Final_Intel_LogoIn the last few years, Intel’s advertising has become a lot less inward-focused. For decades, the company’s “Intel Inside” campaign directed consumers’ attention to the chips that Intel puts inside electronic devices. While that campaign (with its instantly recognizable bong-bong-bong jingle) helped make the company what it is today, Intel hasn’t been content to rest

For the “State of the Creative” series, we’ve heard from Chief Creative Officer’s at: Ogilvy & Mather North America, Weber Shandwick, GREY, 360i, and R/GA.

For my final post, I turn to StrawberryFrog – a New York City Advertising Agency – to get their thoughts. Drum roll, please…

In my final post regarding the “State

So far in the “State of the Creative” series, we’ve heard from Chief Creative Officer’s at: Ogilvy & Mather North America, Weber Shandwick, and GREY. This week we continue to examine what it means to be a creative in today’s world…

I sat down with Adam Kerj, Chief Creative Officer at 360i, to discuss the state of the creative today.

In this new era of data and technology, what has been the fundamental change for creatives?

We have more insight into consumer behavior than ever before, and we are living in a world exploding with content that needs to resonate for consumers to care and to be inspired to share.  Creatives are now using digital and social media as a powerful creative canvas.  To get to better creative and high-quality experiences, requires more collaboration in the creative process and the ability to build ideas and stories across touch points. But ultimately, it’s still about big, simple ideas.  Consumers don’t fall in love with technology, they in love with great ideas and great storytelling.

What does it mean to be a creative today?

Creatives today can have a bigger impact on their clients’ businesses.  Marketers and their creative partners have opportunities to create completely new products and services that are integrated in to the DNA of the marketing ecosystem.  That’s a space where Creatives in the past didn’t have access to, but thanks to technology, user experience (UX), creativity and data coming together, creatives today can make a huge contribution to a client’s businesses.

Continue Reading State of the Creative Series: Interview with the Chief Creative Officer at 360i

In case you haven’t noticed, things have changed a lot in the advertising and marketing industry. With bigger bandwidth and faster, smaller, cheaper digital devices, the world is staggeringly more connected. With home-grown, artisanal wine, cheese, whiskey . . . pants . . . the world is a lot more “local” as well.  And, of course, all of the choices you make – whether it’s the restaurant where you just ate, the starlet you just Googled or the selfie you just posted to Instagram – are obsessively observed, analyzed, and sold to by advertisers and marketers.

So we got to wondering, what does it mean to be a creative in today’s world? How many “legs” does an idea have to have when advertisers and marketers are targeting various demographics, each using multiple media devices and social media platforms? And does having all that data mean you or anyone else knows how to use it?

We posed these questions to Chief Creative Officers at some of the world’s leading ad agencies and will be posting their responses here over the next few weeks. Together, they should give us an interesting take on the state of advertising creative today.

I sat down with Steve Simpson the Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather North America to discuss the state of the creative today.

In this new era of data and technology, what has been the fundamental change for creative?

Creatives now have the remarkable ability to learn from their work after it appears. We are never launched, we are never done and dusted, and we operate in a continual state of launch. We all get second (and more) chances to do it better.

What does it mean to be a creative today?

The days of the copywriter doing the copy part and the art director doing the art part now seem quaint, childlike, and pathetically touching. A creative today takes on many more diverse responsibilities and possesses and uses many more talents. But these talents, although expanding all the time, are finite. We need to rely on experts, and part of our success is being good “expert locators” to do for us what we can’t do ourselves anymore.

Continue Reading State of the Creative Series: Interview with Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather North America

1896 was a big year – the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece; the first x-ray was taken, and, of course, The ADVERTISING Club of New York was born. Located in the heart of Manhattan, The ADVERTISING Club is the industry’s premier venue for networking and creativity and professional development. As such, the club plays a vital role in cultivating advertising professionals of tomorrow and supporting the thought leaders of today.

While The ADVERTISING Club may be best known for the International Andy Awards, which recognize creativity and innovation in advertising around the world, it has garnered its most recent attention for its “I’mPART” initiative, which celebrates diversity within the advertising and marketing industry and works to recruit a wide variety of fresh young voices and talent to the business. That goal is embedded in last four letters of the name – Promote, Attract, Retain, and Train. I’mPART was recently featured in The New York Times, which celebrated I’mPART’s success in making the advertising industry more inclusive and more reflective of the diverse and increasingly global market it is trying to reach.

The Way I See It:

  • I see The ADVERTISING Club remaining an important pillar within the industry, and a symbiotic relationship forming between the older and younger generations. We will continue to see millennials mentoring the older generation on emerging technology and how to best implement it, and the older generation providing seasoned advice that only experience can provide.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club playing a strong role in continuing change within the industry on the topic of diversity, not just from a race and ethnicity perspective, but a gender one as well.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club paving the way for young people and creating a more inclusive industry.

The Way The Industry Sees It:

I sat down with Gina Grillo, President and Chief Executive Officer of The ADVERTISING Club of New York to discuss the impact the Club has on both the industry and the members.

The ADVERTISING Club (The AD Club) of New York has been engrained within the industry since 1896, and encompasses thousands of industry professionals. In terms of membership, have you seen members you’ve attracted at a young age stay active within the Club throughout the duration of their career? What’s the longevity trajectory like?

Our membership of four thousand strong includes many legacy members who joined The AD Club as young professionals and have grown up and progressed in their career with us over the years. While the industry focuses on recruiting new talent, we see retention as just as big of an issue and believe it is critical to nurture talent after they have entered the field. Part of our mission as an organization is to support members along their career journey – as they move up the ranks – keeping them active both within the industry and within The AD Club. We also have a Young Professionals group that is designed to help advertising, marketing, and media professionals ages thirty and under grow to become tomorrow’s leaders. It is truly inspiring to see this ambitious, philanthropic, and outgoing group of future industry leaders develop themselves as professionals and people.

It’s no secret that The ADVERTISING Club has a myriad of impressive initiatives. Are there any initiatives that the Club is especially proud of?

Advertising is about experimentation in communication. It is the business of inventing ideas to be discussed, debated, assessed, and adjusted daily. The AD Club exists to support this process through a number of initiatives around our core pillars – access, creativity, professional development, and diversity. We are proud of our efforts in all of these areas, but I am especially proud of our diversity initiative, i’mPART. It’s our belief that diversity of people, ideas, culture, and craft is a major driver of creativity and creates better work in our business. i’mPART is a fundraising effort that aims to raise awareness of the benefits of diversity and support the nation’s leading diversity programs.  i’mPART employs an acronym that represents the four pillars of the initiative – to Promote, Attract, Retain and Train diverse talent. It’s a movement to make diversity a priority and increase accountability for this issue through a ten-year-long benchmarking survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which will track the progress of diversity programs to ensure long-term success. We are committed to supporting diversity of thought and seek to inspire a diverse mindset in the advertising industry.

Continue Reading Creativity is Poppin’ in New York’s The ADVERTISING Club

Madison Avenue is a hotbed for creativity and innovation. The evolving nature of the digital world means new opportunities and platforms, and also means that agencies are constantly pushing the envelope to meet new client needs, develop new campaigns, and rise to new challenges from global competition, the economy, and the like. The constant change that agencies are moving with is what has propelled the creative industry forward all these years.

 The Way I See It

  • I see more agencies successfully melding creative and data to meet the needs of clients and deliver the type of advertising and marketing campaigns that build upon the new trove of consumer data to frame brands in a positive light.
  •  I see competition in all industry segments constantly growing, with new brands launching all over the world, and each agency being forced to develop creative that both trumps competition in its segment and also stands out for consumers in terms of advertising.

The Way The Industry Sees It

I sat down with Peter Krivkovich, Chairman and CEO of integrated marketing communications agency Cramer-Krasselt, to discuss the industry and the state of today’s agency.

Cramer-Krasselt’s business model is built on the idea of integration with a constantly growing range of disciplines, from creative to public relations to CRM. How do you think this notion of integration plays into your work?

Integration is a highly over-claimed word. The question is not whether everyone has access to those various disciplines – the better question is how does everyone have access to them. If they are run as separate profit centers, separate profit and loss statements (P&L) with the people heading them up having separate budgets or separate revenue-based bonuses, then it can’t possibly result in sustained unbiased contributions to a marketing solution. The former is more akin to the old corporate world conglomerates. And they didn’t work out that well – few synergies beyond a revenue pile-on. Integration plays into our work from inception. Because we are outcome – rather than output – driven, because we have no profit-center walls between people, we can have a diverse group of thinkers around the table minute one, with no discipline politics agenda biasing a solution. It’s never about simply checking boxes – it’s all about connection points that will drive results and that require multiple disciplines in constant motion and in constant sync.

For any creative firm, there is a constant pressure to show return on investment (ROI) and to harness data to drive results. How do you think data has changed the role of advertising?

Data has certainly made us smarter about the people with whom we need to connect. If we’re smarter about them we can get closer to them and be more relevant to them. And, of course, data – big or small – helps us optimize our approach in ways we never could before. We’re much more real-time now. It’s an exciting development, and really just beginning. But like integration, it’s also a terribly over-used word – and more importantly, data is a misused one.  Getting consumer information is no longer difficult, it’s prolific. Knowing which data leads to genuine actionable insights is. That’s where we concentrate our talent. Not on data compilation and output, but on what specifically will lead to an outcome for what’s next.

Continue Reading Breaking the Traditional Agency Model in Today’s Data-Driven Economy with Cramer-Krasselt’s Chairman & CEO, Peter Krivkovich

On Tuesday night, I attended a fascinating event at The ADVERTISING Club called AD THINK, which is bridging the gap between tech startups and the advertising world.  As the event’s host, founder and partner of Evol8tion Joseph Jaffe, put it – we have seen a lack of creativity in digital advertising and with all of the creativity streaming from the high-tech startup boom, several stellar startups have emerged to bridge the gap between Madison Ave and Mountainview.  The event, which was standing-room only and will be the first in a series, brought five cutting-edge startup founders to deliver presentations on their products and attempt to woo a panel of experts who know a thing or two about successful startups, ad land, and how creativity and tech can work hand-in-hand.  The panel included: Brian Cohen, Chairman of New York Angels and the first investor in Pinterest; Andreas Dahlqvist, Deputy CCO of Global & Vice Chairman of NY for McCann Erickson; Nihal Mehta, Founder and CEO of Local Response (in 2001, he founded an agency dedicated solely to mobile – way ahead of his time); and Catherine Schenquerman, Digital Advertising Head of JetBlue Airways.

Even though I could talk about the all-star panel for a while, let’s talk about the startups – the true stars of the evening.  I was blown away by the creativity of each of these tech companies, and the potential that these startups have for the future of advertising and marketing.  The main theme among them was something we’ve talked about before: bringing data and creative together, as well as using data and analytics to improve and drive creative content for digital and mobile advertising.  I’m excited to see what’s next for each of these companies.

  • One of the founders of social intelligence company Bottlenose presented the analytics tools the platform offers brands, which, among other things, can correlate the volume of trending topics and conversations surrounding a brand on social media with key indicators (i.e., stock price, sales, website visits, Nielsen ratings, etc.) to uncover who and what on social media are driving important activities.
  • The founder of Customer.io started by saying, “E-mail is dead.”  We’ve heard it before, but his technology is actually using data gathered from e-mail marketing to help brands determine what to say and when to say it in order to achieve objectives from their e-mail marketing.  This could really bring e-mail back to life.
  • Continue Reading At the Intersection of Tech and Advertising