approvals to production and finally to airing the work. That might make sense for a Super Bowl commercial, but it's not the case for the real-time speed of social media and the Web in general.

The Internet moves fast. Things catch fire quickly, then burn out and disappear with equal speed. So it's smart to lean toward action. Embrace a real-time approach to content generation. Learn to target keywords and trends on Facebook, Twitter, and in the news. Develop the ability to respond faster to market changes by speeding up the approval process, both internally and with clients. Then measure engagement and effectiveness, reframe any failures as a learning experience, and move on.

In the closing keynote at SXSW 2015, Eric Teller, head of Google X (their research division) said, “The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your ideas.”⁴ He was referring, of course, to things like Google Glass and the self-driving car, but it applies to digital content as well. Fail faster.

P.J. Pereira, chief creative officer at Pereira and O'Dell, put it this way: “Think like a marketer. Behave like an entertainer. Move like a tech start-up.”

“Never solve a problem from its original perspective.”

—Chic Thompson, author of What A Great Idea

Always be Inventing

As “maker” becomes the next creative role, you'll want to start thinking like one, too. Makers are a growing subculture of people who play and invent in the worlds of digital tech, engineering, robotics, and 3-D printing.

The movement is popular enough to give birth to events like Maker Faire and companies like SparkFun. Maker Faires are basically science fairs on steroids. Held all over the country, they showcase makers and tinkerers and hobbyists and geeks who love exploration and innovation. (Check out the fiber-optic formalwear on their site.) SparkFun is an online retailer of microcontrollers, circuit boards, and all the other ingredients you need to build stuff for the Internet of Things, not just use it.

Remember it's no longer about trying to make people want stuff, but making stuff people want.

Practice Thinking Laterally

Advertising is typically a very linear process. You get an assignment and you drive toward a specific output, be it an ad, an app, or a website. But given how connected the digital world is, and since ideas can travel from one medium or digital space to another, learning to think laterally is becoming almost a required skill.

Lateral thinking is an indirect approach to problem solving that's not immediately obvious and doesn't follow a traditional step-by-step logic. Think back to how Plan of Norway called attention to the issue of childhood marriage by having a 12-year-old start a fake blog. Or how the blood banks of Bahia, Brazil, induced people to donate blood by removing the red stripes from the shirts of their beloved local soccer team, returning the color to their team jerseys only as fans gave blood (Figure 15.2). Those are examples of lateral thinking. They don't charge straight at the problem. They take indirect approaches to accomplishing the objective.

More often than not you'll be on the receiving end of a brief that asks for a specific deliverable: an online campaign, a TV commercial, a microsite. But if you can look past that sheet of paper to the overall problem you're trying to solve—try using how might we?—you may find a better solution.

American Greetings' campaign to increase sales of their Mother's Day cards is a great example. Straight-on linear solutions to this problem could've been, say, running a TV commercial or buying search terms related to Mother's Day. But Mullen Lowe ran a fake recruitment campaign.

It began with newspaper and online ads for a job described only as “Director of Operations.” Applicants were interviewed online and the interviews became the campaign's entertaining shareable content (Figure 15.3). Entertaining because you got to watch the applicants—their eyes growing wider, their faces paler—listening to the immense amount of work required by the position: 24-hour work days, 7 days a week, no weekends off, no vacation days, no sick time, no benefits, no breaks. Oh, and no salary either. (All of which pretty much describes being a mother.)

After posting a video of the interviews, it quickly became the top-trending YouTube video worldwide and, as of this writing, has nearly 25 million views. As well as well as winning Best of Show at the Effies (for effectiveness), plus Gold at the One Show and Silver at Cannes (for awesomeness).

Practice the Art of Dissection

When you happen upon an idea out there you like, take a minute to see if you can dissect it. See if you can reverse-engineer your way back to a formula or architecture you can replicate, like the format of Do > Invite > Document > Share.

We're not talking about stealing ideas—just their construction, their architecture. Writers and art directors have been doing this for years to create print ads. Maybe they decide on a visual format of exaggerating the benefit. Maybe it's a format of combining opposites. These are just tactics, techniques; and when one works for a problem, they apply it.

Dissect the good ideas to see what makes them work and start applying it to your own problems. Check out these examples.

What made Oreo's famous “You can still dunk in the dark ad” so effective? Let's take it apart.

1. Oreo started with an existing media event, the Super Bowl.
2. They went to Twitter where the fans were hanging out and engaging with each other.
3. They took inspiration from the event itself. (The stadium lights went out.)
4. They found a way to connect their product to it.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Century 21 lights up the Internet by selling “Walter White's” house on Craigslist to coincide with the finale of Breaking Bad. See any similarities?

1. Century 21 took an existing cultural event, the finale of Breaking Bad.
2. They went to the social platforms where people were talking about the show.
3. They took inspiration from the series.
4. They found a relevant way to connect their service to it.

Both these examples can be summed up by a quote Gareth Kay shared in a Think with Google interview: “Be interested in what people are interested in. Compete for their attention on their terms, not yours.”

As you can see, we're partial to the Do > Invite > Document > Share approach; both Oreo and Century 21 initiatives are built this way.

1. Create a really cool experience, doing something, not saying it.
2. Invite participation that inspires creation of content.
3. Document, record, and capture the content.
4. Repackage, distribute, and encourage sharing.

These are some of the new ways to tell stories. Sure, they use words and pictures and sound, and require the talents of art directors and copywriters. But they tap into new behaviors and technologies. They require systems thinking. They leave room for users and communities to participate and cocreate. And they migrate across the Web, from one platform to the next. But even the most active viewers and readers want an occasional break. They look forward to creative ideas where they can sit back and do nothing but watch. Which leads us to our next chapter. Time to make the TV spots.