I spent Wednesday morning this week at the IPA Creative Pioneers
conference held at Shoreditch Village, apparently the site of the first ever
theatre in London and in the heart of London’s Tech City, so a perfect venue to
talk about the intersection of creativity and technology.
I summed up the morning on my Twitter feed as –
try more new stuff, more often, more quickly, more collaboratively and put
people first, not tech – but for those of you who might be interested here’s a
more complete roundup of the morning’s speakers who came thick and fast (and
delayed lunch!)
First up Marc Nohr and Jason Goodman summarised what they
learnt on the IPA’s recent jolly fact-finding mission to Silicon Valley. Given
we were sitting listening to this in spitting distance of Silicon Roundabout
they were honest enough to front the “why did you have to go to Silicon Valley
to find this stuff out” question. They drew parallels between the two
geographies around themes including Vision (we all need one), Now (don’t dilly dally),
and Constant Beta (do it, test it, ship it, do it again). So far, so old news.
Sarah Passe from Creative Artists Agency talked animatedly
about changing models of content creation and brand co-creation as higher
quality productions start to make their first appearances on the internet
rather than via TV or Cinema, including plans by YouTube to introduce 25 hoursof original new content a day. I’m still not sure I understand the funding
model for this but more high quality content can only be a good thing, right?
Ex Ad-man Eric Edge,
now EMEA marketing supremo at Facebook, gave us an insight into how the company
has driven its own success through the application of a few pithy maxims posted
up around their offices – Done is Better than Perfect / Move Fast and Break
Things / Stay Focused and Keep Shipping / What Would You Do If You Weren’t
Afraid?
Most interesting, however, was
their culture of hacking (no, not like
Matthew Broderick in Wargames), hackathons where people work on projects
they normally wouldn’t to find novel solutions.
David Scheine, European head at Yelp, described their social
business model that relies on user generated content from unpaid reviewers.
Heretically, in a room full of Ad Men and Women he admitted that they never
advertise preferring to throw parties for their most frequent reviewers to keep
them sweet. Joshua Graff, from LinkedIn terrified the room by showing how Big
Data is being used by KLM in their Meet and Seat programme to allow customers
to pick their seats based on others LinkedIn or Facebook profiles – one senior
ad man overheard saying “I’d rather kill myself”.
Surely there must be an option to allow the
stalkee to refuse the advances of their stalker? Who wants to be sat next to
someone on a transatlantic flight who won’t stop pitching at you? Eamonn Carey
from Kiip then made a short but entertaining pitch for Kiip, the game rewards system
that allows brands to provide either real, or virtual, prizes for gaming
achievements on your phone.
Andrew Humphries and Kam Star delivered a passionate
portrayal of Shoreditch’s transformation from shit hole to Tech City and
announced London’s answer to SXSW, Digital Shoreditch, as the focus turned away
from Silicon Valley and toward Silicon Roundabout.
Next came another panel/not a panel, this time centred on creative
advertising uses of technology. I’ll be honest, I must’ve been a bit distracted
by this point as I’ve forgotten the names of the three speakers but one thing
stood out for me: Mother talking about
their HTC ‘skydiving’ ad.
What was most interesting to me was the approach they
took in creating lots of content, across multiple media platforms all at the
same time rather than having 3 or 4 separate shoots. Well, you’d have to if you
were trying to film a guy taking photographs while skydiving. Presumably this
should mean that the media planning has to take place at least at the same time
as the creative development, if not before. Otherwise, how do you know which
platforms you’re creating for?
Steve Henry of Decoded next gave an entertaining little
pitch for his “learn how to code in a day” proposition promising he could teach
your Granny to code in a day. Coding is the new black it seems. Alex Hope OBE
made a worthy case for his NextGen project to improve the teaching of
information technology in schools. I was shocked to hear that fewer people
today are studying computer science at University than were 15 years ago. Then
Matt McNeany from Code Worldwide made a compelling case for agencies to catch
up with clients in the race to join marketing to technology. His presentation
below:
Finally 19 year old Steven Bartlett showed his energy and
enthusiasm for his latest startup (his first was an events company run on
Facebook before Flashmob parties had been heard of) dazzling the crowd with
lightning fast mental arithmetic he showed that you’re never too young to start
something new (nor should you ever be too old but that’s a story for another
day).
And breathe! If you’ve got this far then I’ll buy you a
drink the next time I see you. (disclaimer: you may need to remind me)
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