Hoxton Street Monster Supply Store interior (photo: www.monstersupplies.org)

At Labs we like nothing more that creativity put to good use (reference our love for ichainsaws, gloves, design-led activism and fightwear with a social mission). Chuck in some Mortal Terror and we’re yours.

With the recent launch of their online shop, www.monstersupplies.org, our friends at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies have extended what is essentially an imaginative, immaculately designed fund-raising platform. It’s all in aid of Ministry of Stories, a creative writing non-profit which is supported by all proceeds from the shop.

If you need to stock up on Zombie Fresh Mints or my personal favourite, a tin of “A Vague Sense of Unease”, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is the site for you.

A Vague Sense Of Unease, available at http://www.ministryofstories.org/

And, hey, the holidays are upon us, so satisfy the buying-spree beast within with a little monster-based goodness – just make sure you get your order in by this Friday 1pm (GMT), if you want to make last orders before Christmas.

Behind the shop at 159 Hoxton Street, through a hidden door, the Ministry of Stories exists to help young people in East London learn how to be storytellers. Which, as @jeremyet always likes to say, is where the magic happens.

Ministry of Stories Writer (photo: http://www.ministryofstories.org/)

You can shop online here or volunteer to help at the Ministry of Stories here.

Credits:

The website was created “by a small group of unpaid humans in their spare time”: design by Gavin and Jason Fox, build by Simon Pearson, project management by Chris Meachin, user experience by Mike Towber; and art direction by We Made This.

monstersupplies.org

Author: Greg Andersen (@gandersen), CEO, BBH New York

In the last couple of weeks I’ve read two specific articles that made me really stop and think about our future as a creative industry. The first was the March 26th New York Times article “In a New Web World, No Application is an Island”. It paints a picture of a silky smooth, boundary-less web full of open and interconnected apps thanks largely to HTML5. The creative palate and resulting experiences made possible by the likes of HTML5 are truly thrilling. The second article was “Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots”. On the list are occupations you’d expect to see left to machines, like soldiers and astronauts. But taking a step back and considering the all the advances in marketing technology I can’t help but wonder if advertising people, including creatives, will be appearing on that list when the article is inevitably written again in a few years time.

To be clear, this isn’t an anti-technology rant. That would be odd on the BBH Labs blog and flies straight into the face of tons of BBH work and investments within the agency. Rather, it is one guy’s view of a potential future brought on by a lot of very well intentioned innovations and advances, marked in my mind by said excitement around HTML5.

On the surface, what HTML5 offers to creativity and brand experiences is nothing short of amazing. Things like immediate video playback and better video tagging and search-ability will help to further accelerate content adoption and open exciting new creative uses of video. It also means that it will be easier to connect specific video content to other related content like articles, photos, data, etc. In short, HTML5 will make for brand experiences that can go both broader and deeper while maintaining a high quality user experience. Done well, these experiences will be good enough to be searched for and sought out…even if they are really just marketing.

Another positive side of HTML5 is its openness; providing the ability to create vastly better experiences on the free range of the web not penned in by walled garden technology companies. But this also means an incredible open flow of MUCH richer user data around preferences and behaviors. In itself, that’s not a big deal. Agencies and marketers and media owners constantly seek out better information to make better things and better decisions. But marketing is now also swamped with new marketing technologies to take advantage of this data. Coupled with tools for behavioral targeting, tools for social media monitoring, tools for conversion optimization, tools for automated bid optimization, tools for CRM marketing automation and tools that make it much easier for rich creative automation… I wonder what the role for us humans really is.

The best brands and their creativity make people both do and feel. To accomplish that we must not lose humanity in marketing creativity regardless of what is possible technologically. Human creativity is a special thing and when applied to brands there is still something oddly reassuring knowing that behind most any piece of brand communication there is a human engaging another human through a discourse of persuasion.

Asimov’s First Law states “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Man, I hope he was talking about advertising people.

Entertainment brands.. showing us how transmedia is done

Last week was Pixel Lab, Power to the Pixel‘s (@powertothepixel) cross-media workshop.

I joined a group of tutors and producers, half with film/transmedia projects in development, half not, from around the world for the latter half of their week away in Wales.

By way of introduction, Power to the Pixel are an organisation dedicated to supporting film and the wider media in its transition to a digital age. Ben and I are both lucky to be on their Advisory board.

My brief was to shed some light on brands and cross-platform/transmedia storytelling, which, if I am honest, initially felt a little awkward. Brands and agencies may be embracing cross-platform creativity and integration per se, but true transmedia… not so much. The likes of Campfire with their Frenzied Waters work for the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week last year, Audi Art of the Heist and – back in the day – Beta 7 for Sega; as well as Ivan Askwith at Big Spaceship (who was generous and interested enough to chew the fat with me late one evening) are two, honourable exceptions.

With this in mind, my presentation focused primarily on what brands and their agencies are learning about integration, interaction and new partnerships in the hypersocial environment we find ourselves in. I also attempted to explain why brands may be reticent about taking a step further into building deep, immersive, narrative worlds.  Along the way, telling the story of a (failed) BBH Labs joint venture and what we took from it… and finally, ending with a proposal.

That proposal was simply this: that producers should look beyond viewing brands as “promoters” (cf the current raft of Toy Story 3 and The A-Team tie-ups) and consider them as partners instead. Develop stories together that add value to the overarching narrative (think Jeep for Lost Experience) AND stay open-minded to the idea of engaging audiences through collective creativity. I summed up this approach via an adaptation of Chris Anderson’s “3-Party” model:

Adapted from Chris Anderson's Three-Party Market (Free, 2009)

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. The presentation is best viewed on slideshare, below.

A Perfect Storm The Social Web, Storytelling And Brands 08 07

Can we imagine deeper partnerships with producers that go beyond straightforward product placement or promotional work?

Is there an opportunity for non-entertainment brands to break properly into transmedia? What examples of best practice are out there?

Most of the videos to accompany the presentation are also saved on slideshare, but I’ve included them here too.  Note the clip from Talladega Nights (you need only watch the first 30 seconds), which at once epitomises the best and worst of all things product placement-related. Enjoy.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field.

As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

It’s also very reassuring to discover that complex, seemingly chaotic data sets and networks can be expressed as elegant, colourful, ordered maps and models. Perhaps there’s something akin to what the Enlightenment scientists felt as every new discovery revealed the endless beauty of nature.

Indeed the best examples of data visualisation have their own aesthetic beauty. (I felt a nostalgic pang as I recalled time spent with spirograph in my bedroom as a child.)

Like spirograph, but better: Email map by Christopher Baker

To some extent however this elegance, which makes data visualisation so immediately compelling, also represents a challenge. It’s possible that the translation of data, networks and relationships into visual beauty becomes an end in itself and the field becomes a category of fine art.

No harm in that perhaps.

But as a strategist one wants not just to see data, but to hear its story. And it can seem that for some visualisations the aesthetic overpowers the story. I spent many hours when younger staring at data tables, yearning for them to reveal a narrative. It is the prospect of bringing articulacy to hitherto cold, laconic facts that should be at the heart of the excitement around data visualisation.

The more compelling projects from Manuel’s archive did indeed seem to reveal some insightful truth about the relationships that they considered. Enron’s email patterns, the map of Segolene Royal’s supporters, the plotting of visitor eye traces in Barcelona, all looked extremely useful.

Enron Communication Graph, by Kitware Inc.

With this last instance in particular,  one can start to imagine how understanding the dynamic patterns of tourist traffic around the city and its most photographed areas might enable the development of all kinds of helpful tools and services for both tourist and city.

Tracing the Visitor's Eye by Fabien Girardin

Manuel himself talked about ‘turning tools of curiosity into tools of functionality’. In this respect he quoted Chaomei Chen: ‘A taxonomy of information visualization is needed so that designers can select appropriate techniques to meet given requirements.’ And clearly this desire to enable greater utility is driving Manuel’s own research into the different methods and models of visual representation.

As a pioneer in his field, Manuel discussed the opportunities emerging in interactive data maps and he described a Californian experiment in which it should be possible physically to interact with a huge data set distributed about a six storey building.  Blimey. I think I’ll leave that to the true data connoisseurs …

Finally, as a grey haired strategist, I found myself considering how the paucity of visual representation techniques had impacted the way we tackled problems in the past. I think we knew fundamentally that most events were precipitated by complex systemic pressures and relationships. But our limited power to disentangle the many elements in one system reduced us to characterising most strategic problems in rather monochrome ways.

So, this is progress indeed. Data visualisation has radically improved our understanding of these complexities. The real question is: what will we do with that understanding?

Technology … is a queer thing.

It brings you great gifts with one hand,

and it stabs you in the back with the other.

–C.P. Snow, New York Times, March 15, 1971–

There’s a battle raging, yet it’s almost Truman Show-like in its subtlety. It’s the battle between art and the algorithm. Between emotion and rationality. Between indescribable magic and perfect information.

Jim Carrey, in 'The Truman Show'

As the granular world of relevance, measurability and accountability tightens its grip on the increasingly emaciated flesh of businesses struggling to re-tool quickly enough to survive, many are rushing too quickly away from striving for the magic that has characterized the work we all admire, no matter what the decade or canvas.

As far as I know, no one is trying to kill me. Yet, I sometimes feel a little like the unfortunate hero at the center of the dystopian sci-fi thriller “Minority Report,” John Anderton. The famous mall scene in which Anderton (Tom Cruise), is assaulted by dozens of individually targeted ads — some of which, much to his horror, even loudly broadcast his name as he passes — represents a world a lot closer to ours than the fictional date of 2054.

It’s a world of perfect targeting. Optimization. Zero wastage. Absolute utility. Total accountability.

More and more of what I see, hear, read and even taste seems exceptionally cunningly targeted at me. My RSS feeds me handpicked news streams. I get perfect movie recommendations via Netflix, books I’ll enjoy via Amazon, uncannily relevant advertising when using Gmail, weirdly familiar music from Last fm. Satnav keeps me resolutely on the data-derived optimum track. And so on.

All remarkable stuff. It seems Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t far off when he noted how “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

What could be possibly be wrong with all this? In this new world where relevance — of information, of entertainment, of advertising, even of new social contacts — is increasing by the atomically measured second, all powered by the extraordinary power of the Almighty Algorithm, what are we losing?

Well, these shifts are triggering a smoothing out in our experiences, prompting a reduction in serendipity and introducing a spooky predictability to many facets of our lives. It’s becoming clear that ultra relevance comes with a hidden price. Because if everything’s relevant, then nothing’s unexpected, and if nothing’s unexpected, then nothing surprises you, and if nothing surprises you, then that’s a strange, neutralized, vanilla kind of life to lead. Think John Anderton meets Truman Burbank.

We’re talking about the end of surprise.

John Stuart Mill, writing in 1836, coined the term “economic man” in painting a picture of someone who was an ultra-rational being. The day Google was born in 1998 could be said to be the birthday of “algorithmic man” or the ultra-relevant being. Some might argue this is an inevitable cultural outcome of the fusion of technology and economics, the creeping onset of what Mill called “perfect information.” Yet, just as economic man didn’t really exist, nor does algorithmic man.

And right there is the opportunity for marketing: to deliver not just relevance, but revelation.

Surprise is the “killer” form of impact, driving engagement, and powering word of mouth. As the world slides towards increasing reverence of relevance, the opportunity is to re-commit to touching people in powerful ways that genuinely surprise them, whether with products, experiences or communications. We must re-find our ability to craft magic, to move people, to deliver the unexpected, never-seen-before experience, to blow minds and touch hearts. That doesn’t mean fighting against the algorithm; on the contrary, it could mean working with it.

How? A tiny amount of work currently does this.

AKQA’s work for Halo 3 is a brilliant example of how great interactive can genuinely move people by reframing something that they’ve seen before (the honoring of heroes) in a surprising way — in this case through alloying personalization and interactivity with emotion.

Just about anything by Jonathan Harris hits this spot on. His “We Feel Fine” from 2005 is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. It’s a brilliant coming together of art and mathematics, a fusion of art and the algorithm, resulting in a compelling, immersive experience that touches users (still) because it is profound, simple, beautiful and occasionally funny all at the same time.

A shot from one of Aaron Koblin's awesome visualizations (http://sandbox.aaronkoblin.com/)

But too little work has played in this area. Only a handful of businesses of any shape, size or persuasion seem to have succeeded in marrying the two — art and the algorithm, magic and interactivity, surprise and efficiency — in how they operate and in what they produce.

How might this be achieved?

One, creative businesses need to cherish and empower the people who understand technology, consumers’ relationships with it, and brands potential uses for it. Technology must be the catalyst of a new creativity, not just a set of new delivery channels or production options.

Two, creative businesses need to create arranged marriages between these people (the algorithmicists) and the magicians or artists. Only a fusion of these two strands of creativity at the earliest conceivable opportunity in a process will lead to the most adventurous outcomes.

Three, in an era where everything that was once solid does appear to be melting into air, creative businesses need to recommit to surprise as a potent strand of engagement. To paraphrase Ming Yeow Ng, one of the founders of Discover.io, if discovery is the new cocaine, then we’d all be wise to get a whole lot better at dealing in not just relevance, but revelation.

We believe this is the opportunity for the marketing and communications industry. Exploiting the awesome power of the new world of relevance whilst creating more surprising and engaging experiences. In short, then, how can we encourage a collision between art and the algorithm?

Far from having all the answers, we have so much to learn. So more immediately, we’d really appreciate your feedback, ideas, and viewpoints.

Go on, surprise us.

(An earlier version of this post appeared on MediaPost, April 27 2009 – http://bit.ly/aWcwq. One correction has been made since the original post was published: I had incorrectly suggested the Halo 3 interactive work was produced by McCann when it was actually produce by AKQA; this has been amended in this version of the post)

The good news is that there already appear to be some answers emerging, all with the potential to lead somewhere interesting and worth recording. I’m going to approach this pretty organically and see where it goes. Please feel free to jump in, disagree, debate, add your own suggestions etc.

First up, a theme that may seem controversial to some: the wholesale reinvention of a (sometimes much maligned) skill, the art of storytelling.

Ben’s second post caught my attention with the observation that “there’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web” and this got me thinking.

Part of the issue behind this, I would hazard a guess, is the fact story telling as a skill has come to be associated with the old school mores of broadcast advertising. By way of illustration, in his NMA column last week Mark Cridge talked about the need for a creative director to be comfortable with the idea of curation, rather than control. A thought that made complete sense – no question. His piece then went on to conclude “If these are the skills that are going to be important from now on, which type of creative director would you rather work with: a big budget brand storyteller obsessed with control, or one more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the interactive world?”

Reading this, you’d be forgiven for thinking storytelling no longer has a place or is badly in need of rehab. In truth, and I am going to nail my colours to the mast here, it’s never had the potential to be more relevant or exciting.

(For full post click below)

Entertainment brands are showing us how it’s done. The days of film trailer after film trailer featuring near-identical Don LaFontaine or James Earl Jones voiceovers are kinda over. Undoubtedly these brands do have it easy – acres of high value (okay, not always the case..) content people are already prepared to pay good money to see. How hard can it be to chop up bits of a film or game into neat trailers and distribute to a waiting fan base on the web? But, in fact, they are doing so much more than that. The new movie marketing model (the latter also recently examined here by Noel Bussey) shows us that storytelling doesn’t need to be written off as antiquated, one way communication, quite the opposite. Sophisticated stories are spun around the core characters & concept behind a film, all with the aim of driving anticipation, buzz and deeper, more rewarding relationships with fans.

There are a multitude of examples to prove the point from an ever-growing line of films and TV shows (Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Lost, Heroes, The Sopranos etc), but I am going to pick just one: Watchmen. Whatever you may think of the graphic-novel-turned-film, the marketing content was near flawless. The creation of a fictional, immersive world in which a fan could lose themselves happily over a prolonged period of time. If you haven’t read it already, check out Dan Light at PPC’s account of producing it all here. His story is a rare and useful thing: collected in one place, a candid, informative & riveting account of how a seamlessly integrated & interactive campaign was created.

Compared to an fmcg brand, say, of course we can argue that it’s easier to create an extended fictional world around an entertainment brand, especially one as hotly anticipated as this film. However, if we buy the linked principles of (a) moving from interruption to engagement (b) moving from one night stands to ongoing relationships with consumers, and (c) shifting £££ from bought to earned (& owned) media, then we have to accept we have a lot to learn from how entertainment brands are approaching these very same challenges.

At a conceptual level, they teach us that the fundamental shift in storytelling is simply this: we are now in the business of starting stories, not attempting to nail them down from beginning to end. Letting stories take on a life of their own, to be played with, passed around, modified and enriched by the audiences they’re developed for.

Here are a few observations about what it takes to put this into practice, drawn from what Light had to say:

1.The importance of starting out early and producing a LOT of content from that point on. The first part of the jigsaw, the ‘movie countdown widget’ (now a ubiquitous part of any movie launch) was available 10 months before the film was released, compared to the average 8-10 weeks. And, as Dan says, “In the case of Watchmen, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode”. See the post for why that was important.

2. Don’t expect a linear process: brief->concept sign-off->production. To get some things approved, you need to make them without being asked. There’s a risk, but proto-typing and producing at low cost & high speed means the pay-off is worth it, most of the time.

4. Fans may want to be “hunter gatherers” (see Henry Jenkins on the subject of world-building), piecing together dispersed pieces of content in order to build a fictional world, but they only have so much time to do so. The Watchmen downloadable widget was a countdown to the movie, but also a – updated weekly – portal to most of the content surrounding it.

5. The crucial importance of creating a tightly woven team (see Warren Bennis on Great Groups for the theory behind why this is critically important). Dan and his team created a space which removed them from their usual environment. It was the loading bay at their offices – effectively a stripped down warehouse area – nothing fancy. Then they gave that team the tools they needed to do what they do best. For writing purposes they used software which allowed them to co-create whilst still keeping individual ownership.

6. Seed aggressively / mobilise your network. Journalists, bloggers, fans. Despite Dan’s modesty about how last minute some of the meet-ups were, truth is, this probably added to the excitement. These relationships were all carefully identified and nurtured ahead of time. He knew a lot of them personally. Bear in mind, this was in addition to the actual movie’s pre-launch activity orchestrated by the director and production company.

All this leaves me feeling there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space. That the storyteller’s story does not, after all, end here….

Some great, insightful and provocative replies to the earlier question around the perceived paucity of great work in interactive.

First off, I found it fascinating that – to date at least – no one’s responded with a great list of knockout creative, or, in fact, with any knockout creative. This would suggest that there is indeed a problem and that it’s not just perception. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’m reassured that various folks who ‘know their shit’ have commented here, and I’m certain they would have picked out the gems had I missed them in my haste to make the point.

Second, what we have emerging is a really very useful list of factors that, together, explain why we’re not yet seeing consistently great work, and in particular strong enduring campaigns, in the interactive space. Factors cited by contributors will be familiar to many, and include the following, which are reported not as fact but as supposition, at least at this stage:

1. SPEED – Our lack of speed in responding to the changing landscape, a blight suffered by agencies of both old & new skools, digital & analogue, hampers creative innovation.

2. ENDURANCE – We suffer a particular weakness at creating . . . (more)

. . . work that endures over time – what Bud Caddell captures well as ‘long is the untapped market’.

3. VALUE – There endures a disparity in budget allocation between offline & online worlds, suggestive of a pervasive disparity in value in clients’ eyes, perhaps.

4. EFFECTIVENESS – The online mix is inevitably ‘optimized’, resulting in the replacement of brand building content for ‘hard sell’ work that ‘really delivers’ (Griffin Farley nails this powerfully in his response, suggesting that we currently encourage clients to look at media through the wrong lens).

5. PASSION – Interactivity can certainly make an ordinary brand more useful or more relevant, but truly great interactive ideas still tend to come from brands that people care about already (Tom Morton, as ever, sums this up infinitely better than I could).

6. LINEARITY – Involvement of the specialist digital agencies occurs too late for them to show what they can really do; they provide a microwave meal-style service rather than the full Cordon Bleu of which they are capable; they manage rather than soar.

7. BELATEDNESS – Even when the right people are cast together (the geeks, the strategists & the creatives) it’s often too late for that fertile collision to produce the magic that should be possible.

8. NOT INVENTED HERE – We’re frequently seduced by the temptation to want to invent from scratch rather than borrow (&, critically, credit) with pride.

9. NARRATIVE – There’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web (possibly linked to numerous points, above, including one made by Rory Sutherland about the instant disposability – & thus perceived low value – of much interactive work). I look enviously at the output of Campfire and other such agencies in this respect.

10. RISK – We’re crap at taking risks, partly because there’s no facility for doing so (& I liked Gareth Kay’s point about the CDP studio in the basement where people could flex their muscles and stretch the boundaries), but partly because many of us think we’re already taking risks, or being ‘new skool’ just meddling in digital. We’re not.

Hmmm. So what now. While many of these factors remain out of our immediate control or require significant re-tooling of our ‘factories’ (client budgets & pressures, archaic processes, the dreaded ‘optimization’ of media plans at the last second, the fact that people are more likely to be moved by atheletes or music than by fabric conditioner or banks), actually so much is easily within our remit to change. Now.

As Sir Winston Churchill noted, with Churchillian economy, ‘attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference’.

Around half of these factors seem – at first glance – to be matters more of approach than of structure. Creating an environment for experimentation, giving away credit (or at the very least ensuring it’s shared with those who deserve it), encouraging early and respectful collaboration . . . these might surely be actioned today? What’s stopping us?

Some of the more structural issues – around the value of interactive, linear process, cumbersome execution of that process – present more of a headache, but remain ENTIRELY within our control. The one area I feel I particularly disagree with contributors on is in instances where the client is blamed for something. I’m not absolving certain clients from responsibility for poor interactive work, but I am clearing them of the responsibility for changing the situation. It’s down to the folks who runs the businesses which are dysfunctional to change those businesses. That’s us, by the way.

So moving forward I’d really like to hear about solutions to some of these issues. It has to be the most exciting time to be doing what we’re doing since Mad Men. We’re only going to be doing this – if we’re lucky – for a few handfuls of years. So my mantra is fight for change today, not tomorrow. And don’t even think about complaining if you’re not also actively engaged in changing.

Would really value your thoughts on accelerating transformation.

Well let’s get one thing out of the way right away. It’s almost certainly the case (please argue with me if you think this is not true) that the percentage of “great work” in interactive is no less than that on any other canvas. Great work is rarer than a Texan in a Smart Car. Full-stop. But there seem some quite specific reasons why there’s not a whole load of stunningly great creative in interactive.

So, a few linked observations about why this might be the case.

One, as an industry, it seems as if marketing is mesmerized by the (very welcome) potential efficiencies & measurability of digital and that this can lead to blindness when it comes to the creative opportunities. The talk is frequently of driving costs down through zero wastage, or improving efficiency (all good of course), and less often about increasing engagement, forging deeper links with consumers over time, storytelling across screens, and so on. How far away are we from work of the quality and ambition of Aaron Koblin or Jonathan Harris in what we produce for clients? To some extent, even average digital work can be more accountable than much of the work produced for the offline world, and sometimes that accountability can veil what is actually remarkably humdrum work. Here one’s reminded of the John Banham quote: In business we tend to value most highly that which we can measure most precisely. Traditional agencies are, in particular, often in the position of knowing they need to produce both more effective and more emotive interactive work, but not knowing remotely how to develop it.

Two, we probably need to stop looking at digital creativity as somehow different . . . (more)

. . . and divorced from the other elements that a brand uses to engage customers & prospects – a separate stage or world. Too often interactive agencies and skills are involved way too late to give them the best chance of producing greatness, because interactivity is something that needs to run through campaigns like a strand of DNA, not a module that can bolted on to something that’s already been produced. Partly this is a structural issue to do with different companies working together, often a tricky area clouded by egos and budgets. Partly it’s an attitudinal issue, with agencies sometimes wary of involving anyone else until they are forced to. One approach to solving this disconnect is to merge the teams of different people & skills currently tasked to separately produce on and offline. There must be an improvement in creative collaboration, perhaps through the deliberate creation of what ex-MIT organizational consultant Warren Bennis refers to as ‘Great Groups‘ – handpicked teams of people gathered by a (hopefully) visionary leader to produce exceptional results in the creative or innovation fields (examples he’d cite might include those involved with Pixar, Apple, Manhattan Project, Lockheed’s Skunkworks or more recently Obama’s campaign team). These groups are full of talented people who can – and want to – work together and who frequently believe they’re on some kind of ‘mission from God’. They are optimistic, not realistic. They bury their differences for the greater good of the objective. Most of us have at one point of another been part of these kinds of teams, and it is an enthralling and inspiring experience. This may mean (shock, horror) that we need to collaborate with people who don’t work with us or for us at the moment. I say, bring it on. I think it was an ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems that once said, ‘no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else’.

Three, and in a related vein, we don’t always build the right types of skillsets and backgrounds into the teams that do develop the work. The whole configuration of account & creative teams needs to change, with the introduction of technologists and engagement thinkers as central contributors to creativity at the very earliest stages of the development process. That means Day One. They must be used as architects, helping provide some of the art and magic, not just bricklayers, ironing out the issues around execution & deployment. Together, the ambition of these hybrid teams should be to engage the hearts and minds of the people they are talking to with content, tools, & experiences that move them – to do something, to think something, to feel something.

Four, and again linked to the first three points, we need to agree on what ‘great work in interactive’ is. This is a debate we’ve all heard again and again over the last 5 or so years, with little resolution or consensus. My take is simple. That great work in interactive is actually not that different to great work in offline. And my starting point here would be to look to how we benchmark breakthrough creativity in non-digital channels to help us work out how we might generate more breakthrough work in online. Does it tell a story? Does it have impact? Does it leave room for the reader, viewer or user? Does it credit the consumer with intelligence? Is it based upon a compelling insight? And so on.

In particular, though, I think there’s too often there’s a gap between technical knowledge and geeky creativity on one hand, and marketing know-how and strategic savviness on the other. Too often half the smart people – the digital artists, geeks & information designers for example – aren’t talking or spending enough time with the other smart people.

If we do nothing else except start to build bridges across that gap then I sense we’ll be on our way to seeing interactive work that genuine moves & touches people, that feels like magic, and – as the Americans would say – hits the ball right out of the park for clients.

We certainly do not have all – or perhaps even any – of the answers. Would love to know what others think.

(NOTE: a follow-up post to this original post, in which I attempt to summarize some of the emerging themes, can be found at: http://bit.ly/14HVJo; the conversation continues there, B)

(A version of this post was previously published on Revolution’s new – & tremendous – website: http://bit.ly/3JfrTL)