Simple idea. Sort of relevant to the game. Pretty neat.

So I tried it. I saw the site was built in Flash and well I started to wonder, are they using face tracking with some sort of blob detection to check if your hand is in the right place. Well. Possibly no. The game is using some sort of background difference check to figure out if your hand has moved. So I starting thinking and I tried a test. Could I trick the system into thinking I’m ‘there’.

Well yep I could. All I needed was a water bottle in the frame when I started the game and then I left it there – the game thought I was still playing. I then wondered if the game moves the ring around the screen to stop someone doing this. So I left the game running.

As you can see I clocked up 4 minutes and I could have left the game running for days. If the game had moved the ring around every ten minutes, or used face tracking (which still could be gamed) then this game could have been less open to a hack. I also wonder if pictures of what I’m doing were being sent somewhere for someone to check (but this feels highly unusual as it would break privacy rules).

So just a thought. If you are going to make a game with a brilliant prize –  people will ‘game’ your system.

You can design your way around that but ultimately people will do it.

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The debate moved onto a recent blog post written by Igor Clark from Wieden + Kennedy (an agency I am very familiar with as I used to work at their London office) titled ‘Why we are not hiring creative technologists’. This post has gone down a storm. A pretty large response in the comments and on other blogs on the post was congratulating Igor for being so candid and saying what needed to be said – The broad strokes being – The title ‘Creative Technologist’ has become so watered down it is now useless, so Wieden + Kennedy is hiring real coders only.’

I’ve read Igor’s post a LOT of times. So I really, really, really understand his points. Because on MANY levels I agree, and most of this post I am agreeing…but I still think he is still missing a subtle nuance.

He says in big letters. Stop hiring creative technologists – hire coders. Well I would never hire a creative technologist who couldn’t code and make prototypes of their ideas. I don’t think any of my peers would either, and I’ve spoken to a lot of them about this. So I’m really interested why Igor thinks people with no coding skills are getting hired in these roles. Name some names Igor. Point those people out and we can all call them charlatans to their faces. Maybe even burn them at the stake.

Seriously. Who really gives a damn why people get hired and what they are called. Does it effect who you hire? No not at all. You’ll hire people who are skilled to do the job you want them to, not what BS is on their CV. From looking through linkedin as I’ve been trying to hire, I’ve seen loads of people with too much tech on their portfolio and not enough evidence of abstract creative thinking. So I have the same problem – Just from a different perspective.

Also rather than pointing out the failure of “creative technology” courses, why not point out some courses, identify the curriculum and find out more from the course tutors on why you think the students coming out of those courses don’t fit your bill. The type of place I would look to see young talent would be from the RCA Design Interactions, ITP, Eyebeam, Umea Insitute of Design, MIT Media Lab, Parsons etc etc Places excelling in teaching students how art, design, practical experience of technology and user experience can all meld together. I wouldn’t go cruising the alumni of Imperial College for engineers and computer scientists even though they produce some of the best in the world.

Igor talks about “people who engineer excellent software” but who can also “come up with amazing ideas”. Well here is the thing. There are a handful of people in the world who fit this bill and less so who want to work in advertising. There is a massive shortage of engineering talent in this world and silicon valley has a hard enough time hiring in. Why would I pay the vastly inflated salary to get a brilliant engineer in. I don’t need brilliant engineers who can deploy a Hadoop Stack or chew my ear off about how they despise SOAP.

I need brilliant people who can solve communication problems with creative approaches and be able to build fast prototypes to help demonstrate those ideas.

Most “proper” developers would vomit at my code. I learnt to be a developer like most people I know. Did an an engineering / computer science degree and fell into making things for the internet during the late 90′s boom. I then fell into advertising when I started to realise I could work on projects with brilliant brands and great budgets. Where I could put forward useful ideas and not just the usual campaign fluff.

The people I want to hire go to dorkbots to make new friends or hackspaces to play with that new toy they have there. They buy a Kinect and start making a game concept they’ve been kicking around for a while. They make things that get featured on MAKE magazine. They are inventive. They are curious. They can explain their ideas. They are open to collaboration and can understand the nuance of a brand, for example how an idea for Nike should ‘feel’ like.

This I think is the nuance that isn’t expressed in Igor’s post. I’m of the perspective that the best creative techs are probably not the best engineers out there. Most electronic engineers totally piss on the Arduino for ‘dumbing down’ electronics. But look. It liberates people. It lets anyone with a modicum of know how, make their idea possible. That is what a creative technologist is to me.

If I’m sort of implying engineers and hardcore coders can’t be creative then you have to understand there are differing scales of creativity. There are people that can take 1k filesize and make an amazing demo out of it with incredibly creative coding and there are there are people that can come up with and make Baker Tweet. Both examples of creative technology and both at widely different ends of the tech spectrum.

Igor is bang on the money about creating an environment for coders to come and play. But I think he has swung the needle too far into the coding camp and he has downplayed the ‘creative’ aspect.

My take is that the challenge is how to bring non-traditional people inside an advertising agency without the bullshit job titles.

Oh and for the record. I hate the job title ‘Creative Technologist’. I’ve said it all along. In a perfect world you would ban all job titles. You certainly don’t have ‘creative art director’ so why do we need ‘creative’ slapped on there. But then it starts to cause more problems if you get rid of the title. I’m not just a ‘developer’ and I’m not a tech director. I would be loathe to start writing technical scopes, functional specs and architectures. This is the stuff I left behind years ago. I’m interested in coming up with concepts and not being too bogged down with all the implementation nuts and bolts.

Yes divorcing the concept from the execution is a complete brainmelt. But I really truly believe that if you have people in your agency who are armed with the ability to create prototypes of ideas, then a model of outsourcing can work. Look at Hollywood. The film studios are run by producers who pull in the best talent when they need it. They outsource all of their creativity. Yes, yes I know this is a simplistic approach, but if you design your agency to work in a certain way by having the key people in the right places then I think you can crack most things.

To bring it back to the point.

Work with educational establishments to make sure they are teaching in the ways you might need and hire who is right for you.

P.S. Igor if you are ever in NYC then let’s go have a steak, a beer and chew the fat. On me.

P.P.S Any junior Creative Techs who might want to work in advertising. Drop me a line. @sermad

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My thoughts on what my job means, where I think the advertising industry is going and some inspirational stuff in the back end.

In a nutshell.

I come up with ‘ideas’ and I make things to demonstrate them.

Comments would be greatly appreciated – This is my point of view – Would love to work with others to understand how they interpret the role (especially across other industries). You can download the keynote from slideshare and see my speaker notes – Some of the slides need this.

Credit to Mark Avnet, Scott Prindle and Richard Schatzberger for helping me frame my thoughts.

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So onto the talk (my notes are a bit patchy and I’ve embellished some bits so please excuse me) – I’ll try and pull out themes. (If Tom you are reading this I would love to see your slides and please comment if I’ve misinterpreted anything).

Tom Hulme – Design Director of IDEO london was chief speaker. Interesting background as he doesn’t seem to be from a pure ‘industrial design’ background. Seems bloody smart and nice.

Exploit and Explore

When creating a new product, you diverge your thinking into many possibilities and then converge your thinking into the final product. This approach where you funnel all your intelligence into the final product, was a great when manufacturing processes were slow and responding to consumer needs were even slower. But now, with social media we can see the feedback to the product in a much greater scale and faster speed than ever before. This means that production cycles are getting faster and the need to respond to consumer feedback is greater.

The tools of the ‘diverge’ are deep dives, brainstorms, ideation, prototyping etc and the ‘converge’ are the industrial design, spreadsheets etc. You need to mess with those tools – use spreadsheets for creativity (price can be an amazing driver for innovation and creativity). Use creative tools for making business decisions. Mix it up. When you make choices, you might realise your end result is wrong and then you are back to creating choices again. Basically it boils down – Be in BETA.

Be in BETA

Business design can be unpredictable so prototype it and be in BETA – A great example is the Clover Food Lab. They are a restaurant and creating a new restaurant is a massive overhead and risk – finding the right location, renting a space, kitting it out, employing staff, cooking the right food etc. This is a tough business to get right. So they have a food van, they travel around, they change the menu – so they are constantly going to where customers want them, cooking the food the customers want and constantly learning and getting better. An amazing approach for a restaurant to take.

Designing for the whole

Ask yourself why Apple is so great. Genius marketing, beautiful product design, great UX, great retail shopping experience, great customer support etc etc All these things add up to that ‘amazing, magical’ experience that Steve Jobs exudes. But not one of these things IS the ‘magic’. A great phone with a terrible UI is a terrible phone. When you are designing a product – what is going to differentiate this product in the market – what is the marketing insight for this product? – basically bake in the marketing into the product. This is actually something Alex Bogusky and John Winsor wrote a book about.

To steal a quote from William Bernbach – ‘A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.’

Design is now democratized

The era of the lone designer is over. It takes an enormous amount of people to create a design. Technology has allowed us to open up the design process to the crowd to see if we can get better designs. So IDEO are trying this ‘crowd sourced’ approach to innovation and design with OPEN IDEO. If you are going to open up the design to the world, then you have to think really really hard about what you ask. Make sure your are posing the right question (spend a LOT of time on this). Make sure you have the right incentive / motivation for people to participate ($$$ / fun / fame). Make sure you can react to the contributions – don’t just do nothing about it. For me, this also throws up masses of questions about ‘what is design’ and ‘what can be designed’. Can user experience be designed or implied?

Making systems fun

Gamification is the buzzword de jour but it can actually be useful as an incentive. Computers are very good at crunching data but rubbish at understanding images – humans are very very good at understanding images but rubbish at crunching data. So why not combine the two? You can then try to train a computer to be a better. But that is quite a boring task. So if you wrap it up in a playful way, then you have people wanting to perform a menial task a WIN – WIN. Google took this approach and called it ‘Google Image Labeller. They made a game out of labelling images.

Reacting to feedback

Dustin Curtis is a user interface designer, he became so frustrated with the American Airlines website that he redesigned it – Because now we are in an age where you can’t just complain – you’ve got to improve to complain. And improve he did.

He posted it up on his site – It gained an amazing amount of press and then a UX designer for American Airlines responded. He told Dustin he had drawers full of redesigns but the web teams for AA were split across so many silo’d parts of the business that nothing ever was fixed. So you would think AA would react to this by making a redesign priority number one. But no. The AA designer was fired. Say’s everything really.

Conclusions

I’ve glossed over loads of detail. Tom was a great speaker – packed in a heck of a lot in 30 minutes or so. I was incredibly interested in how aware IDEO were about advertising and marketing. Also how they approach open collaboration and consumer feedback and I’ve got loads of questions about how this design approach can work for other creative industries.

Is the age of the visionary really over and is insight driven invention really working? The iPad for me is not a useful product. I said it would be a flop prior to it being launch – it’s just a scaled up iPhone and a not very good laptop. So why not buy an iPhone AND a laptop. But clearly people (millions) of people disagree. And actually it has created a new product category. Was the creation of this product down to a consumer insight? I’m not sure. I’m not knocking insight driven innovation here as I absolutely believe in this, but I think sometimes you have to give people what they didn’t expect.

Is consumer feedback really always worth listening too? Advertising generally hates market research on its creativity (a focus group on an ad is the kiss of death). Did Flat Eric or gorilla or go through testing? I’ve no idea. I doubt they would have got through testing as anything so bold is generally not accepted in testing. But then, the movie industry have got into testing in a big way. I see reports all the time of random people going to see an unfinished cut of a new film only for it to be twisted and changed (for the worse?) when it finally is released. Again I totally believe in testing and iterating through consumer feedback – but I’m talking about software and maybe stories shouldn’t (can’t?) be created like this.

All in a fantastic insight into IDEO. I would love to try and find a way we could collaborate with them. Advertising agencies are certainly trying expand their horizons – I haven’t met one agency who isn’t trying to get into into some sort of product or business development. It seemed that IDEO are the best agency placed to understand the marketing when they also create and fully understand the product. I really think if IDEO wanted to go this way, bring different creatives in house to get that storytelling craft they could become an ‘advertising agency’ (whatever that means these days). Heck they are probably already doing it already…

My final take out – Use the tools you want to use – There is no right way – Plan to make mistakes – Prototype, Prototype, Prototype, Collaborate (internally and externally) – Have some fun where you can.

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Check the video.

They’ve also create a neat little google maps mashup showing the location of the Mini and where the players are.

On the surface it sounds like loads of fun, and I wish I could play the game to try out the design as I’ve got quite a few questions on how it plays out.

I can’t help wonder that they might have got the game mechanic slightly wrong. Basically this game is Halo Oddball played out in the real world but there is one key difference. In Oddball, the winner of the game is the person who has held onto the ball for the longest.

When you have the ball you can’t fire so you have to run like a headless chicken away from the hordes of people after you. When you don’t have the ball, everyone is piling in to get the ball. It’s a really skillful and tactical game and one you can be winning and losing every other second – This game is just total carnage.

With the Mini game, as the winner is the person who is holding onto the car at the end, there really isn’t any gameplay advantage for me to go get the car until near the very end. They’ve made the game area quite small and the prize large, so people will be stealing the car off each other but I just think if they’ve used the Oddball scoring system the game would have had a much better game dynamic.

You could argue that by making the game the way they did, they made it easy for new players to join at any time. Pro’s and con’s to both but I think the game would have relied on a lot more skill and cunning the Oddball way rather than just being ‘lucky’ to be the person who has the car at the end of the game.

This isn’t a criticism of their idea as it is brave, on brand and on strategy. Big plaudits to everyone who worked so hard on it as we need more of this type of work.

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So it still surprises me when I see media placements of messages that make absolutely no sense. We all know that creative has to be delivered with context.

Here are a couple of examples.

The Economist

I really like this work. Lovely illustration, great use of the double ad space to deliver the dual message. But look at the call to action.

For a free copy text IRAN to 60300.

Fantastic I can get a free copy. But…Hang on a minute. I’m underground. Waiting  for the tube. Unless the TFL has secretly installed a way to use my phone underground (which they haven’t) then it isn’t going to work. It would have taken no time or money to have dropped / switched the CTA and run new creative for these placements. They’ve even put a custom keyword on the ad to track it…so close…yet so far.

Cherly Cole

This again is really really good in theory. You check into a poster via Facebook places to win a prize. Brilliant you all say. But look at the poster below.

This looks a little fake so I’m not sure it is real…But taking it as real…it looks like a very very busy and fast moving road. Am I really going to get my phone while driving (and thus breaking the law) to check into a poster. Are the passengers in the going to do this? I would actually say it is impossible for someone to see that poster, register I have to do something, open Facebook, get a GPS lock and check in all within about 5 seconds. Why bother putting a message on a poster that is useless. They could either changed the messaging or just dropped the placement and saved some money.

You could argue that the Facebook messaging is so obscure it doesn’t affect the main message but I would disagree.

The advertising industry has to grow up. Clear communication of creative is the core of the industry. New advances in technology are rapidly changing how the public choose to interact with those brand messages. It is getting incredibly complex to manage and if you can’t deliver a clear message on a poster then I fear the worst when you tackle the hard stuff.

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Assemble your A-Team

I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.

We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.

I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.

1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.

Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.

So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.

The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.

Friendfeed is your friend

Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).

Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.

Collaboration – Living the idea

We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.

Sketches

The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.

This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.

The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.

Magnets

Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.

This led to another study in field lines.

Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.

This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.

So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.

Set the goalposts

The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.

So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…

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What if we can extend a realworld participation back into videogames.

The brilliant Nike78 project has a film by Nick Marsh where they have hacked a Wii controller into a pair of running shoes. By running on the spot you control the game.

This is genius but restrictive. Could you do this in the real world?

Well actually – possibly yes. Nike+ is out there. By running you accumulate points.

In Grand Theft Auto your character gets fitter and can run further by running more in the game.

Could we combine Nike+ with Grand Theft Auto so that by running in the real world makes your gaming character fitter?

If there was a clear Nike+ API and the developers of GTA chose to implement this feature then it could be possible.

What other physical or social choices could there be to create this same offline/online reward structure?

+

Can shopping create points to spend in Farmville?

Again probably yes. There is a Tesco.com API and a partnership with Farmville could be thrashed out.

So can videogames influence our behaviour? I believe we could be at the point where they actually could.

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(Image from flickr)

Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.

(Image via flickr)

So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs  and do so across all the channels they have.

A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches, the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.

So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.

The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breed of agency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.

So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.

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The point is not whats true but what the commentary around your work will be like. If you know your treading a fineline between homage and ripoff or you’ve discovered a similar piece then you have to have a ‘reaction plan’.

In a hypothetical world, it could work like this.

Creatives to Producer -> We’ve found this great video on youtube and the style and look really works well with our script.

Producer now in a dilemma -> These guys aren’t repped by any agencies, even if I did get in touch they’ll tell me to bugger off – Then we are screwed because they know what we are upto. Double bugger.

Everyone -> We are within the law here. So Ok we’ll go it alone.

So your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Creative collaboration could be your answer. Approach the original creatives with the idea that you want THEM to work with your creatives. They’ll get paid well, they’ll get the credit they deserve, you all work together with a director in a collaborative way.

The additional benefit is that you can use the influence of the creators to help share your work. If the original creators post it to Youtube and not the client or the agency, then there is a massive audience of people ready to appreciate a new piece by the same creatives. If it’s framed in a way where everyone knows it was a collaboration then you might just have a great piece of work that is warmly received.

The recent Pepsi ‘Refresh Everything’ work highlights the needs for agencies and clients to be aware of negative word of mouth around their work. All the amazing work on the main campaign around corporate social responsibility starts to be unravelled by a highly vocal fanbase and it could have possibily been avoided by embracing collaboration and not shunning it.

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