A New Creative Direction

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged beyond flash – if they have a sentimental bond with the product. These aren’t my words, they came from the pen of Matthew Weiner and the mouth of Don Draper (John Hamm), the Creative Director’s Creative Director and the star of AMC’s Mad Men.

Don is delivering his thoughts in a pitch to Kodak for their new slide carousel and it brings tears to my eyes every time I watch. On first viewing, I felt a sense of nostalgia for the precious moments with my children growing up. More recently, my thoughts have turned to the time I failed to spend with Olivia and Hattie, having left them in their formative years. I’ve been a poor father, but I’m working so very hard to change that.

It may sound contrived to say you must have something and lose it to truly appreciate it, from family and friends to money to freedom (a reality we’re all facing during the current global pandemic) – even job titles. I can’t help but think this isn’t simply part of our ‘fail fast’ startup mentality. It has always been true.

My somewhat nostalgic view of family also extends to the profession I love – design. This might seem at odds with my role as a ‘Futuroligist’ and all the technological interaction this brings, but my boundary-pushing has always had an extraordinary depth of respect for where origins lie. 

My background combines Design, Technology and Innovation and all three should interlink to form the backbone of a contemporary Creative Director. However, Design should still be the primary focus, leading a team to creative excellence through an understanding of the tools at our disposal and the talented individuals within our sphere of influence.

We strive for future missions to Mars and beyond, fuelled by knowledge gleaned from historic human efforts to reach the surface of the moon. We design and manufacture beautiful cars, driven by decades of data taken from safety, handling and ergonomic experience. Steve Jobs gave us the future in the palms of our hands, not because he asked what people wanted but because he knew what they didn’t have. He had a greater understanding of his audience than they did of themselves and this came from observing previous human behaviour and applying this to the future – the present happened as a result.

How does this relate to Don Draper and the existence of the modern Creative Director? Last week, I took an exciting leap of faith and joined an incredible creative technology agency called Beep!, based in Poole, UK and Santa Clara, US. I had the pick of creative titles but elected to once again become a Creative Director – the Creative Director.

When I first watched the Mad Men Kodak pitch, Don became the creative hero I didn’t know I was looking for. That moment provided the approval I didn’t know I needed. It gave substance to four years of design education and decades building a professional portfolio.

To appreciate its impact, here’s the full script and the scene that breathes life into Matthew Weiner’s words:

“Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged beyond flash – if they have a sentimental bond with the product.”

“The most important thing in advertising is ‘NEW’. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion”

“There is also a deeper bond with the product… nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent”

“In Greek, nostalgia literally means pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.”

“This device isn’t a space ship… it’s a time machine”

“It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘The Wheel’, it’s called ‘The Carousel’. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

I may have something in my eye…

Artificial Intelligence, reality TV creatives and Account Execs won’t replace Designers – the world just needs to know it. The role of a Creative Director isn’t simply to say “make it bigger, make it red and move it to the left a bit”, it is to motivate, inspire and champion the very existence of design. Designers need to feel important – because they are. They also need to feel relevant and the popular opinion that “everyone’s a designer” is meaningless if there’s no distinction between a good one and a bad one.

My role as President Elect of the Chartered Society of Designers provides me with an enviable overview and understanding of the profession. It is in rude health as far as skills are concerned, but COVID has hit the job market for active design recruitment and many freelancers are also suffering hardship, slipping through the cracks without Government support.

Good news is out there. Some creative businesses are flourishing AND employing (Beep! is doing both) but this message is easily swamped by the sheer volume of negative media output. It’s more important than ever to keep telling the world about success wherever and whenever it happens.

Those of us that consider ourselves designers and technologists tell a great story about “designing the future” or “shaping the now”, but like Kodak in Don Draper’s pitch, we find ourselves creating products that capture a moment, platforms that share them or channels that allow us to comment on content. Their power lies in the very same nostalgia Don referenced.

The past, present and future all intertwine and so do our roles as creative leaders.

This is why I’m championing a direct approach that streamlines the complex and makes Creative Direction great again. Like the things we feel we’ve lost or even lost touch with, it is important to appreciate simplicity in order to cut through the white noise of contemporary life.

We’ve all had our fill of Ninjas, Gurus and Experts. And that once-simple org chart now features more layers than Photoshop. When you hit the dizzying heights of creative leadership, you discover quite a crowd at the summit. These are all existing job titles:

– Design Director

– Art Director

– Associate Creative Director

– Creative Director

– Senior Creative Director

– Group Creative Director

– Head of Design

– Executive Creative Director

– Global Executive Creative Director

– Chief Creative Officer

And I’ve probably missed a few!!

2020 may seem like the longest year on record, but more than ever… every second counts. Don Draper’s time machine offered a glimpse into what many people crave – the ability to design the future by combining an appreciation of the past and an effective grasp on the present.

The Creative Director is dead. Long live the Creative Director! 

The Inspiration Game

No one wants to own anything, or drive anything, or change anything. The great Innovators have stopped innovating. The great storytellers aren’t making as much noise as the bad ones. And everyone is happy to follow the crowd – or so the crowd has been told…

In January 2019, Apple reported their first decline in revenues and profits in over a decade. They blamed weak iPhone sales and a downturn in China. True, the Chinese market has become a tougher nut to crack, but the underlying reason for the downturn is we’ve stopped wanting AND needing some of their products.

I used to queue outside Apple Stores to get my hands on new model iPhones. I even waited in line for over twelve hours outside the New York 5th Avenue glass cube in 2010 to be the first to buy an iPad. But that was then, I now struggle to justify the cold nose, sore feet and dented bank balance.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no interest in owning a PC or using Android as my primary mobile OS – because I still love Apple. My long line of MacBooks have never let me down and have been worth every penny and my iMacs have always been there when I needed them, delivering day in, day out for years. My iPhones have worked brilliantly inside and out, looked beautiful and felt like the quality products they are.

So why are Apple’s profits down? Because their flagship physical products are too good and too straight. Too good might seem a great selling point – but it’s clearly becoming an issue. My iPhone 7 Plus is into its third year of ownership and I haven’t upgraded my iPad mini for seven! They both work perfectly and I simply can’t justify upwards of £1,000 for the iPhone I’d want (or need) or an iPad Pro upgrade.

So let’s turn to ‘too straight’. Apple used to excite me. I’d eagerly await each live-streamed keynote with a sense of anticipation akin to the Oscars – living in hope for Steve’s ‘one more thing’. And he’d always deliver. Deliver something we didn’t need or know we wanted, but we just had to have it because it was the future. Our future.

The world we know and love has been built on elation, not iteration – but that’s what Apple now delivers. It makes $Billions from smoothly blending one model into the next. One service and software update into another. The world needs a defibrillator moment where we kickstart the kickstarts and make our hearts beat that little bit faster as we rediscover the joy of the unexpected.

Apple didn’t become the most valuable company on the planet by making poor business decisions so it’s not about dropping the things that work and veering off at a tangent. Tech rivals all too often over-promise and under-deliver, or feel they need to fill a market gap only to find no one wants what they have to offer. But the key to consumer engagement is telling a great story and making it relevant to a brand’s audience.

I’m not going to apologise for disagreeing with the statement “make things people want, don’t make people want things”. Screw that, most people don’t know what they want until they see it. A brand’s role is to tell them why it exists, how it can improve their lives and steer them to ownership, membership or sponsorship via the point of least resistance.

Advertising and marketing opportunities still bring us stories for the products we consume, but these stories need to be told by the people with the passion behind the brands. How they’re made is one thing, but the reasons why they exist are far more powerful.

I spoke with Roborace CEO, Lucas di Grassi in Berlin in December and he told me about the race series startup’s change of direction away from the Daniel Simon-designed Robocar as the audience didn’t understand its capabilities and true Artificial Intelligence. The focus has instead been turned to their DevBot car, with a combination of AI and driver interaction.

The inability of the audience to grasp Robocar’s relevance is not a failing of the motorsport fans – but a missed opportunity to tell a story of excitement, interaction and inspirational possibilities for the future, rather than one of the technology beneath the surface. Don’t give up Lucas, we need Robocar in our near future, weaponised and ready to roll.

It’s more important than ever to get this story right when introducing the next generation of self-driving vehicles. Industry experts speak of the irrelevance of dealerships and a pure digital future but they’re missing the point. Entirely.

Motorists won’t simply hop from their current vehicles into an autonomous network. They don’t trust the technology, it’s as simple as that. The way to convince is not through a VR simulation. Not an online video. It’s by physical experience, sat in the very car they will be instilling ALL their trust. This won’t be about telling an audience how safe a range of robot vehicles is – it’s through the vehicle occupant not being involved in an accident.

The next level of trust will be via word of mouth and the testimonials of ‘real people’ – not actors or brand ambassadors. Selling the autonomous future through trust not tricks.

But there’s still a world of inspiration for us all to discover. The iterators may be shouting louder, but sift through the white noise and you’ll find thought leaders not simply leading by telling great stories – they’re also leading by example.

Richard Browning of Gravity (or ‘Rocket Man’ as he’s more commonly known) is pushing the boundaries of personal mobility by offering us a superhuman vision of the future. He has built a successful business from his own personal invention, innovation and ability to sell a dream. One jetpack is evolving into a scaleable race series on the road (or lack thereof) to tomorrow.

Claire Lomas, an athlete paralysed in 2007 in an equestrian accident epitomises courage and encouragement. She has never faltered in her battle against her physical condition, unwilling to accept the boundaries seemingly imposed upon her. Claire has worn a robotic exoskeleton to complete marathons and her determination to excel has resulted in a new skill – motorcycle racing!

Both Richard and Claire aren’t playing the Inspiration Game – they’re living it. Roborace will also inspire and innovate in equal measures when their story is told in the right way to the right audience, and it will be epic.

Apple has stopped playing the game. It’s not too late for the company I still love to let the iteration take care of itself and get back to thrilling us with one more thing.

And if they’re struggling to find inspiration themselves – or any of us for that matter – the words from Apple’s own 1997 TV ad celebrate the existence of The Crazy Ones. The very people I love and will always aspire to be.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Now Listen Up

The next big revolution is gathering pace. No, not Virtual Reality – that’s the current revolution, the next battle for digital supremacy will take place in your ears. Say hello to Hearables.

OK, I admit I could have written about this last year, before everyone else, got in with the scoop and taken all the glory for shouting about the next digital platform. I chose not to because everyone wants me to have an opinion on VR. That’s no bad thing, with #StereocastVR about to launch and enough virtual reality projects to last us years at Brandwidth, but I’ve been speaking about IoT, Connected Cities, Wearables, FashTech, Movie Innovation, Retail and much more at events around the world. I’ll just stop briefly to add Hearables to that list…

I’m not going to review the current contenders, you can find that elsewhere but I will comment on the potential for this platform. I’ve just spent the last week in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara and you can count on all the big players to join in with this audio revolution.

Hearables aren’t really standalone items (much like headphones are pretty useless without an input device), they offer an information layer on top of existing apps and operating systems. Push notifications, emails, Tweets and text messages read aloud and sat nav directions straight into your head. Hearables could allow you to leapfrog an entire platform, making smartwatches irrelevant and offering a more useful 1-2-1 voice communication with the smartphones in our pockets.

AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now will make this process as seamless and friendly as possible, if we can all get over the social stigma of seemingly shouting at ourselves in public. This was never a good look for estate agents and city traders in the era of bluetooth headsets. Swipe gestures and heart rate monitors are likely to add extra hardware value but software is the main driving force.

I have a confession to make, I don’t like wearing headphones. This means adopting Hearables is a bigger leap for me than anyone already happy to plug themselves in on a daily basis. A smartwatch was an easier step as I’ve aways worn a ‘regular’ wristwatch – it’s just a shame most are crap at being watches.

I was one of the first to test a set of Here headphones and I was keen to realise their potential. Accurate audio selection, digital filtering and app control - sounds good, right? Actually I switched on the oversized in-ear wireless devices, pushed them in, blocking out all audio, then dialled up various preset filters via the app. The novelty of slightly quieter street or office noise or reverb added to voices or music wore off very quickly for me and I was relieved to remove the devices. It certainly made me appreciate ‘real’ sound, using my own ears rather than a bionic pair.

If you fancy a genuine glimpse into the future, put your money down for a pair of Pilot Hearables - a Smart Earpiece Language Translator on Indiegogo. They will translate a selection of languages live in-ear, fulfilling your secret agent fantasy, or just making you the ultimate global traveller - for business or pleasure. Now that will be genuinely useful, when they launch next year… probably.

With the growing popularity of VR and AR headsets, headphones are more useful than ever when attempting to add 3D audio to the 3D imaging. Unfortunately, we face a real problem when demonstrating the tech. It’s hard enough knowing what someone is viewing in a VR demo - try it with headphones, especially in-ear. Who wants to share someone else’s ear wax? 

You want my advice? Forget early adoption as the current crop of Hearables are expensive and attention is on features rather than audio quality. If you need new headphones right now, buy the best you can afford. If you don’t? Wait a little longer and the audio revolution will happen anyway.

Lost in The Void

Virtual Reality 2.0 has come a long long way in the last two years. Each time we discover a VR experience to amaze and engage, the industry finds a new way to raise the bar. This week I was at The Void in Utah, where the bar has been raised to the stratosphere.

VR can be measured in incremental experience. What that really means is we start with Google cardboard, progress to quality phone units like the Zeiss VR One, add substance with the Samsung/Oculus GearVR then hit the big time with Sony’s Morpheus, HTC’s Vive and the biggest player – Oculus Rift.

The last three have yet to hit high streets but when they do, these headsets will offer something the others don’t – real-world movement. The original Rift allowed us to look around 360º from a fixed point. The second generation added the ability to lean in and this brought a new awareness of presence.

Although Sony’s Morpheus sticks with the lean-in approach, both the Vive and Rift allow the wearer to stand up and walk around, and the difference is breathtaking. Once you realise you can move naturally within a virtual environment, your brain stops playing by the rules and you believe you’re actually where the visuals say you are.

So that’s the ultimate VR experience then? For now, it’s the best you can expect in a home or office. But there’s more, oh so much more. It’s time to enter The Void.

I’ve just spent a day in a small town called Linden, less than an hour from Salt Lake City. This is home to The Void – the world’s first Virtual Reality theme park.

Brainchild of CEO Ken Bretschneider, James Jensen and Curtis Hickman, The Void demonstrates the advantage of mixing virtual and physical environments. Not in the way Augmented Reality headsets or the hybrid Sulon Cortex do, this is full VR with enhanced tactile environments.

These environments are given substance by walled corridors, alien pods, blasts of air and heat and motorised monoliths.

This 4D experience has an incredible effect but when combined with The Void’s wireless headsets, physical weapons and props, the results are nothing short of transformational, especially when you're sharing the same space with multiple players. I felt as if I’d been beamed onto the Holodeck of the Enterprise or the far reaches of Mordor.

Bretschneider and his talented team of designers, developers and engineers have big plans (including continuous development of their own hardware) but the first public opening of The Void is scheduled for late 2016 in Utah, with additional ‘Virtual Entertainment Centres’ rolling out to other locations over the following 12 months.

Content for these environments will invariably lean towards gaming but the scenarios are limitless. From fast and frantic shoot-em-ups to creepy spine-tingling horror, the opportunity exists to commandeer the senses like never before. Storytelling has never had it so good!

I can’t eulogise enough about how incredible The Void is. The simple act of touching a wall or sitting down on a rock in a virtual world is mind-blowing. I fought off hoards of giant spiders with a gun I could not only see in hi-res detail but feel and fire as if I were at the heart of a fire-fight. The next generation guns also feature recoil and pump action reload. I had high expectations before visiting Utah, but The Void delivered so much more.

Virtual Reality offers a creative platform like no other and we’re now seeing clear distinctions between the levels of experience on offer. The Void is the VR Premier League, but its halo effect helps to support development for the ‘lesser divisions’. The takeaway from a 4D adventure is a hunger for the next best thing in-home. Audiences will still love the VR on their phones, PCs and games consoles, but they’ll flock to the Virtual Entertainment Centres when they open. And they won’t be disappointed.