shots Issue 166 by shots

Talking in code with The Lodge

Reality Bytes: AR, VR & AI focus

R/GA’s split personalities

Nik Roope blazes a trail

shots

TECH SPECIAL

“I’m sure most of us can admit to losing great swathes of time to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Possibly all three. Simultaneously. And which of us doesn’t listen with interest as Apple or Samsung announces the newest iteration of their mobile phones, wondering what gizmo will make us part with our cash this time?”

I’m writing this on my work PC laptop. Of course I am, what else would I use? Except maybe my iPad. Though that’s at home. Or my phone. Though that would be pretty ﬁddly. Plus, it’s currently sitting in the Google Cardboard headset I have on my desk after I tried out a new 360-degree campaign earlier. Obviously I could have used my own Mac Air laptop, but my wife needed it to charge up her Fitbit. So, yeah, actually, there are a number of things I could use, I suppose, which is indicative of 21st century life.

Our lives now are, if not completely ruled, then certainly framed, by technology and our relationship with it. I’m sure most of us can admit to losing great swathes of time to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Possibly all three. Simultaneously. And which of us doesn’t listen with interest as Apple or Samsung announces the newest iteration of their mobile phones, wondering what gizmo will make us part with our cash this time?

Of course, all this technology is something advertisers have been keen to utilise. That’s nothing new – radio and TV were once innovative

technologies – but the rate at which technology is currently evolving is astonishing. The iPhone has only been with us since 2007 and in less than a decade it, and its competitors, have become integral parts of our existence. I mean, nomophobia (fear of being without a mobile phone) is an actual thing being studied by actual doctors.

While shots has always taken an interest in technology, speaking to creative technologists and highlighting technology-driven campaigns, this month we’re dedicating the whole issue to all things tech. From VR and AR to AI and beyond, we dive head-ﬁrst into understanding how these innovations ﬁt into our lives and how advertisers might be able to use them in innovative ways. Whether it’s understanding the internet of things [page 65], working out if AR, VR or a combination of the two will be the go-to tech acronym [page 15] or dipping our toe into the murky world of data [page 41], this issue serves as your one-stop tech information tool.

We’ve even gone so far as to tech-pimp the issue, by making it Blippable. For those of you who

don’t already know, Blippar is an augmented reality app which, when opened on your phone and pointed at certain Blippable articles, takes you to extra content relevant to the story, whether that’s an additional interview or a link to the ﬁlm or piece of work we’re referencing. You don’t have to do that, of course. You could simply turn o your phone, shut down your computer, unplug yourself from your connected environment and settle back with this magazine for some good old-fashioned reading. But then, that’s so last millennium.

Danny Edwards Editor @shotsmag_dan

Use Blippar in this issue of shots

This issue of shots is Blippable. If you don’t already have Blippar on your phone, simply download the free app for iOS or Android, open and, where you see the Blippar logo (right), hold your phone over that image to be connected to additional content.

STEP 1 Download the free Blippar app for iOS or Android.

STEP 2 Hold your phone over the Blippable image to access additional content.

Top The state of editor Danny’s post-tech-issue brain as interpreted by illustrator Peter-John de Villiers. See more of his fantastical freaky illustrations in our Nordic Special, from page 75 Above Get high with Michael B Rasmussen’s stunning drone’s-eyeview photography. See more shots from a new perspective on page 46 Below Get Blipping! Additional content using the Blippar app is available throughout the magazine

November 2016

shots 166 / front cover

This issue’s cover stars are (l-r) Paulo Ribeiro, Eric Baldwin and Nilesh Ashra of The Lodge (page 42), photographed for shots by Emily Shur.

shots 166 contributors

Words: Carl Addy, Alexander Barlow, Will Bingham, Iain Blair, Conor Brady, Carol Cooper, Tim Cumming, Simon Fenton, Gary Hilton, Omaid Hiwaizi, Ben Jones, Mark Leigh, Lizzie Ostrom, Francesca Panetta, Sol Rogers, Jeremy Taylor, Simon Wakelin

Illustration & photography: Samuel Åkesson, Shelsey Birch, Jessica Brillhart, James Brimsted, Sandra Ciampone, Andrezj Dragan, Julian Hanford, Chris Madden, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Kenneth Nguyen, Petrus Olsson/Crosby, Alexander Rea, Joe Schmelzer, Emily Shur, Son of Alan/Folio Art, Peter-John de Villiers/byHands

shots 167 / December 2016

Issue 167 of shots will be our fashion special featuring Nick Knight, one of the fashion industry’s most celebrated photographers plus the most up-and-coming fashion film directors. We’ll also be highlighting LA and the US west coast

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08 NEW WORK

Pepsi palm oil palaver and Pokémon people pointers are among this issue’s inspiring selections from the latest campaigns

12 GOING GLOBAL

We go around the world bring you spots dealing with underarm issues down under, food Instagrammers spoofed in Sweden and burger buffoonery in France

16 THE SOURCE

Stinkdigital founder

Mark Pytlik’s favourite things

27 APA COLLECTION 2016

Airfix-inspired illustrations of the top 10 directors to have appeared since the Collection began

94 THE WAY I SEE IT

Ajaz Ahmed, founder and chairman of AKQA, gives inspirational insight into his view of leadership and what really matters

105 NEW DIRECTORS

Stories of fresh talent overcoming the odds to tell their story

75 NORDIC SPECIAL

A trip to the Norse lands reveals local ad industries steeped in the native traditions of a healthy work-life balance, careful weighing of words and a strong sense of social responsibility

92 GOING NATIVE

Hanna Tuovio, of Helsinki production company Grillifilms, on her small, safe, but special city

108 SNAPSHOTS

Views of Lapland from Miikka Niemi, CEO, Flatlight Films

Jeremy

Conor

shots 166

November 2016

News | Insight | Inspiration shots.net

Editorial material for consideration to be submitted to spots@shots.net

Many thanks to those companies that submitted material for consideration on shots 166. If your work didn’t make it this time, please do not be discouraged from sending work in again. If you feel that your company has produced anything that would complement the Creative Showcase please let us know.

All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of facts and ﬁgures, which to the best of our knowledge were correct at time of going to press. shots accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to material submitted for publication.

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Editor

Danny Edwards dan@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0833 @shotsmag_dan

Features Editor Selena Schleh

selena@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0887 @selenaschleh

Art Director Sarah Watson art@shots.net

News Reporter

Olivia Atkins olivia@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0922 @olivia__atkins

Senior Researcher

Tom Archer

tom@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0807 @shotstom

Contributing Editor Carol Cooper

Sub Editors Carol Cooper Kirsten Foster

International Account Manager, Advertising Luke Heywood luke.heywood@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0844

International Account Manager, Advertising

Shane Murphy

shane.murphy@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0926

Sales Manager, Subscriptions Jamie Duffy jamie@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0832

Global Business Development Executive, Subscriptions

James Robinson james.robinson@shots.net (44 20) 8102 0839

Head of Marketing

Samantha Nasser samantha.nasser@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0896

Marketing Manager

Andrea Petrides andrea.petrides@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0875

Production Manager

Jon Cooke (44 20) 8102 0825 jonathon.cooke@mbi.london

Publishing Director Nadia Romdhani nadia.romdhani@mbi.london (44 20) 8102 0881

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Chief Executive Ofﬁcer Conor Dignam conor.dignam@mbi.london

Sprechen sie le nosh du monde?

EXPERIENTIAL

Google Translate #EveryoneSpeaksFood

When Google Translate wanted to illustrate that if there is one universal language it’s the language of food, they turned to m ss ng p eces for help in conceiving a multi-lingual, cross-culinary pop-up restaurant.

When Google approached m ss ng p eces, the brief was to create an experience that celebrates Google Translate’s ability to bridge cultural divides. Cam Luby, head of the cultural activations for Google’s brand marketing explains:

“Behind best-in-class AI is a very simple product that addresses one of the biggest obstacles to universal understanding: language. We wanted to demonstrate this to people in a simple and relatable way. The culinary metaphor was the perfect stage to demonstrate the role of our technology.”

In the resulting #EveryoneSpeaksFood campaign, a pop-up café was created in New York, serving dishes from various countries including Israel, Korea, Italy, Sweden and Ireland, and featuring menus in multiple languages (necessitating the use of Google Translate).

To illustrate the campaign, m ss ng p eces director Josh Nussbaum also created a colourful, culinary short ﬁlm that explains the thinking behind it and displays the dishes in their full glory. DE

In this diverse selection of persuaders and proselytisers a café pops up where you can eat your words in di erent languages, a Pepsi spot spoof makes a point about palm oil, a director describes his VW ad nostalgia and Pokémon

Go goes deep for charity

1/2/3 Google Translate, #EveryoneSpeaksFood

4/5/6/7 SumOfUs, The Ad They Don’t Want You To See 8 Missing People, Pokémon Go

Spot protests Pepsi's palm oil practices

ONLINE

SumOfUs The Ad They Don’t Want You To See

Global consumer watchdog SumOfUs has taken aim at PepsiCo’s relaunch of retro 90s soda Crystal Pepsi in a new PSA that spoofs a classic Pepsi Super Bowl spot. In the original 1992 ad, supermodel Cindy Crawford pulls up to a gas station vending machine and buys a Pepsi, seductively sipping it in front of two young boys who are drooling, not over Crawford’s curves, but over the new Pepsi can design. In this PSA from Zak Klein Productions, the set-up is exactly the same (sans Cindy, of course) but instead of the model drinking a seemingly

Pepsi, the bottle soon dispenses what is meant to be thick, yellow palm oil. SumOfUs released the spot to highlight PepsiCo’s support of unethical palm oil sourcing. According to the campaign, the company purchases more than 470,000 metric tons of palm oil per year to make products such as Doritos (which SumOfUs spoofed in last year’s Cheesy Love Story), Quaker Granola Bars and Lay’s crisps. Using non-sustainable palm oil sources drives rainforest destruction and the extinction of endangered animals and exploits workers in Indonesia. TA

Repurposing

the Pokémon pursuit

OUTDOOR

Missing People Pokémon Go

As the Pokémon Go craze continues, with legions of people searching high and low for Ditto, Aerodactyl, Snorlax et al, BBH Barn, the internship programme run by BBH London, has come up with a clever idea to harness this sea of search for the good. Its campaign for Missing People, a charity that offers help when someone goes missing, utilises the huge groups of people combing the planet for virtual characters by urging players to look for real missing people simultaneously. Posters of the missing resemble Pokéballs’ design and target gamers in the area the at-risk individual was last spotted, asking anyone with information to contact the charity.

The posters were placed on the ground to catch the gaze of Pokémon gamers looking down at their phones, with media for the campaign donated by JCDecaux. DE

Director thinks big to cover 'think small' campaigns

DOCUMENTARY

VW Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?

Joe Marcantonio, a director at Annex Films, recently released a new, near-20-minute documentary about the classic Volkswagen campaigns of the 60s called Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?

With archive footage of former DDB New York art directors George Lois and Helmut Krone, plus contributors including Dave Trott, Sir Alan Parker, Sir John Hegarty and Alfredo Marcantonio (Joe’s father) the ﬁlm is a brilliant and very interesting insight into some of the most revered advertising ever made. Here, the director tells us how and why the documentary was made.

Where did the idea for a documentary about VW’s early advertising spring from?

I’ve always thought these were the best ad campaigns of all time and clearly, massively inﬂuential. I knew a little of the back-story to the ads as my dad (who features in the ﬁlm) wrote a book about the campaigns many years ago.

Is Volkswagen advertising something you have always had an interest in?

My dad is a fairly well-known ad man, so I’ve always had an interest in advertising in general. Before he was a copywriter and creative director, my dad used to work as [advertising manager] for VW in their marketing department. He worked under a guy called Alan Priest, and used to work a bit with David Abbott – who did the legendary British VW ads for DDB. When my dad decided to swap being a client for writing the ads, David Abbott was a massive help to him, and was essentially my dad’s mentor. They stayed in touch, had a keen friendship and, many years later, my dad became creative director at AMV.

The funny thing is that Alan Priest’s son, Ben Priest, is my dad’s godson – and he is now the boss at adam&eveDDB, working on the same [client].

What was the most difﬁcult element of this project for you?

The whole thing was difﬁcult! I did everything myself: producer, camera, questions, sound, edit, graphics… even

“Lock 100 people in a room and make them agree on a favourite flavour of ice-cream; they’re going to say vanilla. These days, ads seem to be made by committee, so we end up with vanilla.”

the grade and audio mix. It has taken almost two years from my ﬁrst look through the archive interviews, to now.

And the most rewarding?

Without a doubt, I loved meeting Sir Alan Parker. They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but he was absolutely fantastic. We went for a nice long lunch after the interview and I quizzed him about directing tips and techniques.

Do you think that current advertising suffers in comparison to the VW work from the 60s? Lock 100 people in a room and make them agree on a favourite ﬂavour of ice-cream; they’re going to say vanilla. These days, ads seem to be made by committee, so we end up with vanilla. [Advertising] is about appealing to most people, and offending the least. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn’t make it easy to get inventive and forward-thinking ideas through research. Sometimes chocolate ice-cream is what you want.

What’s your favourite VW ad of all time?

The most self-deprecating ones are the best. I love ‘If it runs out of gas it is easy to push,’ the moon landing’s ‘It’s ugly but it gets you there,’ and ‘How to save for a Porsche’ – the brilliant idea of using a rival car as the headline in your own ad. DE

You can read the full interview with Joe Marcantonio, and also watch the Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads? documentary, by Blipping the logoed image above.

“We knew that we needed an idea that excited and moved people but we also knew that we needed an idea that worked for everyone. I wanted something that grandparents would show their grandchildren.”

An all-round view of a rare tipple

ONLINE 360° VIDEO J&B Rare Stories

French agency MNSTR and client J&B Whisky have created a 360° campaign which utilises VR technology to great effect. Directed by Sebastien Iglésias and Matthieu Van Eeckhout through OKIO Paris, the J&B Rare Stories campaign is a four-episode saga, and the ﬁrst graphic web series to feature a 360° virtual reality experience, using the latest in graphic design and technology.

Superhumans say ‘yes, they can’

TV Channel 4

We’re The Superhumans

Following the style set in 2012 by Tom Tagholm’s Meet The Superhumans, We’re The Superhumans, the recent TV spot for the Rio Paralympics, directed by Blink’s Dougal Wilson with MPC on post, is another example of Channel 4’s 4Creative making a scintillating, powerful campaign. We talked to James Walker, head of marketing at C4, to ﬁnd out more.

What inspired this year’s (more musical) approach?

The Public Enemy music [Harder Than You Think] was such a key part of the 2012 ad and this time we wanted to do something very different. But everyone was very open-minded as to what direction the creative could take. We knew that we needed an idea that excited and moved people but we also knew that we needed an idea that worked for everyone. I wanted something that grandparents would show their grandchildren. When the music [Sammy Davis Jr’s Yes I Can] was ﬁrst played to me, it deﬁnitely wasn’t what I was expecting but it felt good straight away.

Was there pressure to continue the Meet The Superhumans’ legacy?

There deﬁnitely was but we tried not to think about that too much. There was also a new team in charge at 4Creative in John [Allison] and Chris [Bovill], who were coming to it completely fresh. The

1/2/3/4/5 Channel 4, We’re The Superhumans 6/7/8/9 J&B, Rare Stories

main thing was to build on what we achieved in 2012 but try and do it differently rather than aim to better it.

What were the biggest challenges?

The casting was a huge undertaking as we set ourselves the challenge of representing as many disabled people as possible in the spot across both sport and everyday life. Months of work went into ﬁnding people with a huge range of amazing talents. The production teams at 4Creative and Blink did an amazing job.

This year’s campaign is much more light-hearted than its predecessor. Why did you feel this was the right approach for 2016?

We wanted to do something different to 2012 but we also wanted to reﬂect the progress that has been made. The 2012 spot was more deﬁant and in your face. This time, we wanted to be more joyous and celebratory. OA

MNSTR was tasked with developing the experience in order to better express J&B Whisky’s atypical personality and with J&B Rare Stories they have given viewers the ability to immerse themselves in the brand’s history.

The agency chose to focus on J&B Whisky’s most iconic element, its label, by extending the use of its distinctive colours – red and yellow – into the graphic universe. The campaign takes users through the brand’s story, beginning with its birth in London in 1750 after a young Giacomo Justerini, a Bologna-based master blender, meets and falls in love with opera singer Margherita Bellino, who spurns him. Justerini travels to London and sets up the ﬁrst spirit merchants on St James Street, close to the city’s Royal Opera House. Episode 1 ends at that point, before the second in the series takes up the story of ‘young dandy’, Alfred Brooks, the ‘B’ in J&B, who sets his sights on taking the brand from its store in London and turning it into one of international repute.

Episodes 1 and 2 will be followed by two other stories before October and will continue the tale through to the Roaring Twenties in the US. Viewers can explore the history with a VR headset or on the brand’s Facebook and YouTube pages. DE Watch the ﬁrst two episodes of Rare Stories by Blipping the logoed J&B image.

#CallMamma

GOING GLOBAL

FRANCE

Mirthful Big Mac motivation

ONLINE & TV

McDonald’s American Summer; Space Walk

TBWA\Paris, McDonald’s and director Ben Gregor obviously have a healthy relationship. They, and production company Moonwalk Films, have worked together four times in the recent past, two of those spots, American Summer and Space Walk, feature on this issue’s Showcase reel. All of the work is comedic, with Space Walk and American Summer in particular, hitting that hard-to-reach funny bone. Does that more developed relationship boost creativity? “The trust means there’s more fun and better work,” says Gregor. “It’s like the difference between a relationship and a Tinder date. Ads, normally, are like Tinder dates; between set-ups you’re swiping scripts for your next job and agency folks are swiping reels for their next job. But If you do four jobs in a row together you’re in the constantsex-in-the-Maldives stage. This beats a Tinder date in Wetherspoons any day.”

In Space Walk an astronaut lost in space is given hope by the thought of a McDonald’s burger, while American Summer features a pompous actor whose secret motivation comes from a Maccie-D ﬁxation. Does Gregor, a seasoned comedy director in both TV and ads, have much input into the scripts? “We have our collaborative moments,” he says, “but the guys at TBWA\Paris have excellent taste so I more or less execute their vision.” DE

From douchebag to donating hero

Donate Life

The World’s Biggest Asshole

“This is a story about Coleman Sweeney,” opens the new ﬁlm for Donate Life. “Coleman, in short, was an asshole!” Not your usual opening line, admittedly, but then this is not your usual campaign. Created by The Martin Agency, this clever PSA is narrated by Will Arnett and follows Sweeney, played by actor Thomas Jane, as he gives cigarettes to kids, drink drives and generally personiﬁes the word asshole. He’s a douchebag with no redeeming features at all.

All that changes though, when Sweeney is being a dick to a waitress in a diner and has a brain aneurism.

You think, this is where Sweeney sees the light, the error of his asshole-like ways, and swears to be a better person. But instead, he simply dies.

It’s when he’s wheeled away by the medics that Sweeney is redeemed.

The waitress who’d served him ﬁnds his wallet and, in it, an organ donor card. Sweeney’s decision to be on the donor’s list changes everything. In life, he was an asshole, in death – a hero.

Furlined’s Speck & Gordon directed the ﬁlm for the non-proﬁt alliance of national organisations dedicated to educating the public and advocating for organ, eye and tissue donation. DE

AUSTRALIA

Someone needs a smell check

WEB FILM

Rexona Who is Barry Ogden?

“If you do four [commercials] in a row together you’re in the constant-sex-inthe-Maldives stage. This beats a Tinder date in Wetherspoons any day.”

We’ve all been there, right? A packed train on a hot day, running late, allied with a brisk walk to the ofﬁce often equals a less than fragrant start to the day in terms of personal hygiene. But while most of us can recognise this unfortunate, unsavoury state of affairs and rectify it accordingly, Barry Ogden, the central character in this new campaign for antiperspirant, Rexona, seems unable to.

Created by JWT Sydney and directed by Plaza’s Dave Wood, this short mockumentary presents the hilariously deluded, self-styled ‘local celebrity’ Ogden as he is shunned by fellow commuters, work colleagues and restaurateurs for his noisome armpits. Although Barry seems a sweet, good-natured person, his body odour issues and lack of awareness about them mean he is the butt of all jokes. He even mistakes his special treatment and chants of ‘BO, BO’ – the initials of his name, see – as ﬂattery, and believes the gifts of Rexona antiperspirant left at his ofﬁce desk are from a secret admirer.

With the tagline, ‘Don’t be famous for BO’, the campaign has appeared across multiple online mediums including, YouTube, Facebook, Unruly, Spotify and Rexona’s own website, and comprises the 109-second ‘celebrity’ interview, two 15-second teasers, a six-second bumper, and two 30-second radio segments on Spotify. CC

SWEDEN

18th-century food selfie fun

ONLINE

IKEA

Let’s Relax

ACNE founder and director, Tomas Skoging and former Forsman & Bodenfors ECD, Filip Nilsson have teamed up to form a directing duo called Tompa & Rondo and their ﬁrst ﬁlm, for IKEA, called Let’s Relax, is a sumptuous, historical epic which also comments on our current need to share everything online. Let’s Relax sees a family about to sit down to dinner but before they tuck in, an artist arrives to paint a still life of the food they’re about to eat. That painting is then traipsed across the city to a variety of people in a variety of locations who deliver either a thumbs up, or a thumbs down in reaction to it.

The campaign was created by ACNE and IKEA’s in-house creative department and Skoging says this approach was something he and ACNE are used to. “Using integrated teams with directors and creatives working together is a cornerstone in ACNE’s philosophy,” he says. “With some clients, like IKEA, the client’s creative team is also involved at an early stage. To us, the process for this project felt close to the ideal way of working; high engagement, little conﬂict and a lot of respect for our vision and our work as directors.”

And is this the beginning of a beautiful working friendship between Skoging and Nilsson? “Absolutely,” says Nilsson. “This campaign launch also kicks off our collaboration. We’ll work together from now on and look forward to seeing a lot of amazing scripts.” DE

SWEDEN

Make a friend, then make a chair

SHORT FILM

IKEA Poäng

In our second offering from DIY behemoth IKEA, we have this fantastic short ﬁlm called Poäng, which examines the origin story of the 40-year-old Poäng chair, one of IKEA’s most iconic pieces of furniture. Made by Stockholm’s ICOM Creative Hub and directed by Bacon’s Jakob Marky, the ﬁlm follows two designers, both new to IKEA, who, while initially unsure of their roles in the business, combine to create the now design-classic.

“Being an outsider,” explains Marky, when asked about his initial thoughts on the script, “I’ll never forget when I first stepped into film school in Australia, not knowing a soul, just having moved there from Sweden. There was this tiny, young AsianAustralian kid who said hello, and we started to speak. That was 14 years ago, but that feeling of being an outsider and finding a friend was strong in the script. It was a real story in there. That kid on the first day of school is, by the way, Matthew Chuang, who was the DP on this film.”

Marky says it was nice to have an extended amount of time to tell such an interesting story, but, actually, it almost happened by accident. “Initially the ﬁlm wasn’t going to be longer than 90 seconds,” says the director. “After a couple of days in the edit we had taken it down to ﬁve minutes, and I was very happy with it. I sent a text message to Morten Kjær, the CD, who thought I was joking. He answered jokingly, “make it two-and-a-half”. We took him literally. DE

A rich carnival of fools, jesters and furniture makers parade before us in this selection of spots from around the globe, including an Aussie with armpit issues, a burger-obsessed bu oon in space and Instagram-food posting-fetishists in pre-revolutionary France

AR V VR; HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR REALITY?

There’s no question that the immersive quality of virtual reality experiences makes it one of the most potent technologies for brand storytelling. Its transformative power can move us deeply and this has driven a huge amount of buzz for the technology.

However, with Pokémon Go, the focus has shifted to AR. The game smashed the adoption rates of all previous apps, gaining over 100 million users in six days (the previous record holder was Candy Crush which took one year and three months to reach the same level). It even prompted Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to say: “We are high on AR for the long run.”

The market is predicted to be huge. Together virtual reality and augmented reality are expected to be a US$120 billion market by 2020. Of that staggering sum, according to Digi-Capital predictions, US$90 billion is likely to come from augmented reality, with the lion’s share comprised of hardware, commerce, data, voice services, and film and TV projects, and $30 billion from virtual reality, mainly from games and hardware.

Most significantly, they forecast that tens of millions of people will be using VR headsets at any one time, but that billions will engage in AR simultaneously, using their ever present smartphones. After all, around 2.5 billion people worldwide have a mobile phone with a camera. We don’t have to wait for VR or mixed reality headsets to take off, although they will.

Wigglytuff and powder puffs

So what did Pokémon Go get right? And what can brands learn from it? Pokémon Go successfully gamifies our interactions with the world around us. It also drives a curiosity for what’s in our immediate environment, in this case, as part of the quest for cute creatures and various PokéStops and Gyms. Importantly, the app has created generation business models which will drive growth on the platform and give brands opportunities. Building on in-app purchases to enhance the experience, there are some smart business drivers. Brands can use ‘Lures’ (which

attract Pokémons) to draw players to specific locations and in so doing drive footfall into stores and brand destinations. This raised $50 million in the first week alone, from brands like Mercedes, which released Lures at its dealerships.

Another powerful application of AR is to provide expertise and information at moments that matter in brand journeys. For example, Max Factor used Blippar to make its entire range of products interactive. Useful quality branded content was made available at just the right moment for Max Factor consumers through AR on the product packaging.

The simple application on this edition of shots is also powerful. The ability to scan a selection of the stills of great work and immediately see the film in one step enhances the experience, and will perhaps even result in more creatives seeing more work, which has to be a good thing.

Augmenting the virtuality

However, we’re still at the beginning. From gamifying the real world, to providing inspiration and utility at key moments, there’s a vast spectrum of possibilities for brands. What’s important is for agencies to focus their energies in this space and invent new marketing strategies to connect us with the world around us. That’s why Blippar has developed the Blippbuilder and Blippar API beta programme. This scheme puts our AR creation tools in the hands of agencies, creatives and the whole industry – effectively democratising the creation of AR. Finding new ways to tell stories, boost engagement mechanics and utility for consumers will lead to new revenue streams for brands and agencies.

So what of the future of AR versus VR? They’ll likely co-exist, with AR becoming an everyday habit and VR an occasional treat. The richness and depth of VR will eventually come into everyday AR on a new generation of headsets that holographically project rich content into the user’s line of sight. This ‘mixed reality’ presents the biggest opportunity for brands to tell interesting stories and provide useful content at the moments that matter. S

Though there may be the odd cynical Squirtle-hater among us, there’s no denying that Pokémon Go has found ingenious ways to monetise augmented reality technology – as have other brands via smart marketing drives. So, asks Omaid Hiwaizi, president of global marketing at Blippar, is AR set to be more important to brands than VR? Or is the future of brand engagement a mixed reality?

“Another powerful application of AR is to provide expertise and information at moments that matter in brand journeys.”

GOOD GRIEF, MARK PYTLIK!

What is the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen in the last few months?

It’s slim pickings, I’m afraid. The last thing I made a point of watching more than once was Nike’s Unlimited You, directed by The Daniels for Wieden+Kennedy Portland, but there hasn’t been much else. I don’t know if it counts as advertising, but The New York Times’ interactive department turned out some really memorable work for the Olympics. The pieces in their recent interactive series, The Fine Line, were all impeccably judged; the visual recreations of each Olympic swimming event were perfect examples of how it’s possible to make smart social media content without getting too shouty or clever-clever.

Who’s your favourite photographer? I love Gregory Crewdson, Vivian Maier and Andreas Gursky, but my favourite is Todd Hido. His house anthologies remind me of growing up in suburban Ontario.

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

Best Of Enemies. It’s a documentary about a string of nationally televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions, and it’s one of the most captivating things I’ve ever seen. Vidal and Buckley despised each other. Even though there are a few moments where things nearly get physical, what makes this so compelling is how each of them subscribed to the vehicle of reasoned debate as a means to a higher truth. That whole idea seems very foreign to America in 2016.

Despite his digital credentials, Mark Pytlik, CEO & founder, Stinkdigital, isn’t immune to the time-sucking black holes of Twitter and email. When he manages to escape those, he sips the ‘perfect brew’ served up by blog Kottke.org and dreams of being in Radiohead, but realises he’s got more chance of being Charlie Brown

What’s your favourite website?

Kottke.org forever. Jason Kottke is a New York-based blogger and graphic designer who’s been compiling the internet’s most interesting sea drift since forever. Even though a billion content aggregators have come and gone since Kottke.org launched in 1998, I still visit every day, because no recommendation or personalisation engine can match the perfect brew of long reads, trivial ephemera, movie trailers, internet news and cultural observations that you get from Kottke. This week’s sample posts: dissecting Gone Girl’s screenwriting techniques, Jesse Jackson reading a poem on a 1971 episode of Sesame Street, Ian Bogost’s ruminations on the importance of limits to the creative process, and why No Man’s Sky is like reading.

What website do you use most regularly?

The time I spend on Twitter probably eclipses the time I spend on websites two through ten combined, not that that’s a good thing. The key to Twitter is not to overstay your session. If you’re not careful, you can easily lose hours to undercurrents of pointless tangents. I like that Twitter is essentially a writer’s medium that rewards brevity, but sometimes I worry that it’s easier to be succinct and cynical than it is to be succinct and constructive. The pull-to-refresh UX pattern is my Everest.

What track/artist would you listen to for inspiration?

Because I’m not a psychopath, I prefer to listen to instrumental music that’s minimal and unobtrusive while I work. Composers like Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds are good for that – both make moody, expansive music that’s evocative without being overpowering. Drone and ambient music are also good to think to – Keith Fullerton Whitman and Stars Of The Lid are two of my go-tos.

What product could you not live without?

1Password keeps track of passwords for various websites and services while also making the whole process of logging in and out of any site as frictionless and as automatic as it could possibly be. All my passwords are different, secure, encrypted, and, most importantly, totally unknown to me. 1Password has made my life simpler and more secure. This is not a paid advertisement – it’s just really good.

What product hasn’t been invented yet that would make your life/job better?

Something that fixes email. I spend at least half of my work life trying and failing to stay on top of my emails. Email owns me. It’s my Daddy. I’m not proud. There was a time when I thought that Slack might be a helpful ally, but the net net of incorporating it into our workflow at Stinkdigital has been nominally positive at best. It hasn’t done anything to reduce our signal-to-noise ratios. Iain Tait [ECD, W+K London] once said it should cost money to send an email. Wouldn’t that be great? Or am I just suggesting that we all work out of our LinkedIn profiles?

“The time I spend on Twitter probably eclipses the time I spend on websites two through ten combined, not that that’s a good thing.”

If you could live in one city, where would it be?

Tokyo. It doesn’t make sense that a place so governed by order and simplicity should also account for such enormous bursts of sensory overload, but it somehow does both incredibly convincingly, and I suspect design has everything to do with that. Design informs and improves everything in Tokyo, from civic infrastructure and public parks to dining experiences and hotel rooms, to the structures and inhabitants of wards like Shibuya and Akihabara, which are visual feasts at a level that put Times Square and its drunk Elmos to shame.

Mac or PC?

Mac, although it saddens me that Apple’s desktop operating system has regressed into another iteration of iOS. It also sucks that Apple’s idea of innovation seems to involve deploying watered-down versions of their OS across an increasing array of screens and then celebrating every time any one of those OS/screen combinations gets a feature, regardless of whether it’s actually interesting or useful or not. Siri was introduced to the iPhone five years ago; the fact that Apple will soon introduce Siri on the desktop is, well, extremely Apple.

What fictitious character do you most relate to?

Charlie Brown, whenever his teachers are talking.

If you could have been in any band, what band would you choose?

This is such a boring answer, but I can’t not say Radiohead. No band has been that good for that long while staying totally intact and not losing any members to drugs or alcohol or internecine squabbles. That they’re still so singular and so good is mind-blowing to me. I’d donate a kidney to work with them.

S

Pytlik is inspired by:

Charlie Brown

Photography by Todd Hido

Nils Frahm

Radiohead

Keith Fullerton Whitman

The documentary, Best Of Enemies

The New York Times, The Fine Line

Nike, Unlimited You

A BRAIN OF

Though they’ve been a team for just three years, their meeting of minds has transformed the agency’s fortunes with a host of daring digital campaigns and products. They tell Selena Schleh about their shared goals and fixations, and a Malbecfuelled Miami meet-up that cemented their partnership

2 HALVES

James Temple and Rodrigo Sobral, executive creative directors of R/GA London, are so in tune, apparently, they’ve turned up to their interview in the same outfit: white T-shirt, black jeans. It’s a level of coordination that suggests a decades-long history, but in fact the pair have only worked together, jointly overseeing the agency’s creative output, since 2013. Nonetheless, that partnership has proved infinitely more fruitful than many more long-standing industry relationships, and under their ‘shared brain’ stewardship the shop has doubled in size, propelled itself out of the shadow of its New York overlord, and transformed into a multi-award-winning, full-service integrated agency that counts the likes of Google, Nike, McDonald’s and Beats among its client list. “He challenges me and I challenge him, but it’s always in a good way because we know what our vision is,” is how Sobral describes their at-times volatile relationship, which has at its heart the joint goal of moving culture forward and improving lives through work that encompasses blockbuster commercials (Beats’ gold Lion-winning The Game Before The Game), ongoing outdoor activations (Google Outside) and apps that eschew gimmickry for innovative solutions to real problems, be that a serious medical condition (Turkcell’s Instagram-led diabetes management tool, healthmetre) or simply a bad case of FOMO (Heineken’s social media-integrated nightlife planner, @wherenext).

From Dreamweaver to digital supremacy

Temple and Sobral share more than a similar taste in clothes and a mutual appreciation for a bottle of Malbec (more of which later): they both learned their digital trade back in the days when Dreamweaver was the only weapon in a web developer’s arsenal and are mutually “obsessed” with product and service design. But the partnership owes its success as much to their differences as their similarities. “We both have a deep knowledge of, and skill in digital interactive experiences and the different creative application of those,” explains Temple. “So there’s a lot of overlap, a lot of consistency, but a complete sort of independence too.”

“He challenges me and I challenge him, but it’s always in a good way because we know what our vision is.”

Temple, who oversees the systematic side of the agency, has a more techy background than Sobral, who leads creative communications. Having studied visual communications at university (where he delivered all his projects in code), UK-born Temple worked as an interface design consultant for various R&D companies, including Electronic Ink, hopping between Canada, the UK and the US before joining R/GA New York. In 2006, he co-founded the London office. With just an account man and an art director in tow, he was determined to create something “with its own reputation, clients and calibre of work… more than just an offshoot doing local work”.

Brazilian native Sobral, meanwhile, started young in the industry: aged 16, he was making “horrible” car ads in São Paulo (which at least taught him “the importance of effective messaging”), and put himself through university with the proceeds of his geeky hobby, coding. After getting into web design and setting up his own digital production company, he moved to London to take up the role of creative director at UNIT9. A stint on the Nike account at AKQA followed, creating lauded platforms such as Write The Future and Nike+ Supersonic, and in 2010 he co-founded The Mill Digital.

Around this time, the pair met over drinks with a mutual pal, Lucio Rufo, of R/GA London’s Brazilian contingent. It was a classic case of being

Rodrigo Sobral (right)

“…there’s a lot of overlap, a lot of consistency, but a complete sort of independence too.”

“introduced by friends and ended up getting married sort of thing”, laughs Sobral. And like the best marriages, there was instant respect on both sides. “I knew [about] the challenges of starting an outpost of one of the best digital agencies, and having to carry that weight on your back,” says Sobral. “AKQA was this impenetrable fortress in Europe… so anyone coming out of there, especially from the Nike team, is clearly not a chump,” chimes in Temple, “and what Rod had achieved at The Mill, in such a short time frame, was incredible.”

It wasn’t until 2013, however, that their friendship matured into a professional partnership, sparked by Temple’s growing ambition to turn R/GA London into a full-service, end-to-end agency. “There were a couple of pivotal moments, when I thought, ‘I could really do with a partner to grow this vision,’” he remembers. One was an agency of record pitch for O2: R/GA won the innovation brief, developing the Priority Moments platform, while the communications segment of the business went to VCCP. The resulting campaign, Be More Dog, was certainly a bold creative statement, but Temple felt frustrated by the disparity in direction. “We’d created a platform that people were using multiple times a day, and then it went to comms and suddenly we had a cat and a dog! It’s like, why can’t you just show the thing you created? I thought, there’s got to be a way we can take control of this. If we’re creating the invention, why can’t we create the communication?”

The second real turning point was the 2012 Olympics, when a hitherto under-the-radar headphones brand, backed by a certain hip-hop mogul, went stratospheric. Up until then, R/GA’s work for Beats had been fairly small-fry

pop-ups and the like, but thanks to an audacious marketing stunt in which athletes were sent – and then papped in – custom headphones (thereby sidestepping strict sponsorship rules), the candy-coloured cans were suddenly on every hipster’s wish list. “It was like a pebble dropped and all the ripples spread out,” recalls Temple.

Two worlds collide in a teary, tipsy union

With Beats blowing up, the agency needed to expand not only geographically – opening an LA office to service the account – but also in its scope of work, moving beyond products and services into narrative communications. For Temple, it was uncharted territory. “Let’s face it, you’re never going to come to me to write a TV spot,” he admits. “I might have some interesting thoughts, but I’m never going to be ‘that’ guy.”

With his passion for storytelling and strong campaigns experience, ‘that’ guy was, of course, Sobral, who’d recently left The Mill. The opportunity was “a perfect alignment of the planets”, he says, and offered a very simple challenge: “If [R/GA] is doing some of the best digital work in the world and we want to get into communications, it needs to be as good as the work coming out of any top agency.”

While the challenge might have been straightforward, the pair cheerfully admit that those early days were anything but. Sobral joined in the midst of a perfect storm: as well as creating a campaign for Beats’ portable speakers, Pill+ (“Essentially launching a product in a category which didn’t really exist

James Temple (right)

Temple & Sobral are inspired by…

What’s your favourite ever ad?

James Temple

Blackcurrant

Tango St George. Rodrigo Sobral Guinness Surfer. What product could you not live without?

JT Water.

RS Dulce de leche.

What are your thoughts on social media?

JT It’s the future of news.

RS Please text or call me instead.

What film do you think everyone should have seen?

JT 2001: A Space Odyssey

RS Cinema Paradiso.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot?

JT Headspace [the app].

RS Being overprepared for the shoot.

What’s the last film you watched and was it any good?

JT Chef. It’s a beautiful life lesson.

RS Captain America: Civil War on a flight from LHR to LAX. Don’t bother.

What’s your favorite piece of tech?

JT Looksee [a Tinder-meetsInstagram app].

RS At the moment it’s my Beats Pill+ and my Sky Guide star-gazing app.

What fictitious character do you most relate to?

JT Han Solo.

RS Lieutenant/badass alien hunter Ellen Ripley [Alien].

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be?

JT Nomadic photographer.

RS An astronaut, of course.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know…

JT I love mint ice cream. The type with tiny chocolate shavings.

RS I write most of my scripts and ideas when I’m flying.

yet,”) Temple was tied up with launching a new streaming service, Beats Music (now Apple Music), and setting up R/GA’s Los Angeles unit, Hustle. Working across two time zones for the best part of a year – Sobral in the States and Temple in London – plus the 24/7 demands of a music industry client was “ferocious” and Temple’s control issues didn’t help. Having built the agency from the ground up, he admits he found it “very hard…. [to] let one of the babies go and be brought up by someone else.”

After almost a year of communicating by phone, the two caught up in Miami to present what Temple calls “one of the nicest pieces of work that will never see the light of day”. The client might not have bought the work, but it was a fortuitous trip nonetheless. “Over dinner, Rod said, ‘Look dude, you’ve got to let me go and do what I know I can do,’” remembers Temple, “and I was like, ‘OK, but first you need to hear these things that are going to make me cry if I don’t say them.’” Two bottles of Malbec later and “a bit drunk”, they realised they’d had a common goal all along: to do the best work both in digital and in communications. “It was the realisation that yes, we have these overlaps but

“Over dinner, Rod said, ‘Look dude, you’ve got to let me go and do what I know I can do.’ And I was like, ‘OK, but first you need to hear these things that are going to make me cry if I don’t say them.’”

that’s actually a good thing – they keep us on our toes,” says Sobral. An in vino veritas moment indeed. From that point, the partnership went from strength to strength. “Clients like Google and Beats… started coming to us more and more with comms briefings. It all came from this experiment of James and I learning to work together, merging the two worlds, and having clients that allowed us to explore that,” explains Sobral.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder at Shoreditch desks

Off the back of a successful few years, the pair are now set to push the boundaries even further, bringing their melange of experience design and storytelling into the context of “connected spaces”, i.e. tech-enabled architecture and interior design. Hot on the heels of the fully-connected New York office, R/GA London’s new Shoreditch digs will function as a showroom and testing ground.

As well as overseeing the agency’s creative output, Temple and Sobral have joint responsibility for talent recruitment and retention, something they take very seriously. It’s one of the drivers for the European Accelerator programme they launched last year in Berlin, helping fledgling businesses get off the ground while giving R/GA’s creatives the chance to experience the cut-and-thrust of the start-up world without quitting agency life.

With onerous travel demands that frequently place them on opposite sides of the world, how on earth do they keep the partnership going? Telepathy? Teleporting? “[The set-up] works pretty well,” insists Sobral, who’s flown into London for the day and is heroically battling jetlag. When they’re both in London, they share an office equipped with modish standing desks; they host weekly creative reviews there with their teams and “Being in the same room together helps a lot,” says Temple.

Naturally, with seamless digital connections between every R/GA office in the world, there’s no excuse for not keeping in touch. Teleporting might well be an option in the tech-enabled spaces of the future, but for the time being, they rely on good old WhatsApp to stay connected. But with that shared brain, we reckon there’s some telepathy involved too… S

MILK CHRIS

Chris Milk has worked with Kanye West, so an attraction to alternate realities must be his thing. Breaking into VR with the award-winning The Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire, the director has since thrown himself behind the medium, starting his own VR production companies. He tells Simon Wakelin he’s making sure he’ll always be at the cutting edge of this future gold standard of storytelling

Chris Milk has created a bevy of truly unforgettable videos over the years for the likes of artists such as U2, Kanye West, Chemical Brothers and more – but it wasn’t until the veteran music video director released The Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire that he began to embrace fresh, new ways of storytelling that led him into a career in virtual reality.

This interactive multimedia promo used what were emerging technologies back in 2010 – HTML5 and Google Chrome – to take users on an interactive journey back to their childhood home. The video won a Grand Prix at Cannes and was celebrated as one of TIME magazine’s 30 best music videos of all time. It lit a fire under Milk, pushing him to experiment with new media and uncover new ways of storytelling that would affect the audience in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Wandering the corridors of the University of Southern California one day, Milk discovered a prototype virtual reality rig and he hasn’t looked back since, embracing virtual reality as the future of storytelling. In 2014 he opened virtual reality film company Vrse (now called Within) with technologist Aaron Koblin, and VR production shop Vrse.works (renamed Here Be Dragons), co-founded with award-winning producer Patrick Milling Smith.

He also went on to create a number of immersive VR films, including The Displaced for The New York Times’ VR app, a groundbreaking VR effort revealing the lives of three children from South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine who have been forced to flee their homes due to the ravages of war. The touching film collected an Entertainment Lions Grand Prix award at Cannes this year, as well as recognition at the AICP Next Awards Best in Show.

Another collaboration with the United Nations takes viewers into the life of a 12-year-old Syrian

girl living in a Jordanian refugee camp, while yet another follows a survivor in an Ebola-plagued village. These are all powerful, life affirming projects created in the magical realm of VR.

One thing is certain, VR is here to stay. Headsets from major manufacturers such as Oculus Rift, Sony and Google are widespread and signify a healthy trend, allowing users to try out the technology on affordable mass-market platforms. Meanwhile, directing in VR is incredibly difficult; nothing like film. The adventure lies outside the frame, requiring a choreography of action to ‘inform’ viewers where to look.

Milk is the first to admit that the medium is new and that it will take time to decipher its storytelling language. As he notes, in VR today we’re still learning the grammar rather than writing in the actual language.

So, as VR continues its monumental growth, we reached out to Milk to get his thoughts on where the technology is today, and where it will go in the future…

With the rebranding of Vrse to Within and Vrse.works to Here Be Dragons, will there be a change in the type of content you create? The name changes match our philosophical thinking around VR, but we were evolving as thinkers and creators already. There will be longer stories and generally we hope to continue to produce and distribute the most extraordinary storytelling in VR that we can muster.

Outside of the work you have put out yourselves, what VR films or experiences have you seen that you feel have elevated this new medium? Notes On Blindness is a pretty extraordinary piece of storytelling. The creators have broken a lot of rules in order to get to a place of individuality. The experience feels

“Notes On Blindness is a pretty extraordinary piece of storytelling. The creators have broken a lot of rules in order to get to a place of individuality. The experience feels like a shared authorship between creator and audience.”

2/3

4 Song For Someone

5/6 Evolution Of Verse

The New York Times, The Displaced

United Nations, Waves Of Grace

like a shared authorship between creator and audience. It’s really special.

We’re beginning to see more VR films with interactive elements. How difficult is this to implement, and do you have any interactive projects on the horizon? It’s a challenge on the technical side, but also on the creative side. How do you tell a great story where more and more of the control is in the user’s hands? What are the future definitions of story that we haven’t explored yet? Interactive storytelling is the next level of VR and we’re thinking about it every day.

You are noted for your support for light field cameras, is there anything particular about that technology that excites you more than others? What are your thoughts on [light field imaging platform] Lytro? We’re going to see a lot of new technologies emerge and refine as the industry develops. There’s an extraordinary opportunity in VR to create worlds that look and feel like the worlds we experience every day. A full working pipeline using the technology isn’t quite there yet, but companies such as Lytro are helping pave the way to making that a reality.

Talking VR camera rigs, is there one in particular you like to use? Are there any that you are excited about that are on the horizon?

There will always be a new camera rig, so I try to contain my excitement about the latest and greatest. Camera rigs are always in service to the elements of story, and there’s still a ton of ground to be broken in that department.

In your recent TED talk, you spoke of directing in VR as “a choreography of the viewer ’s attention” with tools such as spatialised sound. Do the rules and tools change when working in volumetric VR [a system which allows fullyrealised 360-degree representations of people and environments in VR]? Absolutely. Every new territory we explore will inspire new creative reactions. Volumetric VR provides creators and audiences with new possibilities and hurdles alike. Obviously the tools for volumetric technology are still in the early stages for live-action shooting, but as the tech sharpens, so will our storytelling constructions. The ability to step inside a story and participate – to certain degrees – will feel like nothing we’ve experienced to date.

What are your thoughts on the future of virtual reality and augmented reality? Do you see them as competing technologies? No. They’re both exciting in their own ways. Arming storytellers with more equipment is never a bad thing. I’m excited to see how AR shapes not only the stories we tell but the very flow of our everyday lives. S

“The tools for volumetric technology are still in the early stages for live-action shooting, but as the tech sharpens, so will our storytelling constructions. The ability to step inside a story and participate – to certain degrees – will feel like nothing we’ve experienced to date.”

Chris Milk is inspired by…

What’s your favourite ever ad? This one is tough. Two of my favourites are Jonathan Glazer’s Frozen Moment for Nike and Spike Jonze’s Doctors for Levi’s.

What product could you not live without? Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

What are your thoughts on social media? It’s an extraordinary way to instantly connect/disconnect with everyone around the world.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? In a perfect world it’d be transcendental meditation. Unfortunately it’s usually craft service peanut M&M’s.

What’s the last film you watched and was it any good? I just saw Sausage Party and it’s pretty insane. What’s your favourite piece of tech? Light-field retinal projection for VR.

What film do you think everyone should have seen? Children Of Men

What fictitious character do you most relate to? Dumbo.

If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? Unemployed.

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I have a profound lifelong phobia of public speaking, though I have to do it a lot now.

blazing A TRAIL

The old rules may have gone up in flames, but Poke co-founder Nik Roope relishes the chance to play with fire. He sees our swipe-driven world as offering an opportunity to explore previously hidden freedoms, he tells Tim Cumming. His fine art background gives him the creative confidence to unravel the complex web of new digital surfaces, experiences and relationships that are changing culture

Going native in digital means walking a narrow path bestrewn with obstacles ahead and precipices either side – landslides of indifference, rockfalls of irrelevance, blanketing fogs of unnecessary content that just won’t lift. For Nik Roope, co-founder of one of the original digital shops, Poke, creativity is still playing catch-up with the relentless advance of technology and the new content spaces created.

“The big change is that we are the content,” he says, “rather than jumping in between the content.

The formats keep shifting and the old rules don’t always apply.” Ah, the old rules. What do we do with them when they are no longer fit for purpose? Put them in a museum? “Brands didn’t have to think before about what was resonant to a millennial consumer at 11.30am. Now they do and it’s a very different creative challenge to solve.”

You can’t put social back in the box

The biggest driver of change remains the little rectangular touchscreen that goes with us everywhere, generating data for us and about us as we negotiate and interact with swipe-driven culture. “Smartphones are still driving change,” says Roope. “Digital started framed in a desktop, then the desktops started talking to each other and now it’s everywhere. Digital is more than just stuff – it’s the net impact of digital on society, the way we think and the way our brains are wired. Smartphones have tipped us into that ubiquity. It’s profoundly different to a computer – it’s location-aware, habit-aware, it’s with you all the time. It’s your window to the world and the world’s window to you. That’s a massive shift. And with it comes a huge shift in complexity in terms of managing those surfaces and experiences and making them make sense to people, making them intuitive, rewarding, useful, entertaining.”

In concert with the hand hovering over the smartphone is the social media revolution, starting with Myspace and Friends Reunited in the early 2000s when Poke began, now via Facebook and Twitter and, in the future, who knows? “Social was the proper revolution,” says Roope. “And now it’s the dominant discourse in the world. Social brands themselves may come and go but there’ll always be another one that will come along and pick away at something else no one has discovered yet. We’re not going to jump back in our box and stop using that space where we share and consume and participate.”

Going back is impossible, because every technological advance means a systemic change in human relationships, and it’s relationships that

fuel the changes in how brands communicate with people. “What is the bedrock of culture and society?” asks Roope. “Human relationships. It’s human beings that are interacting. Digital is the enabling structure that shapes relationships in a new way, and as it does so it changes culture.” Roope points to a phenomenon like Tinder. “Why is it such a reference point in culture? It has become a shorthand for the degrading quality of relationships caused by digital, the swipe. Though of course those desires are nothing new. Tinder doesn’t make people feel new feelings. It’s responding to what is there.”

“Smartphones have tipped us into that ubiquity. It’s profoundly different to a computer – it’s location-aware, habit-aware, it’s with you all the time.”

With the buzz around AI, the internet of things and mixed reality, it’s easy to forget how long we’ve actually been in the digital-human space, and how deeply it has shaped our world. “Everything from the Arab Spring to Daesh propaganda has been driven by digital. It’s not digital’s fault, but it’s enabling new freedoms that were hitherto hidden and weren’t exercised. Which is wonderfully liberating on one side, and fucking terrifying on the other.”

Opening up a new kind of space

When it comes to digital brand engagement, Roope has a clear philosophy. “We talk about living ideas – ideas designed to be flexible, malleable, sustainable. A bedrock and basis on which you can bend, flex and respond, and that you can use again and again, building equity into the idea.”

“It’s not digital’s fault, but it’s enabling new freedoms that were hitherto hidden and weren’t exercised. Which is wonderfully liberating on one side, and fucking terrifying on the other.”

TECH TALK

Nik Roope

What’s the most recent piece of tech you’ve bought and why? I bought some Parrot Zik headphones. I don’t love the stark design, the functionality isn’t brilliantly resolved, battery life is too short – the power button is far too easy to press by mistake, so you put them on and the battery is already drained. But they sound awesome. And I like my music to sound good.

Which piece of yet-to-be-invented tech would transform your life? Idiot blinkers.

What’s your favourite app? Citymapper. Technology taking a messy reality and kicking it into some kind of operable order.

Apart from the internet, what has been the most significant tech innovation to hit the industry during the course of your career? Digital film and photography.

How would you define ‘innovation’? Solving old problems in new ways and inventing new things or methods that create some kind of benefit or value (lots of so-called ‘innovation’ doesn’t actually add anything).

“It’s human beings that are interacting. Digital is the enabling structure that shapes relationships in a new way, and as it does so it changes culture.”

concept. There’s no recognition that digital is a place with its own culture. Generally speaking, it’s done pretty terribly.”

An example of doing it successfully is Poke’s work for EE, The Wembley Cup, a 10-part YouTube series following the build-up to a match between two footie mega-vloggers and their hand-picked, star-studded teams. “It changed perceptions on the ground with 81 per cent of the demographic, which is an incredible impact,” says Roope. “It’s a juggernaut of attention you couldn’t achieve through other media. People were choosing to see that stuff. It was genuine organic engagement.”

“Contemporary art is such a good training for all sorts of stuff –I still use it every day. Honing and developing those skills gives you a real power in the worlds in which we operate – walking that line between risk and uncertainty.”

art as a completely scaleable experience that you could participate in, or enjoy as some nice images to look at.” Thousands uploaded images and hundreds of thousands visited the site. “That was amazing, and rammed home that there was this new space opening up, an appetite for a new kind of proposition and experience.”

Pulling stuff out of the air

Roope has a theory about why so few digital campaigns, even today, get it right. “It’s not a discrete culture apart but it does have its own feeling, reference points and language. What works in that environment is not consistent with what works in films. Most brands still feel weird on digital. They’re either unwelcome or insensitive and unresponsive, and blind when they access that environment. They don’t have the right

This ethos has roots in one of Poke’s earliest successes, The Warholiser, created to launch an exhibition at London’s Tate Modern. People uploaded a picture of themselves, then Poke would ‘Warholise’ it and put it on the Tate site for 15 minutes. “It wasn’t an ad. It was Warhol’s S

Roope’s background in the 1990s art boom (he graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a sculpture BA in 1994) is a big influence on how he approaches his work. “Contemporary art is such a good training for all sorts of stuff – I still use it every day. Honing and developing those skills gives you a real power in the worlds in which we operate – walking that line between risk and uncertainty. Creativity, when it is any good, is always taking you somewhere new.” For Roope, these somewheres have included the art collective Antirom, which he co-founded in the 90s, and the low-energy lighting company Plumen, whose beautiful bulbs are in the permanent collections of MOMA in New York and the V&A in London. Not that creativity is always an easy journey, even for Roope. “You find a lot of fine artists in this business,” he says. “But a lot of people aren’t comfortable being creative.” He recalls rainy midweek mornings in his art studio, wondering what the hell he was going to make next. “It’s terrifying, but if you go through it enough, that gives you confidence. You can’t guarantee outcomes, but you can train yourself to be as productive as you can be. A large part of that is pulling stuff out of the air with confidence.”

OUT OF HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS...

Digital out of home is entering a new era – breaking from the traditional world of outdoor to create a stand-alone medium that blurs the boundaries between online, content, mobile and OOH. From its early days, when maintaining a fully-functioning network of screens could be a challenge, through the rise of ‘dynamic’ and techbased interactive campaigns, right up to present day dabbling into programmatic buying, the introduction of new tech has always been the lifeblood of the medium.

As a result of this new dawn (and many progressive media campaigns), brands are now far more aware of DOOH’s potential. From smarter, data-powered broadcast campaigns through to clever stunt-based executions aimed at driving earned media, DOOH is constantly throwing up new opportunities to deliver exciting work.

The prominence of e-commerce has led to brands being data-rich, so the opportunity is now firmly there to bring DOOH content to life with real-time, data-powered context. An airline, for example, knows which destinations are selling better than others at any moment and which types of holidays sell better at which times, so why not adapt creative accordingly, in real-time? Equally, why would an ice-cream brand be constantly live through a spell of bad British summer weather, when it can switch on only when the sun comes out in any given location?

Are you experienced?

Smarter, data-led campaigns are gradually becoming the norm now instead of being considered ‘innovative’; a shift that is crucial for the medium to fully advance.

The same degree of opportunity applies to interactive digital out of home ‘experiences’. Screens can now be fitted with cameras and sensors that detect not only movement but gender, age, mood, skin tone and the colour and style of clothes you are wearing. As such, a fashion retailer now has the opportunity to present consumers with products that perfectly match their appearance and situation, as well as deliver personalised content –and all in real-time.

We’re also beginning to see the emergence of VR-based immersive

experiences too. Again, the technology has actually been around for some time, but waiting for appropriate facilitation and consumer availability has seen something of a stagnation. Jaguar’s recent #FeelWimbledon installation at Waterloo Rail Station saw a real step forward, giving commuters the opportunity to experience what walking out on Centre Court feels like. Surely it won’t be long now before brands seize the opportunity to not only introduce a product to consumers but enable them to experience it in a fully immersive way; something that should be exciting news to the leisure and entertainment industries, to name just two.

Billboards talking bollocks

However, as is usually the case with anything technology-led, interpretation and application is crucial to success.

Any technology must serve and enhance the purpose of the execution, otherwise the story can often become about the technology instead of the product or brand message. Using a weather feed, for example, to dictate what messages appear on screen is nice, but when the application of this data actually brings the narrative to life, as seen with the recent Cannes silver Lion-winning The Boys, by Pacific Brands Underwear, the results can be brilliant.

Looking ahead it’s hard to say exactly where things are going, but there’s little doubt the landscape will be broadened and more technology-fuelled creativity will flourish. Beyond further advancements in buying efficiencies and adaptive display, it’s fairly certain that personal devices hold the key to truly unlocking digital out of home’s full potential.

The capability to connect and interact with screens via smart devices, all via web browser (so negating the need for app download), has been available for some years now. But what of more passive/ intrusive distribution of personal data to enable targeted Minority Report-style content flashing up on screen as you walk towards it? It could well be the next watershed moment for digital out of home and, assuming brands can navigate trust and privacy barriers with consumers, it might be just round the corner. S

With such delights as Clemenger BBDO Melbourne’s The Boys, which gave us talking testicles swinging low on a hot day Down Under, what’s not to love about digital out of home? Jeremy Taylor, strategy director at Stinkdigital, heralds a new era in which e-commerceenabled big data already allows real-time bespoke ads to reach consumers on the go, and content popping onto phones as you walk by a brand location is just around the corner

“…with anything technology-led, interpretation and application is crucial to success.”

accidental TOURIST

Google’s principal VR filmmaker

Jessica Brillhart tells Iain Blair her career has been one of surprises. Shocked to get onto an NYU film course, she was later blindsided by an invite to be the creative lead on Google’s 360-degree camera rig, Jump. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at her constant state of astonishment as she travels the world, exploring where this exciting new technology can go next

Jessica Brillhart, the principal filmmaker for VR at Google and a pioneer in this brave new world, may be a self-confessed high-tech nerd and “proud of it”, but she’s definitely not your usual Silicon Valley-raised techie.

“I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and I learned filmmaking via technology,” she says. “My dad was a programmer and a hobbyist kind of guy, so I was exposed to some stuff from him, but I learned how to edit videos I was making for high school by reading books at the local Borders because I couldn’t afford to buy them and take them home. I was basically self-taught.”

And there’s more than just algorithms and circuitry embedded in her DNA: “They give you this test at school to see what direction you should go in later, and my interests were all over the place,” she remembers. “I was a big tech-nerd, but I also loved art and creativity. One result from my future career test was ‘filmmaker’. So I looked that up and thought, ‘That’s interesting – and it’s a real job,’ which I hadn’t realised before.”

No one Brillhart knew had “a clue” about filmmaking, “so I Googled it, and NYU popped up,” she recalls. “So I applied, never thinking I’d get in, and also applied to a lot of other colleges, to study computer science, which seemed far more likely to

happen.” She submitted a short video she’d edited to NYU, and was “a bit taken aback” when she was accepted. “That was 2003, and I graduated in 2007 and then worked at Apple for a bit, which was fun and interesting,” she adds.

The joy of pressing record

But she still hadn’t found her sweet spot, she admits. “I had this filmmaking track and this technology track, and for a while they ran on parallel courses, but never converged. And it wasn’t until I started working at Google seven years ago as their ‘first filmmaker’ – even though I didn’t know what that title meant, and they didn’t either – that these two tracks in my life finally merged.”

At Google Creative Lab she spearheaded numerous award-winning shorts and documentaries before joining the VR team in 2015. “VR happened randomly,” she says. “I was making films about AI and how technology interacts with humanity, and some other really interesting stuff, and I wasn’t looking to leave all that. I was happy doing that.” But then she got an email from a group of engineers that were building a new 360-degree stereoscopic camera rig, asking if she could test it for them as a filmmaker. “I thought the request was sent to me by mistake,” she

admits. “And it was a big moment for me, as it was the prototype to Jump at the time, with 16 GoPros in this array, all un-synced.”

Brillhart took up the challenge, and went to Seattle to work with the team. “One of the cool things about the Jump ecosystem is that it’s not just the rig – it’s the ability to take footage and use cloud computing to stitch it all together,” she notes. “That’s a big deal as otherwise you spend a lot of time and money stitching material together – and this setup did it all in just one day.”

“I had this filmmaking track and this technology track and it wasn’t until I started working at Google as their ‘first filmmaker’ that these two tracks in my life finally merged.”

One particular piece of footage really caught Brillhart off-guard. “It was the group just pressing ‘record’ in their office, so it was literally just a bunch of engineers hanging out together with the rig, and they were all so excited and happy, and it felt awesome,” she says. “Here I was, trying to communicate the nuances of humanity and tech, and these guys just hit the record button and did it. It felt like everything I’d been trying to accomplish in filmmaking and just couldn’t.”

It was a eureka moment for Brillhart. “I instantly realised that this would be the next big step,” she states. “It captured something and made me feel something I’d never felt before. It was a very profound moment, for sure.”

That was a year-and-a-half ago, and since then Brillhart has worked with all the Jump prototypes and the GoPro Odyssey rig, and has made three films: World Tour, the first VR film shot with the

“Here I was, trying to communicate the nuances of humanity and tech, and these guys just hit the record button and did it. It felt like everything I’d been trying to accomplish in filmmaking and just couldn’t.”

TECH TALK

Jessica Brillhart

What’s the most recent piece of tech you’ve bought and why?

A pair of Bluetooth headphones. I run a lot and I prefer to have that untethered feeling.

Which piece of yet-to-be-invented tech would transform your life?

One cable that connects to one plug that can charge any device. Doesn’t matter what country you’re in. The amount of adapters and cables and plugs I need to bring on any one trip is starting to get ridiculous.

What’s your favourite app?

Our Jump engineering team built the aptly named Jump Inspector that lets me watch VR edits. It gets a lot of use.

Apart from the internet, what has been the most significant tech innovation to hit the industry during the course of your career?

I’d say a mobile-based VR headset.

How would you define ‘innovation’? Connecting dots that no one else could have imagined connecting.

“[Getting into VR] you can expect to be confused a lot of the time… It’s important to be reactive and OK with being wrong. Then it’s a lot of fun.”

stuff back so quickly, so I can have insights, and then let those emerge and use that information for the next project I do.”

1 From Jump VR video, Resonance

2 Montreal Canadiens VR film, Go Habs Go

3 From Jump VR video, World Tour

its stripped-back music videos called Take Away Shows, largely shot by Parisian indie filmmaker Vincent Moon. “We’re working on music video experiences together,” she says. “They do really cool projects, like putting a musician in a stairwell and just filming him singing in a very raw, unpolished way in this great space. So VR seemed like a natural fit for them. It makes perfect sense for projects like that.”

“I’m not even a big ice hockey fan, but it was one of those things where they were like, ‘We’d love to know what VR is,’ and I was like, ‘Great! I’d love to know what ice hockey is!’”

Ask Brillhart what she thinks of the current wave of VR technology and content, and she’s very enthusiastic: “It’s all great. It’s permeating a lot more now, so you’re seeing more rigs and platforms out there and people are experimenting more with content.” Mentioning Cardboard Camera, the Google app that turns your smart phone into a VR camera, she continues: “People are really into it now, so you see camera companies and tech companies reaching out to creators, enabling them to take the next step. And I go to all these different festivals, and it’s amazing to see, not just what all the major players are doing, but what kids are doing.

first prototype of the Jump rig; Resonance, a VR music video featuring violinist Tim Fain; and Go Habs Go, about the opening night of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey season. Brillhart found herself surprisingly excited about the last. “I’m not even a big ice hockey fan, but it was one of those things where they were like, ‘We’d love to know what VR is,’ and I was like, ‘Great! I’d love to know what ice hockey is!’” she laughs. Brillhart has been travelling the world, filming and experimenting, all in an effort to better understand and help inform others about this emergent medium. “Last time I was in Paris, I went around a lot of the touristy areas with the rig, just to gather material and insight,” she explains. “I’m trying to film and see what’s possible without the stress of having to complete a very polished final product. It’s been very helpful because I get the S

Currently, Brillhart is working with La Blogotheque, the French company well-known for

“There’s this huge VR hacker culture now. It’s going to be far more common to have a VR headset soon,” she adds, “and the content will constantly improve, thanks to the experimentation. For instance, there are things that work in traditional filmmaking and gaming that just don’t work in VR. But you can use some of it as a framework, and pull in the elements that do work.”

Giving advice for people thinking of getting into the VR space, Brillhart doesn’t hold back: “Expect to be very confused a lot of the time! But that’s OK because, to be honest, we’re all confused too. You think you know something, and then it switches on you. It’s important to be reactive and OK with being wrong. Then it’s a lot of fun. Otherwise, it’s going to be very tough.”

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD DATA?

It’s a familiar theme in science fiction. Something unscrupulous and ‘big’ (it’s always ‘big’) enslaves the population with cunning technology that monitors, anticipates and manipulates the many for the elite few. And now it’s real. What’s possible today or in the very near future makes the imagined a very tangible reality. Can we capture the biological traces you litter the world with and use that to sinister marketing effect? Most probably. Can we appropriate details of ID cards, bank cards and anything with a readable digital signature and use that information to confront you at every step with ‘appropriate’ interventions? Very likely. Can we watch your face, eavesdrop on you and adjust content to mirror your desires? Of course we can. And there’s so much more we can do as we aggregate, reorganise, process and profile, if we put our fiendish creative minds to it. All hail the algorithm!

The price of privacy

The truth is, it’s not really about what’s possible, but what’s probable. And as with all innovation, probability is determined by demand. Putting income aside, let’s simply say that price, preference and expectations drive demand. So, what is the real price of data privacy? How comfortable are we about other people capturing our information and doing stuff with it?

In the web’s early days, someone coined the phrase: ‘In the future privacy will be the currency of the internet’. Much has been built on this theme and the ethical collision in the ‘big’ data world.

Let’s begin with an understanding of the need for privacy when, after all, we are social animals. It’s fair to assert that the desire for privacy is partially socially and culturally inherited, but fundamentally, it’s about maintaining control and controlling our interactions with the world around us. However, as social media expert Danah Boyd notes, “Privacy is not about control over personal data but the control individuals think they have”. We can see this play out in the degree of control that different generations think they exercise over big data. I hail from the older ‘control’ generation who suffer from mild paranoia, fuelled by stories of ID theft and the murky workings of digital mega-corporations. Having had early exposure to sci-fi versions

of the future, we are slow to experiment –sensing an inexorable loss of control. Contrast this with the open, collaborative, life-in-full-view approach of younger generations, who rightly assume that a data-driven world is a done deal. They expect that the internet’s ‘crowd’ power will self-police – quickly vilifying those who misuse it. They’re also wise to the covert approaches of ‘big data’, through opt-outs or ad blocking. But, if we come back to the demand drivers of price, preference and expectation, ironically it’s older users who probably have the most to gain from big data. They are the ones with the greatest appetite for filtering, relevance, customer service, bespoke and customised offers.

While the overall premise of the film Minority Report was chilling at the time, the ad-serving ideas were pretty cool. People could see the possibility of a world tailored to you. This might be our ‘Special K’ moment when we need to figure out ‘what we will gain when we lose’.

Nobody wants to lose control, but most of us are prepared to trade some data for a focused value proposition. So, the question is whether we have empowered people to make informed choices regarding their personal data. Do they really have control? If we are honest, we have made the control topic as opaque as is legally possible. Look at the countless pages of legalese that we have to constantly agree to.

Big can be beautiful

Until we can administer a simple risk assessment so people across generations and cultures can understand the control issue, and how to simply exercise choice, then we will need to maintain external controls and ethical watchdogs.

A future tailored to everyone, that cuts away redundant, time-wasting ‘blah’ and focuses on what’s important has to be a good thing. The real discussion is whether we choose the sinister, covert path that proves the sci-fi writers correct, or choose a different, more open route.

Once we understand the psychology that drives angst around big data, then we have an onus as an industry to demystify, simplify and reassure. Let’s reframe the dark side of ‘big’ and make it synonymous with liberty, salvation and humanity. All hail the algorithm!

So just how big is big data? In 2012, IBM estimated that 2.5 billion gigabytes of info were produced by the world per day – nowadays it’s growing too fast to quantify. But with advanced analytics, size isn’t the issue, it’s what data miners, specifically marketers – do with it that’s key. Mark Leigh, CCO at strategic communications consultancy Verbalisation, ponders privacy paranoia and says the industry must help consumers embrace, not fear, the algorithm

“What’s possible today or in the very near future makes the imagined a very tangible reality.”

together in ELECTRIC DREAMS

A satirical copybot that mocks agency positioning statements and a hairy little robot that just goes around the office being needy may sound like exactly what they are: the charming, unexpected fruits of a creative-tech team whose job description is to answer a rolling stream of increasingly imaginative what-ifs. But Wieden+Kennedy’s The Lodge is not all whimsy. In fact, they tell Alexander Barlow, they’re seriously determined to put the competition out of business

What’s going on with The Lodge’s mission statement? “We help our clients thrive in a meaningful impact on the future for the future,” reads the first line on the company’s site. “Evolve organisations in rapid product and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviours and brands, and interactive experiences that transform the future, evolve organisations, and grow.” Sound sort of familiar? Well, that’s the point: the text, it turns out, is a computer composite of dozens of ad-agency positioning statements. It was created by Mimic – Wieden+Kennedy’s artificially intelligent copy-bot that uses algorithmic hoo-doo based on Markov chain technology to analyse text and then copy its tone and style.

Director of creative tech for The Lodge, Nilesh Ashra, says his team came up with the idea when they started using team messaging app, Slack. “Could we develop a thing that just politely listens to everything and mimics what people say on Slack?” he says over the phone from Portland. Within days a Mimic prototype was outputting copy. “We just thought, ‘Wow, that’s really funny, and charming, and unexpected.’ And it sort of snowballed.” This kind of geeky, improvised, tech-craft try-out is typical of how Wieden+Kennedy’s insurgent creative-tech arm works, Ashra says. “It’s not as if we sat there and said, ‘OK, let’s build a Slack-bot.’ It was just an idea, and we pulled the thread to see where it went.”

Next-level what-iffery

Some of the biggest tech companies in the Bay Area have added Mimic to their Slack sessions for light relief, an obvious point of pride for business director Paulo Ribeiro, who describes the project as one of The Lodge’s proudest IP pay-offs, one of

its most successful ‘what-ifs’. There have been others. In fact, The Lodge itself was founded in a similar way, explains Colleen DeCourcy, Wieden+Kennedy’s global co-ECD, who first pursued the idea of a creative tech division back in 2012, shortly after she joined the company. “The idea of The Lodge was definitely a what-if journey,” she explains. “The first thought was, what if we turned our understanding of human emotions and pointed them in the direction of experiences with technology? The second was, what if good products could move beyond just telling people they were good and prove it through experience design?”

“The first thought was, what if we turned our understanding of human emotions and pointed them in the direction of experiences with technology?”

Then came a whole tide of next-level whatiffery. “What if we could attract the same level of talent in technology to Wieden+Kennedy as we had always been able to attract in film and advertising? What if we could provide an opportunity for these people to work as artists and a place where we recognise that process is creativity and that finding and making go hand-in-hand. A place where we could help developers and designers reach their creative

“Our mission is simple: use tech to do what Wieden has always done – creative, emotive work that makes people feel something. We’re just using a wider variety of tools.”

potential with different kinds of briefs than they were getting at Google and Facebook,” she continues. The final question might have been the most existential. “What if we could find brands that wanted that thinking?”

DeCourcy believed they could. The proof was there, says Ribeiro: The Lodge’s work would share DNA with campaigns such as Nike Chalkbot and Old Spice Responses – embracing tech but with Wieden+Kennedy’s soul intact. “Our mission is simple: use tech to do what Wieden has always done – creative, emotive work that makes people feel something. We’re just using a wider variety of tools.” DeCourcy agrees and says it’s not about fudging the digital question or a rush to reinvention. “We’re not looking at The Lodge

“There are agencies out there that have hired, say, three or four creative technologists, and they’re putting the burden of solving a giant, macro-economic issue in the industry on just a few random hires – well, that’s not going to work.”

as a group that would capture digital spend or figure out the mess of display advertising online. We wanted a team that would capture people’s hearts and minds in new ways, aim for work that was simple, daring, epic,” she says. “I haven’t seen a lot of that kind of work from this space.”

Neither has Ashra, who points to an industrywide failing to open up to creative tech convincingly, partly due to dire handling of tech talent. It’s a key frontier to cross, he reckons, if

ad agencies are going to take on the FacebookGoogle duopoly. “There are agencies out there that have hired, say, three or four creative technologists, and they’re putting the burden of solving a giant, macro-economic issue in the industry on just a few random hires – well, that’s not going to work,” he says. “I speak to people in the industry that have the title ‘creative technologist’ and they’re super frustrated because they have ideas and they get told that their job is to come in and innovate, but quite often none of the processes, culture or ambition [in those agencies] ever align.

“Some of the most amazing, problem-solving talent now are highly trained computer scientists and designers. So we felt, if we brought them here, to incubate them in a creative culture that genuinely, no bullshit, supports experimentation, then really interesting things would happen.”

A robot in need is a friend indeed Interesting things that, on the face of it, don’t adhere to the standard syntax of an advertising agency. Example: Needybot – a small, selffinanced do-nothing droid that ambles around the Wieden+Kennedy Portland office needing stuff – literally. “We came up with an idea: rather than building a robot with one specific, preprogrammed utility, what if we built the world’s first robot that needed help?” explains Ashra. “Could a robot develop tactics to build empathy and care in humans?” This April, Needybot began to combine heat-seeking tech and face-recognition software to chat up Wieden employees. It interacts with employees’ kids, asks people it recognises to introduce it to strangers, and is sometimes intentionally ‘pranked’ to gauge its reaction.

While the project was a success, says Ashra, it took an immense amount of stamina. The initial timescale was three months; it took ten. So why spend so much time and resource developing what they themselves describe as a less-than-useless robot? Ultimately, it was representative of The Lodge’s broader USP, says Ribeiro: a pre-emptive, long-lead tooling up for the incoming tide of AI in advertising that will eventually transfer to a client project. “We wanted to build a testing environment for interactive design – that’s what Needybot is. It already has a thousand or so scripted interactions in its system – every time it engages we learn more. What’s fun? What puts people off? What do people ignore? What do they do over and over again? It’s already given us a whole bunch of data. And some of those tactical interactions we built… we’re already repurposing them for other projects.”

Other successes have had more direct applications. They’ve built the Minecraft world’s first working smartphone for Verizon; a digital, movement-mimicking “magic mirror” for Laika’s

stop-animation film The Boxtrolls; a full, 360-degree VR experience for car-maker FCA; and there are major experience-design works-inprogress on the go for Samsung and Nike that draw on character design, sensor tech, real-time graphics… it’s a broad church. And it’s supposed to be, insists Ribeiro. The whole point is to prep for a growing number of discipline-agnostic briefs.

“Adding joy, utility, and showing up in people’s lives in a way that adds value with VR, AR, AI – there’s totally a role for brands in that. And it’s all super-open territory right now.”

“If we wanted, we could do nothing else but focus this team on VR,” he explains. “But there are two reasons why we won’t restrict ourselves: one, working in one space has taught us new ways of working in others. Two, we’re not going to force-fit anything on a client.” It’s not about continuing the ‘X-is-dead’ narrative but developing a mature, omni-channel digital pluralism. “We don’t want to be in a position where we’re saying one technology is the future and forcing it down clients’ throats. It’s more like, what’s the most interesting thing we can produce that makes sense for this brand?”

The start of the creative tech wars

Still, even if some platforms are more brand-ready than others, the team are in no doubt that creative tech has immense potential; its entry into the grand marcom maelstrom is necessary and long overdue. Experiential design is a more nourishing alternative to the empty calories of interruptive digital-display advertising, reckons Ribeiro.

“You can’t argue with the fact it’s getting harder for advertising to engage. Sure, we can continue to create endless inventory of digital advertising – it doesn’t make it more effective.” The industry has to find new, scalable, accountable approaches. “Adding joy, utility, and showing up in people’s lives in a way that adds value with VR, AR, AI –there’s totally a role for brands in that. And it’s all super-open territory right now. So we’re entering that space not just because it’s interesting to us but because we think it’s the only way forward.”

DeCourcy agrees. “From 2010 to 2015, most tech in advertising was either social media content or back-end ad-tech. I think there’s evidence that

audiences are ready for more. I think real-world, community-driven, technology-enabled exploration is where communications is moving: tangible experimentation design is the next edge.”

Are we on the tip of an industry-wide embrace of creative tech? Will teams like The Lodge become an industry standard? Unlikely, reckons DeCourcy. “I see fun, opportunistic stuff happening, but I’m pushed to places like R/GA and AKQA when I look for similar types of teams. I’m determined to put AKQA out of business. They get great briefs and enviable budgets. But I haven’t seen a lot from them that stops me in my tracks. We could do better with those opportunities,” she concludes. “And we will.”

TECH TALK

The Lodge

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought and why?

Nilesh Ashra (top)

An Anova sous vide machine. It’s what all the food nerds are buying, because it lets you apply science to food.

Paulo Ribeiro (centre) I just pre-ordered Anki’s Cozmo robot. I love the mash-up of bleedingedge technology and a category like toys. There is serious AI in those little plastic widgets.

Eric Baldwin [creative director] (bottom) No Man’s Sky for the PS4. I bought it because I like torturing myself with the memory of what it was like to get lost in a game, before I had kids.

Which piece of tech would transform your life?

NA A completely full-loop nutrition and health coaching and guidance system. Something that’s plugged into my body and measures macro/ micro nutrient ratios without any manual input. So when I go on an ice cream rampage, I don’t have to deal with the burden of telling anyone or anything. It would just line me up for an extra 30 mins on the treadmill the next day!

PR Every tool that has promised to filter and prioritise communications has just become another channel to manage. Help me get to more human conversations. That’s what my soul needs.

EB Teleportation.

What’s your favourite app?

NA Glassy is a great idea for surfers. It notifies me when the wind and swell conditions are shaping up, which makes it easier to plan early morning or weekend trips.

PR Truly, it’s Google Maps. We recently got an Impossible I-1 [tech-enabled instant camera] in the office and it’s fun to be able to master analogue photo techniques with a swipe or two. A shortcut to becoming Warhol!

EB Right now I’m obsessed with a game called Rymdkapsel. I know that’s cheating because it’s a game as opposed to an app.

Apart from the internet, what has been the most significant tech innovation during the course of your career?

NA Too many to name. Cryptocurrencies? Deep learning? Google Glass?

PR Besides super computers in our

pockets? Maybe it’s the fact that today the barriers between hardware and software are almost gone. We can connect a Samsung Smart TV to an Apple device and can turn a fish into a sensor. We can connect anything, which means we can make anything we can dream up.

EB It’s lame, but I would say the iPhone. I’ve been without it and I realise how much it’s a part of my everyday life.

How would you define ‘innovation’?

NA Making things genuinely better: more useful, or beautiful, or accessible. There’s so much noise around innovation now. It’s hard to be creative when people are wedging their opinion or initiative around the thing you’re working on. So maybe a part of innovation is being focused, even a bit selfish.

PR Innovation is such an overused buzzword in business today, but I suppose that’ because the opportunities are limitless. For us it means using new tools to make people feel something.

EB Anything that I wish I’d made and that makes everyone around me talk about it.

1 Needybot (Blip the image to find out more)

FCA: Sterling Heights VR experience

Soundsketch (image courtesy of Grace Rivera)

EYE IN THE SKY

You wake late one morning in the not-toodistant dystopian future and realise you’re late for the drone races. You hop into your human drone carrier, but as you take off, your neighbour’s emergency Amazon Prime Air delivery of toilet paper arrives and gets caught in your minicopter’s blades. You crash into a lamp post dislodging a drone docking station, which falls onto your neighbour’s head. You call for a private medidrone to treat him but its battery fails and it falls out of the sky and smashes your robo-dog. Your neighbour laughs, you flip, you’re armed,

obvs, you draw your gun and shoot. Fast forward: you’re in jail, but at least you can get high-quality drugs delivered via drones that fly through the rundown penitentiary’s broken windows.

A flight of fancy? Not necessarily: drone racing is now a thing, the first US national drone racing championships took place last summer; China’s Ehang 184, the world’s first passenger drone, has recently been tested in Nevada; in April a drone crashed into a BA jet over Heathrow (reports indicate the number of near misses involving aircraft and drones has quadrupled in the past

year); the UK government has just relaxed aviation rules to allow Amazon to test drones capable of delivering parcels within 30 minutes of ordering. Amazon is aiming to fix recharging points on church spires and lamp posts; this summer a woman watching a sporting event in Canada was knocked unconscious when a 1.2kg DJI Phantom filming the event fell onto her head, and there have been recent cases of drugs being flown over high fences to inmates’ windows in UK jails. Whether we like it or not, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are buzzing into all areas of our

Marsh

Small Pond

Thanks to its frequent coupling with such words as ‘surveillance’, ‘strike’ and ‘warfare’, the term ‘drone’ has long carried dark and sinister undertones. But it is steadily acquiring a sunnier aspect as it moves into other sectors – in particular the arts. Danish photographer Michael B Rasmussen, who won first place in the Nature-Wildlife category of this year’s Dronestagram-hosted International Drone Photography Contest, talks to Carol Cooper about his enthusiasm for the new aerial medium and his elevated vision for the future

“Obviously, I couldn’t afford to rent a helicopter, but dreaming is good for the soul and I kept wondering how locations near me would look like from above.”

lives, and while the laws surrounding both commercial and private flying are evolving as usage increases, image makers are busily experimenting with their new vantage points. Dronestagram’s head of marketing, Guillaume Jarret, says “a great drone picture is one that you immediately identify as a drone photo. It is taken at a low altitude, near the target of the picture [and couldn’t have] been taken with a device other than a drone.” Ken Geiger, National Geographic photographer and a judge in this year’s Dronestagram contest also believes the technology offers a unique perspective: “Drone photography is a new kind of visual language.” As the technology diversifies and gets cheaper,

it is also opening a medium up to the masses in the same way that digital opened up general photography. I ask Rasmussen, who is inspired by the natural environment surrounding his hometown of Naestved, Denmark, how he feels about a possible future where the clear, pinescented sky over his beloved local forest is blackened with drones. But he’s a glass-half-full kind of guy: “Drones are still new, and people panic when something new comes along.”

Regarding speedy UAV deliveries he says: “I can’t wait to be able to order a filter via my phone while I’m out shooting. Imagine the time it would save!” And what about the privacy aspect that troubles some? “Monitoring people secretly from afar via

drone isn’t easy. Firstly, a drone is noisy, secondly, the camera’s so wide-angle you have to get really close to clearly see people,” he says.

Rasmussen has been a passionate amateur photographer since 14, when he worked as an intern following his journalist mum and her press photographer around on shoots. A few years ago he became interested in aerial photography after seeing helicopter-shot images at an exhibition in Copenhagen. “Some seed was planted in me back then – I never forgot how amazed I was. Obviously, I couldn’t afford to rent a helicopter, but dreaming is good for the soul and I kept wondering how locations near me would look like from above.”

Then a year ago his wife bought him a DJI

Page 50 The Bridge

1 Up The Tree

2 The Railroad

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4 Bulbjerg

5 Agricultural Pattern

Phantom 3 video camera drone. “I’d been talking about amazing drone photos for years. I guess she decided it was time for me to get up there myself.” It was his second trip out with the drone, and first attempt at photographing Kalbyris forest that landed him the Dronestagram prize. “When I first got my drone, I raced to the nearest field, took off without any planning and ended up with useless photos.” His tip for newbie pilots is to know your drone before you shoot. “Fly as much as you can and when you stop being afraid of it falling from the sky, you can start taking pictures. Always keep a close eye on your battery life. It’s easy to get caught up in composing a perfect image and before you know it, you’re out of battery.”

Once he’d mastered his DJI Phantom, he returned to Kalbyris and took the shots that won him not only the international contest prize, but also second place in another Dronestagramhosted competition – the Zeinberg Landscape Photo Contest. His work has just been exhibited at the Dong Gang International Photo Festival in South Korea and the attention he’s attracting seems set to give him the break he needs to give up working in car-part sales and go professional. “There has been a huge interest commercially from different news agencies since I won the contest,” he says, “and I’m hoping to work with a few of them in the future.”

One of the features of aerial photography that excites him is the lighting possibilities it affords. “When flying high above trees and structures, the light and shadows are much more defined. Imagine the edge of a forest, if you stand at ground level, looking towards the sun and trees, you’ll see something like a barcode, with dark and light stripes. If you fly over the treetops, you’ll not only see the beautiful green foliage, you’ll also see the trees’ shadows stretching on the ground.” So is his goal to depict reality faithfully? What about his artistic vision? “I try to show the world as it is. With software you can now turn day into night, or a treetop from green to deep red. This can be beautiful, but it’s not how our world is – the world I want to show. I develop my photos as I remember the scene at the time. However, my emotions [can also affect] my version of the truth. If I was feeling on top of things when I took the pictures, they tend to be warmer and more colourful. But if I was struggling with something inside, my images usually end up in grainy black and white.”

It will be interesting to see if Rasmussen’s future work might show the real-life beauty of flocks of drones (carrying Amazon parcels, drugs, even people) buzzing over the treetops.

the whether FORECAST

Amy

Kean, Mindshare’s regional strategy lead for Asia-Pacific, tells Danny Edwards the internet is her spiritual home – like the online world, she’s

eccentric and eclectic and partial to a bit of drama. Although her role has always been in the digital realm, it’s not the technology that excites her; it’s learning about people and their problems, then divining solutions – such as stuffed crust pizza

Amy Kean, Mindshare’s regional strategy lead for Asia-Pacific, believes that the internet is her spiritual home. Its very eclecticism is what, for her, makes it such a captivating place. Kean admits that she is riveted by people and by their relationship with technology, specifically the internet. She studied psychology and sociology at university in England and did her dissertation on the role of the internet in people’s relationships with celebrities. “I was the first person at the University of Bath to reference Madonna and

David Beckham in my dissertation,” she says proudly. “And what I began to learn is that the internet is a fascinating, enlightening, positive, dark place and, as such, the perfect environment for me in which to work.”

In 2004 Kean began her career at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the organisation that represents the UK digital advertising industry. She was paid to discuss, in general terms, the internet: its positives, negatives and best practice approaches to it. She set up the IAB’s first social media council, worked on events, PR and marketing, and created a well-respected profile within the digital community for herself before moving, in 2011, to work at the Havas Group, first as social media director then latterly at Havas Media Labs as the head of futures.

Do you want sex with robots?

But before getting to that enigmatic-sounding role, it’s clear that Kean hadn’t always set her sights on a life in advertising or technology, and it’s no real surprise to learn that this animated, energetic 35 year old had one eye on a future in the performing arts. “I’ve always been quite eccentric – or weird, depending on your preferred terminology – and as a child I was a big fan of drama,” explains Kean. “Lots of singing, dancing and school plays. As a kid I inevitably wanted to be a member of a girl band, which was a dream that left me as soon as I went to my first audition and was told to “dance, freestyle” for three minutes. I then decided that I wanted to be a Blue Peter [UK children’s TV show] presenter, but got put off after the Richard Bacon scandal [Bacon was caught taking cocaine]. I guess you could say that I’ve always wanted to be attached to fame in some way, without the bother of actually achieving it myself. So, working within media, where we align ourselves with the biggest brands and get to meet the most interesting minds, is probably a great second best to actually being on TV.”

Back to Havas and that forward-thinking role which, Kean says, “was a grandiose title to describe what I think is a very practical job: mapping out the future of your clients’ [business]

and trying to work out what’s coming next”. The Havas Media Lab is a research facility whose aim is to get people thinking about technology’s potential applications. Kean’s role used analytics aligned with imagination to work out what might be coming down the pike. “This might sound like common sense,” she says, “but the good thing about the future is that we can change it, and so the role of the futurologist isn’t to say ‘In 20 years we’ll all be having sex with robots,’ (although we may be!), but instead to say ‘Here’s a number of different possible scenarios for the future, some are good, some are horrible, what do you want to happen?’”

“The role of the futurologist isn’t to say ‘In 20 years we’ll all be having sex with robots,’ but instead to say ‘Here’s a number of different possible scenarios for the future, some are good, some are horrible, what do you want to happen?’”

In 2015 Kean left London for Singapore and her current role at Mindshare, which, in essence, tasks her with understanding people and generating strategies around that understanding. It seems like a perfect job for someone so inquisitive about human nature and people’s application of technology. “I think I’d be hard pressed to find a more dynamic and diverse role,” she says, “but my God, there’s a lot to learn about people, and I’m starting to think I might need to learn all the languages, too. I used to sit in an office in the UK and create these global strategies and

“Working within media, where we align ourselves with the biggest brands and get to meet the most interesting minds, is probably a great second best to actually being on TV.”

recommend innovation based on my own bubble of London understanding, but working across APAC has really opened my eyes to cultural nuances and how creativity looks different everywhere. In fact, the very definition of creativity and innovation differs from market to market.”

The cutting edge of pizza crusts

TECH TALK

Amy Kean

What’s the most recent piece of tech you’ve bought and why? I actually just bought part one of a DIY robot kit. It’s one of those weekly rip-offs (probably aimed at children) that gives you a magazine and a different piece of a product every week for you to build over time. In 72 weeks, at $28.99 a pop, I’ll be around $2,000 poorer but I will have made my own humanoid robot that speaks both English and Mandarin. Watch this space.

Which piece of yet-to-be-invented tech would transform your life? Some kind of intelligent body screening system that scans my body and brain each morning to establish my very speciﬁc shape, understand what mood I’m in and then assess the clothing situation in my wardrobe to tell me what to wear. I imagine it would be a bit like Cher’s virtual dressing room in Clueless, but more neurological.

What’s your favourite app? Shazam. I can honestly say it’s made my life about 80 per cent happier and more fulﬁlled. Other apps may come and go but Shazam is probably one of the most genius audio inventions of all time. OF ALL TIME!

Apart from the internet, what’s been the most signiﬁcant tech innovation to hit the industry during the course of your career? When I started working in digital, blogs weren’t even a thing yet, so I’d have to say the type of ﬂexible and accessible CMS that allows everyone to be a publisher. Imagine not having access to every damn person’s opinions all of the time.

How would you deﬁne ‘innovation’?

A creative jump in thinking, behaviour, process or production.

you can effectively inspire people to change. There are so many examples of that in history – religion, societal movements and, yes, technological developments that have solved such a compelling problem that people decided they couldn’t live without the solution. Pizzas with pepperoni and cheese in the crust, for example. Pizza crusts are one of the most impressive sources of innovation globally. The problem? People always leave the crusts. The answer? They want more cheese!”

1 Disney Inﬁnity

2 Paco Rabanne Black XS, 360 experience

where such innovations are available to all, a future devoid of the current clickbait mentality of the internet, would be, she believes, a time when we could say that technology has truly changed the face of humankind.

One piece of tech that frustrates and fascinates Kean in equal measure is augmented reality. “It has the potential to change us, change how people think and see the world and yet the majority of normal people still don’t know, let alone care about it,” she says. “Historically it’s been left up to agencies, not tech providers, to push AR as a platform, and the executions have been expensive and buggy. Obviously Pokémon Go has made an impact. It has used the strength of an existing brand to introduce a new technology to the masses for huge social rewards. Similar games have existed, but I think people underestimated just how obsessed the world has always been with Pokémon. If it takes a 20-year-old brand with TV shows, toys and multi-million dollar investments to launch a new technology to the public, then we probably need to apply these lessons to the future of new technology distribution and the amount of investment needed to change people’s behaviours.”

So would it be fair to say that these glimpses into people’s thinking and behaviour are what

“[Augmented reality] has the potential to change us, change how people think and see the world and yet the majority of normal people still don’t know, let alone care about it.”

Despite Kean’s interest in people’s use of technology and how it can empower them and the brands which use it well, she doesn’t see herself as particularly interested in “the tech side of technology”. Innovation, identifying problems and their solutions are what interests her. “Whether it’s tech-driven or through a cultural movement or even a piece of literature, it doesn’t really matter,” Kean states. “What I’m most interested in is how S

Kean goes on to discuss the potential psychological applications of VR, such as aiding with agoraphobia, and posits that apps of the future might be able to rid a person of paranoid anxiety, or that playing an online game could save a failing marriage. This potential future, a future

Kean finds the most interesting element of her job? “Hmm, what do I most enjoy about my job?” she ponders. “Arguing? Being smug? Recommending something to a client and then, five years later, someone else doing it, allowing me to say ‘I told you so’? Obviously none of those things,” she laughs. “The thing I enjoy the most is learning new things about people every single day. Little facts, insights, new types of behaviour and trends. Just new knowledge about what people love, what they hate, and how weird they are. The fact that I can apply that to the media world is purely incidental.”

Unlike sound and vision, which can be reproduced via wavelengths and pixels, the reproduction of scent still relies on good oldfashioned molecules that must be transported from source to nose. Yet the tech surrounding scent is developing – apps can detect BO or play you scent tracks – and there’s a deeper understanding of aroma’s role in marketing. But what of demand? The film industry’s launch of ‘scentsational’ smell-ovision flopped and nobody wanted CDs playing ‘scent stories’. Scent consultant Lizzie Ostrom wonders if consumers prefer to sniff out authentic, direct-from-source smells over imitations

NOSE on the

The smelling glove must be the most freaky product I’ve encountered while working in the fragrance industry: a pair of washing-up gloves with catheters running from the fingers to your nostrils. The concept: hold a beautiful flower and breathe in the aroma without having to bring the thing to your face. “Why the hell do we need this?” was my initial thought. It’s a question that even the most well thought-out scent tech has always to answer. The holy grail of such products is the removal of actually having to inhale scent molecules, detaching the odour from the object source.

Yes, any old candle or room spray lets us delight in the perfume of a rose in the depths of winter when we’re nowhere near a garden. But why use old-school wax when you could employ a Scentee, a Japanese apppowered device that releases aroma-puffs from tiny cartridges attached to your phone, for example when a friend sends a text? Or a Cyrano, dubbed a ‘digital scent speaker’, which lets you activate scent tracks from an app, playing sequences of aromas from a portable scent diffuser? There is also Smeller 2.0, an instrument that enables producers to create narratives of smell – compositions made up of scents and scent chords known as Osmodramas – as live performances.

“Why use old-school wax when you could employ a Scentee, a Japanese app-powered device that releases aroma-puffs from tiny cartridges attached to your phone.”

Most often, the ‘tech’ part of scent tech actually refers to the internetenabled bit, which allows us to customise which aromas we want to be released. For the machines themselves, we are still stuck with a limited palette of delivery systems in various sizes: put the scent in liquid, gel, aerosol, polymer bead or capsule form, then use heat, a fan or ultrasonic waves to encourage the volatile molecules to evaporate. Designers can then multiply the number of tubes and scent sources to offer a musical instrument effect and an ability to layer aroma. An article in this April’s MIT Technology Review examines the limitations of ‘artificial olfaction’, the most important of which is that, unlike sound and visuals, we can’t reproduce scent in wavelengths, and are stuck dealing with molecules that we must convey from A to B.

The tech may be limited, but the applications are certainly not. There’s brand activation, as with Nivea Men’s NOSE app, created by Belgian agency Happiness FCB. If held near a man’s armpit, it can ‘scan’ the smell of his sweat, analysing it with an algorithm created by evaluating the scent of 4,000 other males. It can then report if there is any BO and advise the use of deodorant. There is also the recent spoof Nosulus Rift campaign from games makers Ubisoft to accompany the release of South Park: The

Fractured But Whole (spoiler: it involves an aroma generator that emits human farts). For VR production and experiential agencies there is the prospect of creating mood and atmosphere, the simulacra of a jungle paradise, or a trip into space. In retail and hospitality scent-marketing diffuser machines are now a commercially viable part of the customer experience mix, building familiarity across a brand’s global estate of stores. We are even seeing how scent can enhance human performance thanks to research on the neuroscience of smell: the Cyrano, for example, can emit smells that will help to make you a more attentive driver.

The long and winding road to scent tech success

Scent tech certainly demonstrates ambition in how it aims to enhance our day-to-day lives, but the genre seems to be stuck, even as enthusiasm around olfaction as a design language mounts. Will these products ever appeal to consumers in volume? We’ve had plenty of scent jukeboxes, players and cartridges before, including – over a decade ago – Febreze’s Scentstories. This ‘scent CD’ player emitted a selection of aromas, enabling one to relax at home with a glass of wine while also going on an olfactory journey.

1/2 Nosulus Rift, the (fake) fart-smelling accessory for South Park game

The Fractured But Whole 3 Digital scent projector/ instrument, Smeller 2.0

“We don’t take the sense of smell seriously enough. We’re unpractised in sniﬃng and don’t have a rich language for it. We’ve suppressed the ‘lizard’ part of our brains. Odour is not permitted to take on its proper role in our lives. We don’t pay it enough attention.”

The Exploring A Mountain Trail scent CD started with the smell of a winding creek and built up to a wander through a fir forest via a stroll through a wildflower meadow and even a struggle up to a mountain pass. But it didn’t sell. It seems we crave Smell-o-Vision stories in our newspapers, especially on April Fool’s Day, but not in our actual homes.

Even before getting into all the technical diﬃculties that are involved, Smell-o-Vision is faced with a brand image problem; it’s associated with the costly flop that was the 1960 film Scent Of Mystery. The movie saw the launch of Swiss inventor and osmologist Hans Laube’s ‘smell brain’ machine, which released scents, such as tobacco, in sync with the action in the film. It was billed as the next big thing but never took off and actually made some audience members feel nauseous (the film was later re-released as Holiday In Spain, without the smells).

Part of the problem may be that we don’t even take the sense of smell itself seriously enough. We’re unpractised in sniﬃng and we don’t have a rich language for it. We’ve suppressed the ‘lizard’ part of our brains. Odour is not permitted to take on its proper role in our lives – we don’t pay it enough attention. Rather than accept the boundaries of our sense of smell, we try to stretch it, to make it behave like our other senses.

Also, because the hype is so focused on technology and hardware, we neglect the most important asset at the heart of these devices: the scents.

Often, those leading on brand activations struggle to source aromas for their campaigns (or, in some instances, they don’t really care that much anyway and will just use anything). The fragrance industry business model is predicated on volume, and it is much easier to provide off-the-shelf library or portfolio fragrances – a coconut here, a strawberry there – than put lots of resources into bespoke atmospheric odours that are never going to sell in hundreds of kilos as a shower gel formulation.

This means there are opportunities opening up right now for independent perfumers who can negotiate a supply chain on a small scale. The industry’s fragrance houses are responding, and putting together new business models based on impact over volume, and are also looking into the R&D of new aroma chemicals that could perform particularly well in digitally-powered applications and which would allow for experimentation with aroma effects. But with research currently shrouded in secrecy, it remains to be seen what products will eventually emerge in the future.

Reproducing the scent of a rotting corpse

In the meantime, this summer, the New York Botanical Garden’s titan arum, or corpse flower, bloomed – the last time this happened was in 1939. The event secured global media coverage and crowds of visitors flocked to experience the plant’s aroma of rotting flesh. “If only Smell-o-Vision had caught on!” cried the weblog Boing Boing.

It seems that, far from being careless about our noses and what they can do, we really do want to smell our way through the world. But we want to be there, at the source, nose-to-nose with the real thing, forming a memory that one day might just be triggered again. Or will we simply be happy to load up our

1 The Cyrano Scent Machine

THIS IS THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE

Looking at new TVs recently, I was presented with a huge UHD unit with a screen displaying the most wonderful colour and movement. I then looked at this long metallic slug accompanying the TV, ‘a super sound bar’, and thought: are we really as up to speed with sound as we are with vision? We create and reproduce images for the wonder of our eyes but what of sound, dialogue, the dynamism of music and the impact it has on the narrative? We widely accept that music or sound can affect us more than visuals, so where is the technology? We have 4K and UHD TV, AR, VR, 360° vision, but can a ‘super sound bar’ tick the aural box?

Sound design, voice-over, foley and SFX all belong in the same arena of expertise as music, but it is music that I want to address primarily. Music moves us, defines us, defines eras and personalities and sells products. Aside from its obvious contribution to the economy, music adds point-of-difference value to creative visuals, but how has the quality of audio content improved in relation to technological developments in visuals such as 1080p [Full HD] and 4K or UHD? Advances in home cinema and sophisticated headphones are improving the sound experience, but how do we bridge the gap between soundfields encoded to a 360° picture by proprietary gaming software to the wider TV and film market? How do we support the advances in virtual reality with commonality in audio software and hardware to avoid a Betamax/VHS power struggle?

Better binaural Beatles’ beat

The objective should be to capture multiple sound sources and encode them to a 360° picture. Ideally, we need both the technology to record, mix and produce in 360°, along with the delivery mechanisms. Many people will own current devices that will render such improvements negligible, but history has proven all advances forward do offer some trickle back. The Beatles album Revolver was recorded fifty years ago on mono and sounds fantastic through studio speakers today.

Having both music and audio in 360°, 3D, VR and AR is the goal and how we get

there is the current hot topic. The aim is to be able to hear everything as it is and in the right place: a total surround-sound experience. Before you start imagining the number of speakers which will be needed to make up a sphere around your head, stop and count the number of audio receivers you already have. Two. Your ears. We also have a super-charged computer called a brain. This combination, in simple terms, allows for multiple aural inputs to be identified, registered and recognised. It is the latter we need to focus upon when considering audio reproduction devices, for it is the filtering process within our brain that undertakes countless processes to allow us to sense and feel the audio. Stop and listen to your environment. What you are hearing is a personal filtered version of everything that is around. The key point is everything that is of aural benefit to you comes courtesy of your brain.

The architecture of sound

We experience sound in six simple modes, front and back, above and below, left and right and it is these modes that we should focus on for the production and delivery of 360° surround sound. What we need to do is agree on the platform, for now it could be called ‘kinetic binaural audio’ and it would offer moving, 360° sound reproduced as both ears – and your brain – hear it. We need to establish across the industry an easy to understand format built on the premise that great sound is a prerequisite for all moving image.

As we move into the future, we should be both improving technology, while also acknowledging where we have come from. The success, as with all projects, comes from a clear brief and early engagement across the creative team. Keep it simple and do not over-complicate. Simply ask; what’s best for our two eyes and two ears?

As for the commercial landscape, might we encounter a recycling of enhanced back catalogues, as we have seen with vinyl moving to CD, and film to video and then to DVD? I look forward to sitting and listening in awe to Revolver and actually hearing Ringo behind me, John in front, Paul to the left and George to my right. S

With ultra HD offering us increasingly sharper pictures on our screens, and 360° visuals enabling us to be virtually surrounded by images, our peepers have never before been offered such ocular excellence. But what about audio technology? Has it kept up to offer us the equivalent aural clarity and realism? Gary Hilton, musician, composer and co-founder of music and sound design studio GAS Music, is listening out for the sound of the future – kinetic binaural audio

“The key point is everything that is of aural benefit to you comes courtesy of your brain.”

marshmallow SKIES

Tim Cumming trips the light fantastic with Barney Steel, co-founder of amazing immersive experience creators, Marshmallow Laser Feast. These London-based VR and projection-mapping specialists have the keys to a magic kingdom of robots and lasers, using real-time systems that create so many possibilities, even the most controlling client has to go with the literal flow

Gut instinct and high tech are the twin peaks on which Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) builds its dreams. The Hackney Wick-based studio-laboratory has created stunning projectionmapping work for car marques such as McLaren and VW and mega-band U2, plus cutting-edge VR experiences that range from a synaesthesia project with Heston Blumenthal to the In The Eyes Of The Animal installation at Grizedale Forest Sculpture Park, commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and Forestry Commission England’s Forest Art Works. There must be something about VR and trees – MLF co-founder Barney Steel is about to start work on another ambitious forestry project, amid the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada. For him, nature and VR are an inspirational blend – tech is the third eye opening the mind to visions brought to life using scanning technologies so advanced that the user tech around it is still catching up.

Accidents with a McLaren P1 Steel came into the industry as an animator, first as a freelancer, then with his own Found Studio. Here he hooked up with fellow MLF founders Robin McNicholas and tech wizard Mehmet Akten (now departed to do a PhD) on a real-time projection mapping campaign for Sony PlayStation in 2011, employing live puppetry, 3D-tracking and pyrotechnics. “Robin and I were lead creatives. We’ve always had a relationship with really

“We’ve always had a relationship with really technical programmers. They have the keys to the kingdom –unlimited control of robot arms, lasers, lighting systems. All driven by code.”

technical programmers,” Steel says. “They have the keys to the kingdom – unlimited control of robot arms, lasers, lighting systems. All driven by code.”

The MLF team specialises in real-time systems that they can enter and adapt at will, employing chance and gut instinct as much as technical know-how. As a result, accidents do happen –happy ones at that. “You have all these millions of possible combinations, and you suddenly hit on aesthetics or unexpected places you could never have imagined before you built the system,” says Steel. “That process of being in the moment, and ideas coming out of that, is the backbone of the company – fostering an environment where happy accidents can flourish.”

Surely accidents, happy or otherwise, are tricky to run past a major car brand with a major budget to manage? Steel laughs. “Getting your vision through to the final product is a real challenge,” he agrees. “The best commercials we’ve done are when the ad agency has a great relationship with the client, and they say, trust these guys and give them freedom and you’ll be happy in the end.” As an example, Steel points to MLF’s Motion Light Painting piece for the McLaren P1 supercar.

“The best commercials we’ve done are when the ad agency has a great relationship with the client, and they say, trust these guys and give them freedom and you’ll be happy in the end.”

McLaren wanted a projection mapping piece based around the concept of air flow, technology and beauty. What they got was a technical tour-de-force in light-painting that revealed the car in representations of the wind-tunnel air flows that inspired its design. The boss at McLaren saw it, said they had a lot of nerve coming up to see him with something off-brief… then said he loved it. “And after that they didn’t have any influence on the project until we delivered,” beams Steel.

The subtle arts of projection mapping –projecting light onto an environment (it might be a room, an arena, a dome) and then transforming it, is a big part of MLF’s portfolio, often including VR elements, such as using markers to track individual viewers as they move about the space to create first-person illusions of perspective that are seemingly world-transforming. “Walls can become portals to other dimensions,” says Steel, “and you transform the space into whatever you

want.” For U2’s video for single Invisible, that meant multiple LED screens filling the field of view to create real-time illusions of depth. For their laser-based Forest installation at the Barbican’s Digital Revolution exhibition, the team ignored the space completely and made it so dark that the only sense of space came from towering beams of light.

But technology, and MLF, are moving on.

“We’re still exploring live music projects and

immersive experiences with lasers and light sculptures,” says Steel, “but 90 per cent of our own work now is in VR.” Their breakthrough was with Lotus, using VR technology to reveal the invisible forces acting on the marque’s F1 car.

Virtual reality better than LSD

As a tech-driven derangement of the senses, VR is hard to beat, says Steel. “VR has more in common with everyday, lived experience than it does with film or theatre or computer games. Combine its simulations with tracking systems that give you the freedom to move around, and it convinces your whole body that you’re in another place, and it puts you in that other place.”

So when MLF posed the next logical question: ‘What can you do in VR that you could never do

Marshmallow

Laser Feast

What’s the most recent piece of tech you’ve bought and why? Robin McNicholas, creative director: A bunch of HTC Vives. They’re good fun to work with. We’ve been busy scanning trees across the globe, most recently a giant sequoia, for our Treehugger VR project which lets people interact with, walk round and hug a sculpture, using a Vive. Which piece of tech would transform your life? An anti-gravity chamber.

What’s your favourite app? We love the vvvv live programming environment OpenVR library.

Apart from the internet, what’s been the most significant tech innovation to hit the industry during the course of your career? Shout out to the Shockwave Player.

How would you define ‘innovation’? When active minds make things happen. It’s generally a balance between creativity and productivity.

as a human?’ they answered with In The Eyes Of The Animal, a project in which you see the world anew not just through someone else’s eyes but something else’s eyes – as a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and an owl.

“The VR experience that people had actually took place in the same woods that we had scanned to create the project,” says Steel. “Afterwards, people would gather together and talk about it, all in the same location. It sparks off wonder, and that’s the key. It breaks the human sensory perspective, and connects you to nature.” One little old lady walking her dog through Grizedale Forest tried the headset and proclaimed loudly it was “the best thing I’ve done since LSD!” While she was away with the dragonflies, her loyal little dog sat at her feet, barking.

1 Barbican, Digital Revolution: Forest

2 McLaren, Motion Light Painting

3/4 Forest Art Works, In The Eyes Of The Animal

“We’re using 3D scanning technology at the Natural History Museum to build those environments, so when you expect the resolution to drop out, we’ve gone in to micro detail, and the journey just keeps going.”

The next step, as resolutions sharpen and the latest advances in game engines push closer to full photo realism and total immersion, is the world of the molecular. Steel envisions a trip that takes you through the surface of things to their inner workings. “We’re using 3D scanning technology at the Natural History Museum to build those environments, so when you expect the resolution to drop out, we’ve gone in to micro detail, and the journey just keeps going. So it is literally the world beyond your senses – what does it look like if I put my head through this table and see into the grain of it?”

Equally audacious is the project with Heston Blumenthal, envisioning a synaesthetic relationship between sight, sound and taste in which a long straw is preloaded with different flavours and attendant visualisations, in which the users themselves appear. “We had the idea of sticking the straw in a cocktail glass, but this glass is the room you’re in, and you’re under water and see this giant straw enter the water, and as you’re sucking on the straw the water level goes down, and you look in the glass and there is a mini-you at the bottom of it. And at the end you can suck yourself up your own straw.”

Viewers can expect to drink themselves at a Heston pop-up soon, but in the meantime, the brave new world of mixed reality is only going to get more persuasively integrated with actual reality – the one we stub our toes on. “Ultimately, we’re headed to a place where VR will be 100 per cent convincing and you won’t be able to tell the difference between virtual and real,” says Steel. “Which offers amazing opportunities for human experience, but at the same time it could be pretty dark and addictive.” He chuckles. “Isn’t that always the way with technology?”

THE INTERNET OF THINGS, PINGS AND BINGS

Tonight, go outside and look up at the stars. Billions of them, right? Actually, you’ll probably only see about 5-10,000 from any one view point. But, those stars you see represent a fraction of the number of sensors and ‘things’ that you’ll be connected to an any one point in the coming years. Things that represent, augment or inform your life. IT research company Gartner estimates there are around 6.4 billion connected ‘things’ around us now and predicts rapid growth towards 21 billion by 2020. Other studies point closer to 50 billion, yet the formation of the internet of things (IOT) has taken only a decade. We need to be taking IOT seriously.

So what are these ‘things’? Well, you are one. Your dog is one. Your dog’s food bowl can be one. In fact, nearly anything at all can be one. They are sensors and chips, products and people connected into the web, communicating freely.

I really hope that IOT does not mean more connected things purely because it’s possible. More bloody notifications, more pings and bings. I’m bored of the simple lack of thought when it comes to digital.

The age of magic is upon us

What the rapid growth of the IOT means is the creation of new businesses and services by brands or entrepreneurs who see chances to extend existing products or create completely new services.

For the consumer it will, initially, mean more digital clutter. We will see brands getting to market quickly with a connected product and an app. But then we could subsequently see the clever organisations harnessing AI and understanding the opportunity to deliver ambient service.

What does that look like? Well, just like nature’s ecosystem where cells come together to create new things; the opportunity with IOT is just that, new partnerships and magical end-to-end experiences that will emerge to make our lives easier. Ambient interfaces will emerge, apps will fade and things will just happen for us because of the constant streams of data coming from us and the things we own. Things will start to feel like magic, just as they should when technology is at its best. Groceries will be delivered to our front door. What’s new there I hear you ask? But I missed out the phrase, “with the

click of a button”. In the IOT world, things are just done for you through data and applied intelligence. Your shopping order will be placed because your fridge said it was empty. Cool, right? Maybe; maybe not.

When you integrate data from your biosensor, activity stats from your smart watch, Met Office and GP’s reports, the order placed and then delivered will be informed and accurate. It’ll have been based on the fact it knew you were low on calcium, that the weather forecast is hot, that your child has a cold and that you’re doing a daily run. Therefore, the shopping on your doorstep matches your family’s needs. No button pressed, zero interaction.

Convenience through intelligence

However, though the IOT world is about convenience, it’s only convenient if you are clever. Connecting stuff is fine, yet pointless if you don’t have the ‘brain’ in the middle of it all. So, to build on the groceries example, those groceries, seamlessly delivered to your doorstep, are currently decomposing as we speak because some numpty forgot to check that the reason your fridge was empty was that you’re away on the beach for your two-week vacation. In the new world, IOT is about thinking end-to-end.

From sell to service

IOT is taking a step further away from sell (product) and even further towards service, and the really clever systems will combine the two. We will see forward-thinking organisations realise that consumer is not just king, but god, the god which, if wonderfully serviced and cared for, will most certainly return loyalty and love. We will see businesses offer new services on existing products and within existing industries, and existing products and companies will drive new revenue streams through the data they’ll collect and potentially re-sell. Which raises issues of security, privacy and data ownership. There is much to be considered in this new world of connectivity and opportunity.

Talking of privacy... “Ping!” My smart watch has just alerted me to activity from my home security camera. Who the **** is that with my wife?! Sorry, got to go.

As the saying goes, the future is written in the stars. S

As the old joke goes, why does a dog lick its balls?

Because it can. Similarly, with tech innovation, just because something’s possible, doesn’t mean you should do it. Ben Jones, chief technology officer at AKQA, argues that with ballooning big data and digital connectivity allowing brands to make infinite connections between us and our ‘things’, are we heading for digital detritus overload? And just how smart will a smart world be, with human brains connected to it?

“Connecting stuff is fine, yet pointless if you don’t have the ‘brain’ in the middle of it all.”

VIRTUAL REALITY BYTES

With the launch of Samsung Gear, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, 2016 has been widely trumpeted as the year that the ‘virtual’ finally becomes ‘reality’ and VR goes mainstream. Whether that tipping point has actually been reached is still up for debate, but there’s no doubt that VR is rapidly transforming the world of advertising, marketing and branded content. Over the following pages, we shine a spotlight on three sectors – journalism, gaming and automotive – via expert views from industry insiders on the key trends and predictions for the future. We also speak to the agencies and clients behind some of the most groundbreaking applications of the medium, from The Guardian’s chillingly claustrophobic experience of solitary confinement to the high-octane thrills of Castrol’s virtual drift race.

Actuality is so last week, all hail the next-gen virtual world, in which car salesmen persuade with simulated test drives, newsmakers convey the truth via empathy-inducing experiences and games makers stimulate adrenaline with ever more immersive play. Here we look at three areas in which the new tech is, virtually, transforming communications

DRIVING CHANGE

So long, tiresome test drives in weekend traffic and schleps to out-of-town car showrooms. VR, which has long been used in auto design, is revolutionising motor sales by offering improved in-car simulations.

Sol Rogers, CEO and founder of VR specialists REWIND takes us on a spin...

Technology and convenience are changing the way we buy cars. Take, for example, the Audi City London showroom in Green Park: 50 per cent of customers in the first half of 2013 ordered vehicles at the store without a physical test drive, having already ‘experienced’ their future car in an entirely virtual environment. Studies suggests that about five per cent of all cars will be sold online by 2020. The most recent changes in the automotive industry have been driven by virtual reality. This powerful new medium is being used throughout the automotive business, from the design process

right the way through to marketing the final product. VR allows manufacturers to showcase the latest model in someone’s living room, take potential buyers on a test drive without them leaving their home and transport people so they are ‘present’ for new model announcements at motor shows. Presence – the real magic of VR – is commonly equated with the concept of ‘immersion’, an incredibly powerful sensation that is unique to VR.

Car showrooms of the mind

VR enables dealers to showcase models wherever the customer wants at their convenience, and there are no constraints. Entire model line-ups can be shown – past, current and future – with an infinite number of optional configurations. The possibilities really are endless and it’s just a matter of time before creating and ordering our virtual dream car while we’re realxing at home or out having lunch and then having it delivered to our driveway is the norm.

REWIND created the world’s first VR car configurator and simulator for the Oculus Rift DK2 headset for the launch of the Lexus NX in 2014. Using the latest CGI technology, the user was immersed in a virtual world where they could fully configure a Lexus NX to their own specification and then take it on a test drive. This pioneering campaign paved the way for many other car brands to follow suit and experiment marketing their cars with VR.

Since then, Audi has been rolling out a new VR system with Oculus Rift in which wearable tech allows shoppers to customise the ideal configuration of the Audi they want and view the car inside and out from a first-person perspective. Meanwhile, Lotus customers wanting to try the 2015 RC F were able to take virtual test drives via Oculus Rift, and Fiat used the headsets to create a VR version of its new 500X car, controlled by magician Dynamo, for roadshow visitors. Cadillac has even announced it’s looking to abandon traditional showrooms in favour of VR in the near future.

At REWIND we’ve worked with a number of car brands including Nissan, Lexus, BMW and Rolls-Royce on VR projects, and with so many brands already using VR, it’s plain to see that there is a huge appetite for the medium within the automotive industry. With backing from the

likes of Google, Sony and Facebook, it won’t be long before there are a great many households that have at least one VR device. At that point, VR will transform from being an interesting gimmick or experiment to a serious means of communication and user experience.

as a driver of social change

While VR is being embraced by automotive marketers, it’s also being used further back in the pipeline – Ford’s designers and engineers, for example, have been enhancing the creative process by using VR right from the beginning stages of new model vehicle development to help test design ideas for everything from the upholstery to the chassis.

The automotive industry has always embraced new technology, so it’s no surprise that for some brands, such as Jaguar, Land Rover and Ford, virtual reality has been part of the design process for many, many years. Recently it has got a lot easier and much, much better. With major advancements in graphics, screen resolution, fields of view, head and spatial tracking and computer processing powers, VR headsets are the perfect tool to create prototypes during the design process. Consumer insight can continually feed into the design process, allowing immediate

“VR allows manufacturers to showcase the latest model in a buyer’s living room, take them on a test drive without leaving their home.”

refinement of ideas. Previously, manufacturers had to ship models around the world for various tests, but now this can be done virtually. Development can be made faster and less risky –real world testing won’t disappear completely, but would be saved for prototypes that have already passed virtual testing.

Beyond the uses that have already been mentioned, VR’s unique ability to drive empathy

3/4

Hairy handbrake turns in a virtual world

As well as revolutionising showrooms and auto design, VR has raised stunt driving to new white-knuckled heights. A boundary-pushing example is Castrol EDGE’s Virtual Drift, which sees pro racing driver Matt Powers go full throttle around a real-world race track – while wearing a VR headset. Will Bingham, CD at The Brooklyn Brothers, the agency behind the project, explains how they did it

Why did you decide to use VR for this particular project?

Virtual Drift was the second instalment in the Castrol EDGE Titanium Strong trials series. Each trial calls on professional drivers to take on unique driving challenges, which are designed to push the boundaries of performance and test their abilities to the limit. Using VR allowed us to put a driver in a challenging environment that they would never have been able to experience in the real world.

Had you worked with VR specialists Logan & Sons before and why did you think they were the right choice for the project?

Logan & Sons’ experience of shooting performance vehicles for the Gymkhana [rally car driving] series assured us that we would be in safe hands from a filmic perspective. But it was their in-house post-production capability, combined with their VR expertise, that gave them

the edge over other production companies out there.

Tell us a bit about the creative process and the tech involved in creating the experience.

The trial challenged a professional driver to race a real car in a virtual reality helmet. Developing world-first tech, we turned an actual vehicle into a giant game controller, allowing our driver to take on a menacing virtual racetrack and demonstrate performance driving, powered by Castrol EDGE oil. Blind to the real world, our driver had to rely on his instincts and the performance of his vehicle to reach a beacon and escape the dangerous world. By extracting data from the Ford Mustang, we were able to track everything from the steering angle and wheel spin, to the dynamic damping and throttle position, allowing us to simulate the vehicle with near-perfect accuracy in the virtual world. This data was synced with our driver’s Oculus Rift helmet, turning a

and understanding has also been used by brands to communicate important social messages. For example,Toyota cleverly used VR as part of its TeenDrive365 campaign to educate teenagers and parents about distracted driving. The distracted driving simulator includes sensors that translate what the user is doing with the pedals or steering wheel into the simulation, and includes built-in distractions like a mobile ringing and friends chatting in the back seat.

As the automotive industry becomes more familiar with VR, I think we’ll see many more innovative uses of the medium. Watch this space!

previously sit-down, stationary experience into a mobile experience in a moving vehicle.

The track was designed using multiple game engines. We wanted the racecourse to feel alive, forcing our driver to constantly react to his environment. Collapsing tunnels, falling boulders, sheer cliff drops and a nemesis vehicle, all stood in the way of our driver reaching a beacon and escaping.

What was the most challenging aspect of the project?

It would have been easy to fake it and create a film that represented our idea. Our challenge was doing it for real. Immersing a driver in the virtual world required months of testing and immersion training. When planning the project, we needed to build this period of research and development into the production process. This was difficult to estimate, especially when you’re doing something no one has ever done before. A fixed launch date meant there wasn’t much room for error and technical

issues, particularly reducing latency, made for an anxious few weeks prior to shooting.

And the most rewarding?

Just seeing it working was seriously exciting. The technology was featured on the BBC and the Discovery Channel, proving the idea had genuine appeal to a mass audience. It felt like we had helped advance the conversation about VR and the possibilities of performance driving.

How have you built on the success of Virtual Drift?

In addition to the hero film, we worked with Immersive Media to create 360° versions for YouTube and Google Cardboard. The sequel, Virtual Racers, went a step further, allowing two drivers to compete head-to-head in a virtual world. Consequently, tech has become an important component in all our Titanium Trials, as we keep thinking up innovative ways to push the boundaries of performance driving.

CELL PHONE HELL

Carl

Addy, CD at The Mill and Francesca Panetta, special projects editor at The Guardian, recall the 6x9 project, which,

via a mobile app and 360° video, recreated the horror of solitary confinement in a 6ft x 9ft US prison cell

Carl Addy, creative director, The Mill

How did you approach and realise the brief for 6x9?

6x9 was a well-researched piece of journalistic filmmaking, a factual documentary that The Mill translated and directed in VR as an immersive experience. Our brief was to build empathy through involvement in the story. To achieve this, it was paramount that we honoured the rules of authenticity – namely that the room you sit in is as real as possible and the experiences are factual. Something that threw us a curve ball was the realisation that, in order for this to be interactive, we needed to build it in a game engine. This is a prime example of one of the counterintuitive aspects that sometimes occur with VR.

When you look at the game engine graphics on a traditional screen it can look fake, but when you are in the scene the more primal areas of your brain believe in the spatial nature of the room. This idea of respecting the reality of the room became a guiding principle for the direction of the experience.

When faced with the need for typography or a user interface we chose to never break the first-person perspective. For instance, when we needed to display stats, we chose to project them against the walls of the cell. When we viewed footage in the night time/flashback scenes, this again was handled as a projection, where we dimmed the light of the room – without the need for cursors, prompts or any other UI design. Much of the information in the experience is narrated in the voices of real ex-prisoners,

which again was a way to build empathy. ‘Hot spots’ were built into the environment to accommodate interactivity and associate the narration to themes. For example, by looking at the toilet and sink you would activate a dialogue about how prisoners build a routine by bathing and preparing for the day.

By assembling research material into both a chronological sense of a ‘day in the life of’ as well as non-linear interactivity, we wanted to educate the viewer by putting them in the space, and develop empathy by engagement as a result. Rather than simply being fed information, you can experience it as if you were actually there.

What were the challenges associated with the project?

VR was still relatively new when The Mill took this project on and one of the first lessons when directing in VR is to abandon some preconceived approaches to film direction. Elements like fixing the viewer’s attention to scenes is not possible when the viewer can look wherever they want. You can’t cut to a close-up that has symbolic or narrative meaning, instead you need to draw the viewer’s attention through directional audio or visual movement. It may seem like a big leap, but actually it is closer to real life than it is to film direction. You notice things out of your sight though hearing them first, or because they catch your attention through your peripheral vision.

On the design front, our challenge was to create a cell and an experience that was factual and not dramatised. This meant that every detail from the objects found in the cell to the hallucinations had to be backed up factually.

There were conceptual barriers too: we needed to create empathy within the restrictions of an incredibly contentious topic. How could we expect people to get beyond their preconceived opinions of criminals to see them as average people, in order to recognise the difference between punishment, rehabilitation and what the UN refers to as a form of torture? Yes, these people are criminals but solitary confinement creates sensory deprivation that has been proven to cause negative psychological effects. To achieve this, we had to keep everything in the first person

– you are in the cell with peers and the prisoners speak to you as an equal. Our biggest ally was authenticity, which would not have been possible without the rigorous journalistic research provided by The Guardian

Having worked on this project, what are the implications for VR for the news and journalism sector as a whole?

360° video gives you access to the whole scene, transporting you closer to the story. Humans are such complex story viewers. We demand authenticity and a closer proximity to

Francesca Panetta, special projects editor, The Guardian

When did you first come up with the idea for 6x9?

At The Guardian, we’re always looking at new ways to innovate and

share our journalism with our readers. Virtual reality was a form we had been thinking about for a while and wanted to experiment with, because it obviously had huge potential. Simultaneously, solitary confinement is a topic that The Guardian has covered a lot in the past, so the two things came together.

Why did it feel right to tell this particular story via the medium of virtual reality?

VR is a medium that is all about space. Solitary confinement is also all about space – albeit a small and very undesirable one. It felt obvious that this would be a good story for the form.

“VR is a medium which is all about space. Solitary confinement is too –albeit a small and very undesirable space. It felt obvious that this would be a good story for the form.”

What was the brief you gave to The Mill and what was your reaction to the finished work?

We asked The Mill to provide the visuals and technical aspects of the project. The process was iterative and we found them extremely sympathetic to our needs. They were also very understanding of the integrity that needed to be in the piece – this was a piece of journalism not a game and throughout the process we discussed what that meant.

Virtual reality journalism is a channel that’s being increasingly explored by media outlets. How important will it be for the future of journalism and what are the main issues and challenges that need to be overcome?

Virtual reality is exciting for stories where it makes sense for you to be there, on location. Then it has a huge role. But not for all journalism. It’s a hugely exciting medium and over the next few years we’ll see experimentation in non-fiction, documentary and news and its role will become more clear.

the story, distrusting much of the packaged information we receive.

The future possibilities of embedded 360° cameras and virtual transportation to the scene will remove much of the sense of detachment we naturally have when we are not physically there. In the same way that news as it happens is more compelling than old news, this ability to be in the scene could bring stories closer to home. Gameengine VR allows us to learn within a story, make choices and voice an opinion. It is no longer a stretch of the imagination to see how it is possible to be active socially within an immersive story.

The challenges are many: distribution, the technical complexities and specific skills. These will get easier as time goes on but setting up teams and a workflow system for VR is new to us all!

Are you planning any more virtual reality projects? 6x9 was an experiment – a proof of concept. It worked in terms of journalism and was an effective way to tell a story that we care about. The Guardian has a history of being at the forefront of digital innovation and we regularly experiment with the different forms our journalism can take – which now includes virtual reality. We’re looking forward to investigating the potential for using this technology more in the future.

THE VR GAME CHANGERS

Though the names of the games can seem stuck in some retro naff aesthetic (Call Of The Starseed, really?) the VR tech now available for gaming is moving on apace. But there’s still work to be done, says Simon Fenton, head of games at visual effects academy Escape Studios, to create a reality that’s less virtual

Virtual reality shot into the public eye this year, with a lot of buzz coming from the latest Siggraph Conference [on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques], GDC and Gamescom, as well as the widely anticipated release of new technology, such as Playstation VR.

It’s clear that the VR industry has managed to create extremely impressive and entertaining virtual experiences, but the question is this: have they created a truly virtual reality?

The initial development of VR can be traced back as far as the 1930s, the decade when sci-fi writer Stanley G. Weinbaum created one of the first explorations of the concept via his short story, Pygmalion’s Spectacles.

The first VR/AR headset, which was rather dramatically named The Sword Of Damocles, was created by American computer scientist Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull at Harvard, back in 1968, This primitive, heavy device was attached to the ceiling of the developers’ lab and the user had to be strapped into it. As you can imagine, this was not exactly conducive to an immersive experience.

Curing first-person VR vomit

It’s clear that VR has come a long way since. VR headsets and technology are increasingly available to the wider public, consumer interest is booming and content creation for these new devices has grown dramatically since the start of this year alone.

Having said this, it’s vital to recognise that there’s still a lot of work to do. Headsets can still be bulky, the price tag can be a substantial obstacle for many and the software is still in its infancy, far from creating something that can be described as a truly spectacular virtual ‘reality’ rather than just a virtual experience.

The type of headset the industry focuses on will affect the direction VR takes in the future. The likes of Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard make VR accessible to the masses by creating an experience available through your smartphone. These low-cost, instant VR wonders do have their drawbacks, however, as the phones’ capacity and screen quality limit the quality of the experience.

Alternatively, there is the option of using headsets such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and the soon-to-be-released PlayStation VR, which are linked to their own systems. This obviously allows greater scope in terms of game quality, storyline, interactions and overall experience, but they come with a hefty price tag – for both the creator and the consumer.

Despite cost concerns, many studios have already taken advantage of this opportunity, with the release of The Gallery: Call Of The Starseed and the soon-to-be-released Batman: Arkham VR, which have been highly praised

for their next-gen entertainment experiences, even though they have only reached the edge of effectively achieving virtual realities.

One of the most advanced games currently available is Oculus Rift’s Mythos Of The World Axis. VR is notorious for causing motion sickness in users (some say this is due to the experience being truly immersive, but that’s a different

“…bio-sensing gloves allow the user to simulate steering a wheel, giving a more realistic feel than a wand. Natural movement, and not just of the hands, is vital in achieving a truly realistic virtual reality.”

debate), but Mythos has successfully conquered this obstacle. It’s the first VR game I’ve seen that wasn’t from a first-person perspective, and yet it still creates an amazing gaming experience. In simply altering the viewer’s POV it has solved the problem of motion sickness, but hasn’t lost the core principles of the VR user experience. It should give any future VR software creators something to really think about.

Wands, brushes and more VR magic Bio-sensing and similar technologies are likely to take the lead in the next phase of VR, getting closer to the achievement of truly immersive gaming experiences. We’ve already seen the creation of the HTC Vive Wands and the eagerly anticipated Google Tilt Brush as attempts to improve gaming interaction, but bio-sensing –small sensors attached to a data glove, suit or the body, which record movements made by a person in a 3D space – is undoubtably the next level for VR gaming. Bio-sensing streamlines VR interactions. Wands are not very practical for, say, racing games, whereas bio-sensing gloves

would allow the user to simulate steering a wheel, giving a more realistic feel than a wand. Natural movement, and not just movement of the hands, is vital in achieving a truly realistic virtual reality.

When one reality is not enough…

It’s obvious that VR is nowhere near reaching its peak potential. It has taken almost a century to go from the first conceptual idea of virtual reality to the development of a technology that is even getting close to a level where it could realistically become a worldwide trend. But now at least we’ve reached the point where the technology, the software and the consumer demand have aligned. This alignment is acting as a catalyst for rapid growth in the industry and I believe this growth will bring us ever closer to the realisation of what it is to be immersed in a truly virtual reality.

“It has taken almost a century to get from the the first conceptual idea of virtual reality to a technology that is even getting close to a level where it could realistically become a worldwide trend.”

1 Mythos Of The World Axis

Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus for Galaxy Note

NORDIC SPECIAL

Lands of the long winters and little egos

It’s snowing. Again. So what to do when big weather keeps you indoors for six months of the year? Get creative is the answer. Olivia Atkins surveys the ad scene in the Nordic region, exploring countries’ subtle differences but also such commonalities as a fondness for modesty and egalitarianism, and a Scandi summer shutdown that refreshes and refocuses creatives’ minds

Unsurprisingly, for a region that is all about long, harsh winters, summer is a big deal for the Nordic locals – who lock up shop for a month to escape urban life and enjoy the tranquillity of their summer houses. While the cities are packed with tourists, its citizens are unwinding in the sunshine.

“Really we just have a month where we actually see the sun, so we need to make the most of it,” says Folke Film Sweden’s founder Johan Tappert. He admits he often uses the time to go skinnydipping or drink away his winter sorrow.

“Happiness kills creativity, so at this time of year, we are extremely unimaginative,” he adds.

“Although this time off is needed because it’s the only way we cope with being creative and miserable during the rest of the year.” It seems that the extreme weather forces locals to actively cultivate a highly creative, cultured lifestyle because they spend so much time inside. “I firmly believe that because we spend a good six months of the year trapped indoors, hiding from the cold, that it makes the quality of your inner life incredibly important,” says Brett Richards, the Australian-born head of new business at Swedish production company Brokendoll.

Civilised seasonal sabbaticals

The future of these traditional, guilt-free holidays may be under threat if local brands like IKEA and H&M start adhering to international markets and remain open over the summer months. But for the time being, a healthy work/life balance remains. “This regular summer sabbatical lets

your mind rest and encourages focus and creativity when you return to work,” says Richards. Apart from this region-wide sabbatical, there are other similarities that link countries in the region. The Nordic Model, for example, which refers to the region’s similar economic and social policies, and the Janteloven (Law of Jante), which explains its culture of modesty and egalitarianism. Coined by Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose, the non-binding Janteloven discourages the championing of one’s own successes over that of the group. Individual arrogance is frowned upon, causing many to be reserved about their work. It also explains the region’s flat management structure; where the working culture is open and encourages collaboration among creative peers.

Sweden – known as the Big Brother of Scandinavia (as in its elder, protective sibling) – is reputedly the most creatively-advanced nation of the region. As the most populated Nordic country, its creative infrastructure is understandably more developed than that of its neighbours, containing more production companies, agencies, film and art schools. Sweden’s socialist past perhaps explains why the Law of Jante is still in effect today and why collaboration is key within the industry. “There are fewer egos to contend with,” says Nicola Jones, production manager at Stockholm-based production company Camp David. “So directors, DPs and creatives aren’t afraid to ask for other people’s opinions; it’s not a sign of weakness.” However, Brokendoll’s

Richards finds Sweden’s modesty culture difficult to read. “Feedback is often not very direct,” he says. “It’s just the way things are done. You have to try to tune in to what people really mean.”

Equality for Swedish sisters

Luckily, the quality of Swedish advertising has remained consistently high – something Richards attributes to the late introduction of a terrestrial commercial channel in Sweden in 1992. “Swedes really did not have any direct exposure to the kind of low-cost, high-volume commercial production that we see elsewhere in the world,” he says. Which means that creating work here will always be competitive as the standard has never dipped in quality. Yet director Oskar Bård, from Hobby Film’s Stockholm office, thinks that the best Swedish directors often leave the country, often seeking fresh opportunities and inspiration abroad. “Sweden’s [big] fishes need to leave the small pond to grow and keep on moving,” he says.

The lack of heirarchy and arrogance in Sweden’s work culture also helps junior creatives enter the industry. Its high-quality film schools equip graduates early on with the right skills, so senior industry members accept them more readily, “keeping the business more dynamic and not just another ‘old boy’s club’,” adds Jones. In terms of gender equality in the industry, of all the Nordic countries, Sweden has the most impressive childcare-friendly ethos. Swedish parents are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave, 90 of which can be taken by the father.

“I firmly believe that because we spend a good six months of the year trapped indoors, hiding from the cold, that it makes the quality of your inner life incredibly important.”

ANDERS MALMBERG – CECILE SMETANA

JEPPE KOLSTRUP – LASSE DEARMAN – MATTIAS RUDH (STILL)

NIKLAS JOHANSSON (STILL) – OLIVIA FRØLICH (STILL

POSTERNAKS – RASMUS WENG KARLSEN –

Bad Land will manage and produce the most creative and up and coming directors & still photographers in Scandinavia. Bad Land is based in Stockholm and Copenhagen.

badland.tv for inspiration.

Though this is progressive, there’s still a distinct lack of women in senior roles in advertising.

“I think gender equality could be pushed even more,” says B-Reel’s COO Pelle Nilsson. “It’s something that everyone needs to actively work towards, especially in the production industry where there’s a [real] lack of female directors.”

Erik Holmedal, EP at content/VFX studio, Swiss, in Stockholm agrees, “I would not say we are particularly good at gender equality. Men are in the majority.”

However, there are drives to improve the situation, such as One of Three, which was launched by the Swedish film and TV producers organisation, KOMM, last year. Encouraging agencies to ask at least one female director to pitch on a script out of every three directors approached, this initiative offers no financial incentives, but acts as more of a reminder to Swedish agencies.

Stability and surrealism in Norway

Like Sweden, Norway also boasts an equally stable economy thanks to the nation’s recent oil discovery. “How this affects creative outlook is that there is very little economic fear,” says senior Flame compositor Henry Cummings from Oslo’s Storm Studios. “At worst, this can create some complacency in thought, but at best, it creates a very stable environment where creatives can

1/2/3/4

express themselves [freely].” And this is reflected in the type of work that’s coming out of Norway at the moment. Folke Film’s Tappert has seen an increase in quirky and surreal ads, admitting he’d “love to have more of this [type of creativity] in Swedish commercials.” Although the Norwegian commercial scene is small, its highly-skilled and efficient workers are extremely effective.

“People here work hard and we’re used to smaller budgets,” says Loopfilm’s founding partner Jarle Tangen, who says that the national characteristic of competency emerged when times were tougher pre-oil. And despite its size, Norwegian creatives are often encouraged to work overseas, says Storm’s managing director/producer Thomas Reppen. There’s an assumption that they’ll return home eventually with lots of experience and help to bolster the national creative market.

The biggest challenge arising from being based in Norway is not being able to secure the attention of international clients. “We wouldn’t like to be strangers to the really big campaigns with the economic muscle that would enable us to creatively extend ourselves more,” says Beate Tange, producer/partner at Oslo’s Tangrystan Productions. But on the ground, production companies enjoy a lot more autonomy and there is a greater sense of trust between them and the agencies. Production companies are accustomed to working alone – such was the case with

Tangrystan’s award-winning PSA, Dear Daddy for Care Norway, where the creatives didn’t see anything until the first online version. “Being involved and, preferably, in the early [stages], is very important to us,” says Tange. “We have directors who can deliver at this stage, having backgrounds in scriptwriting/development or film-/TV-series backgrounds, like for example director Jakob Ström (of Dear Daddy) who started out as a creative.”

An indie attitude in Denmark

In Denmark, the creative culture is completely different. While the big agency networks do exist in Copenhagen, there’s a culture of creatives splitting off from these networks to form their own local offerings. “A lot of the older network agencies are having a hard time due to old, out-of-fashion ways of working, which makes room for new smaller agencies and new ways of working,” says Mads Mardahl, art director at independent Copenhagen agency, Robert/Boisen & Like-minded. The situation may not be as evolved as its Swedish neighbour, with only a few of the networks working across international accounts and winning fewer awards, but it’s becoming increasingly more established.

Not too long ago, there was a strong in-house production company culture, but as director Tore Frandsen, who’s repped by Storyroom in Denmark, explains, “The movement has gone back towards production houses again. There aren’t that many top directors freelancing in Copenhagen anymore, mainly because they like to be protected by a production company.” The backlash against the in-house production offering followed after too many agencies were setting them up purely for the sake of making money and not with the goal of making great work.

‘Ad documentarism’ is what M2 Films’ vice president Ronni Madson cites as the latest trend to hit the Danish market. “You combine a brand with the cause or a person or a certain type of feeling in order to secure consumers.” It reflects the fact that audiences are now preferring greater authenticity in advertising and have a more advanced “social conscience” says Mads Marstrand, creative producer at production company Uitch Iscratch.

As all things Nordic continue to trend across Europe and the US – as evidenced by the craze for Scandi noir thriller imports, kicked off by Danish TV series The Killing and Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo franchise, this region’s fascinating culture is sure to continue to boost its advertising output. S

“A lot of the older network agencies are having a hard time due to old, out-of-fashion ways of working, which makes room for new smaller agencies and new ways of working.”

Care Norway, Dear Daddy

The creatively responsible thing to do

Calm, humble, serious… Forsman & Bodenfors’ Samuel Åkesson stands out in the often brash ad world. The thoughtful art director has inherited a strong sense of responsibility from his socially-conscious parents and, after a false start in London, has found the perfect creative home for it in the mutually supportive, yet collaboratively critical, award-hoovering Swedish agency

Talking to Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B) art director Samuel Åkesson, perched on a park bench, watching sprinklers dampen moss-covered tombstones, it’s clear that this is a man who takes his role within the industry very seriously. He maintains a balanced perspective, proving to be calm and humble throughout our chat –surprising, given the agency’s notoriety after 2013’s The Epic Split spot for Volvo Trucks and its status as the most awarded agency in the world, according to the Gunn Report 2014. Despite 18 years in advertising, Åkesson admits he’s still mastering the skill of differentiating a good idea from a bad one. He constantly strives to push the boundaries between good and great, realising there’s very little room for average work – it’s an all-or-nothing kind of game. He’s most successfully creative when working in a collaborative culture; F&B’s fluid creative partner structure means he’s never limited to working with just one person.

No future in hierarchy in the UK

But it took a while to discover that this was the environment where he would excel. After seven years working in London, including four at Fallon, Åkesson risked burn-out, exhausted by the city’s competitive edge. “I was tired of the hierarchical way of working in London, with creative directors and other senior workers having to sign off and approve everything,” he says. “I wasn’t ultimately creatively responsible for what I produced, which meant that I didn’t take [full] responsibility for my work… so I ended up being creatively lazy.” Thankfully, it seems he was too lazy to get up and walk away from advertising all together. After all, he’d known he wanted to work in the business since the age of 15, when someone mentioned that it could be a good way for him to continue drawing. He grew up in Uppsala, about an hour’s

drive north of Stockholm, with parents working in the caring rather than the creative industries: his mother helped behaviourally-disabled people get into employment, while his father devoted his life to distributing aid to developing countries. Perhaps their work subconsciously rubbed off on him and sensitized him to the importance of understanding human emotion.

Somebody listen to the children Åkesson certainly takes the responsibilities inherent in what he does seriously. “We’re working in advertising, we’re making things that we want millions of people to see and we want millions of people to somehow change their mind – that’s what we’re trying to do daily,” he says. “So if we’re going to do that, maybe we have to take some responsibility for how we do it and in what direction they’re changing their minds.”

He knows there’s no one-size-fits-all for socially-relevant advertising, but he wants to tell purpose-filled stories creatively. Luckily for him, F&B creatives are fully responsible for their work. While everyone can comment on other people’s ideas, ultimately it’s up to the creative on that project to decide which ideas to take on. So there’s a mutual responsibility to make ground-breaking work while still enjoying true creative autonomy.

“It does put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. You can’t shy away or give [the project] to someone else,” he says. “And it can be tricky with the social aspect of sharing your work and listening to other people give constructive criticism – that’s a skill in itself.”

But for Åkesson this approach works and it clearly invigorates him. His campaign, Slow Down GPS, for If Insurance was responsible for six of the 17 Cannes Lions F&B took home this year: a gold, a silver and four bronze awards. At its heart was a special satnav app that switched

1 If Insurance, Slow Down GPS

2 Volvo Trucks, Look Who’s Driving

to a child’s voice when drivers approached schools and daycare centres.

Åkesson is also learning when to let go, close the door on an idea and move forward. “Personally I’ve got better with that over time and that makes the process a bit easier. You feel less shit,” he says. “I still feel bad about it, but when it’s not as good as I wanted, I can live with it more because I know it just means I’ll learn and do something better next time.” He also strives to inject more of his personality into his work, realising that being opinionated in advertising can be an asset, a way of relating to and engaging with audiences. His advice? “Don’t hide your opinions. Don’t hide your personality. Because the more you let that through, the more likely you are to get people interested.”

And this fascination with self-development translates to F&B’s in-house culture too. Åkesson admits that, since the success of The Epic Split, the agency consciously stepped up its game in a bid “to maintain that positive curve [and continue] its positive creative development”. But he’s equally aware that in order to secure the bigger-name clients, it’s not just about the work that they do but also the way in which they distribute their ideas. It’s an exciting time for F&B, as they’re in the process of partnering strategically with MDC. “It feels like the right way of doing it: we’ll be maintaining our culture and spirit, yet we’ll be able to export [our ideas] to bigger parts of the world,” he says. “We hope to keep doing the same but on a bigger, global scale.”

As the chapel bell chimes and our chat draws to a close, I realise that our relocation to this setting (because the coffee shop around the corner was busy) is reflective of Åkesson’s approach to advertising. He’s an optimistic realist, ready to think creatively to find a suitable solution, even if it means doing something unexpected… like having an interview in an old cemetery. S

“…we want millions of people to somehow change their mind… maybe we have to take some responsibility for how we do it.”

Actually, it is the winning that counts

Other top creatives would demur at the suggestion that awards are anything but a nice extra, but INGO’s ECD Björn Ståhl, something of an accidental adman, is happy to admit that he’s only in it for the gongs. Is he joking? The wry Swede also suggests it’s all downhill from here for his multi-Lionwinning agency, so perhaps his words should be taken with a large pinch of snus

Dragging anyone into the office halfway through their holidays is hard enough… but drag them away from their favourite hobby (in this case, carpentry) and it’s a wonder they’ll come meet you at all. Yet when INGO’s ECD Björn Ståhl arrives, he’s a bundle of snus-chewing joy, rubbing the tobacco leaves on his gums in between insightful musings. Perhaps it’s INGO’s 2016 performance at Cannes, winning 20 Lions across two campaigns, that’s making him so happy.

Just five years ago, the agency didn’t even have one Lion under its belt. Then Ståhl promised the creative department that they’d produce one great idea per year, thinking that would take them quite far in Cannes. Implementing this strategy, INGO took home its first three Lions in 2013 for its work on Situation Stockholm, a magazine sold by homeless people. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of the vendors’ situations, with subway ads outlining their work and life experiences. Commuters quickly took note of the campaign and magazine sales rose by 101.5 per cent the following month.

Hello, is it Swede you’re looking for?

After that initial success, INGO obviously got a taste for winning, picking up Lions every year since. Ståhl jokes that 2016 is clearly the agency’s peak year, “It’s going to be downhill from here!” He knows how difficult it will be to beat 2016’s record. But INGO plans to stick to the schedule and is aiming for three Lion-winning campaigns in 2017. Ståhl believes the real skill lies in recognising the potentially award-winning briefs and identifying the right opportunities early on –“I think we’ve become quite good in doing that.”

The Swedish Number for the Swedish Tourist Association is proof that INGO’s strategical approach is working. This innovative campaign set up a single phone number that allowed anyone

anywhere in the world to call a random Swede (anyone in Sweden could sign up to be a potential ‘ambassador’ and receive calls). This idea didn’t conform to the original brief – INGO was initially supposed to present a campaign about Swedish food – but the team were confident it was a winner. “When you stumble upon [a good idea], you feel it in your stomach,” says Ståhl. Plans were ambitious from the start, getting Stefan Löfven, the Swedish prime minister, to take part and eventually attracting 36,000 telephone ambassadors

The campaign’s success proved that believing in your ideas is essential. Initially, the INGO team was terrified that it wouldn’t work, as it relied entirely on public involvement and they had very little media spend. When it launched in April, the team quickly surrendered full control after day two. “Then it was an entity out there living its own life,” says Ståhl. In the end, 15,000 calls were made per day and the campaign went global – creating a media space worth $147 million and receiving over 9.3 billion media impressions.

The accidental life of Björn

Gothenburg-born Ståhl has spent 27 years in the industry. He initially wanted to be an author, writing his first novel in his early twenties “about the agony and anxiety of becoming an adult”. He gave it to a publisher who encouraged him to keep writing, but by then he was already deep into his adventures in adland. “It was the famous banana peel [moment]. I slipped on it and then all of a sudden I was in advertising,” he chuckles. A high school teacher had told him about copywriting and in 1988 he enrolled at Berghs school of Communication in Stockholm. The intense programme revolutionised his life.

Beginning as a junior copywriter at a small and now defunct agency in Helsingborg, Ståhl was given a lot of responsibility early on, thanks to the

1/2 Swedish Tourist Association, The Swedish Number

company’s size. In 1994 he returned to Stockholm ready to enter an agency network, and joined Lowe Brindfors, where he was creative director for 11 years, including a brief stint in London. Although the agency had a bad creative track record at the time, Ståhl then grabbed the chance to move to Ogilvy Stockholm. “I’m a guy who needs something to push against,” he says. “It was probably the steepest hill to climb in the industry at that time… so I jumped at it.” After 13 years (and a merger with Grey plus a name change to INGO), he’s now a veteran in the building.

See one, feel one, touch one

Being part of two international networks has its perks. Ståhl sits on both global creative councils and is able to access their different communities and resources as well as witness the work emerging from their international offices. “When we want something, we can ask [either of them]. If dad says no we can always ask mum,” he says.

While he’s not exactly slogging up a steep hill anymore, Ståhl’s main satisfaction comes from bolstering the rankings of Ogilvy and Grey, both of whom benefit from INGO’s award show success. He admits, “I wouldn’t like to work in this business if it weren’t for the awards.” Perhaps he’ll eventually return to his novelist roots – he’s thought about writing a book based on the wild times he’s had on shoots.

He was quite ill before Cannes and didn’t actually make it to this year’s event. Then he was on vacation, getting his hands dirty with hammer and saw, and concentrating on something else entirely, so he’s had a long time away from the ad world and he admits he’s excited to get stuck in again. “I think that’s the problem with having a job that’s also your hobby,” he says. “You tend not to listen to your body because you think it’s so much fun.” S

“I’m a guy who needs something to push against. It was probably the steepest hill to climb in the industry at that time… so I jumped at it.”

White nights and wilderness

Finland may not yet lure location scouts with fiscal incentives to film there, but directors drool over its stunning, unpeopled landscapes. Its Arctic reaches also make it a go-to spot for snow and offer magical, low, winter sun for unique lighting ambience. Film location hub worldoflocations.com profiles the land of the midnight sun

Makers of European films, television and commercials have been drawn to Finland for its spectacular locations for decades. The Finland Film Commission offers plenty of practical support to foreign filmmakers – including filming permits that are usually cheap and easy to obtain– but currently no tax incentives. However, it does make up for this lack of fiscal support with natural and meteorological splendours galore.

For wintry scenes the country guarantees plenty of snow throughout the extended winter period of mid-October to early May. It also offers lush green vistas in the summer. Producers will find dozens of national parks and thousands of inland lakes, while Finland’s northern setting creates the conditions for startlingly beautiful light. In the most northerly parts of the country, the sun doesn’t set fully for around 70 days over summer, and doesn’t rise for 50 days in winter.

The country’s northern Arctic province of Lapland has been the location for many features, including the 2011 US/Germany/UK co-

production Hanna, directed by Joe Wright, which included scenes shot near the beautiful Kemijärvi area. It was also the location for the 2014 German film Snow Queen, about Queen Christina of Sweden, and even hosted a Bollywood film crew shooting the 2104 blockbuster, Shamitabh

The Girl King, a 2014 Canada/Finland/France/ Germany/Sweden co-production, was filmed in the southwestern city of Turku. This former country capital and Finland’s oldest city offers a picturesque castle and cathedral that saw it stand in for a 17th-century Sweden town. The film’s Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki is positive about Finland’s film commission. “We received support from the city of Turku and West Finland Film Commission, which was important. They welcomed us warmly and helped make it happen.”

Finland is currently aiming to introduce a filming incentive as it faces competition from Norway, which in late 2015 announced a scheme offering international producers a 25 per cent refund of their costs when filming there. S

Need to know

DO prepare for the seasonal climactic differences – Finland may be best known for winter temperatures of minus 25°C, but summer conditions can reach 25°C plus.

DO make time to visit Santa Park in Rovaniemi, in Lapland. This Santa Claus theme park doubles as a nuclear fallout shelter and is available as a filming location.

DO check out the spectacular scenic hiking route that is the Karhunkierros Trail (Bear’s Ring) which winds through Oulanka National Park in the northeast of the country.

DON’T forget that in Lapland the sun does not set at all in July, and in December the days are less than four hours long.

The Lowdown

Financial incentives

Despite its lack of tax breaks, Finland does offer to international producers a refund of up to 24 per cent on VAT. For full details see the Finland Film Commission at filmfinland.fi

Infrastructure and crews

Production support is available from the centralised Finland Film Commission as well as its five additional regional film offices. Finland offers Villila Studios as a small production facility in the west of the country. See villilastudiot.fi

Size matters

Finland spans 130,128 sq miles. The country is well connected by air and land, with an extensive road system and a well-maintained rail network. Three separate airlines offer local flights to 25 different Finnish airports.

First person to call Johanna ‘Nunnu’ Karppinen, CEO, Audiovisual Finland. johanna@audiovisualfinland.fi

“Producers will find dozens of national parks and thousands of inland lakes, while Finland’s northern setting creates the conditions for startlingly beautiful light.”

Ruthless, rigorous and rewarding

Oslo agency SMFB’s Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas Askim have something of a perverse approach to success. Not for them the short-lived thrills of awards. Instead, their pleasure comes from creating ‘amazing advertising with no rules’, forged in the pain of a culture where the open critique of ideas is the norm, leaving only the best and most creative

standing

“You have to be a bit masochistic to work here,” confides Thomas Askim, partner/ECD at SMFB. He’s referring to the Oslo-based agency’s culture of relentlessly pursuing ideas. Its flat structure means creatives are constantly critiqued by their peers, which takes some getting used to. “When your ideas are laid out and openly criticised, it may hurt, but it helps you get better creatively,” says Askim. It may be initially intimidating, but this process is guaranteed to leave only the best ideas to work with. Life at SMFB is ruthless and rigorous, and thoroughly rewarding for those driven by hard work and ambition. Ten partners work across the different departments and all employees are encouraged to try out varied roles. “This means we get a lot of people in senior positions with different specialities and a really broad understanding of the process,” says partner/CEO Kristian Kristiansen. “This allows people to talk and work together more easily, with greater confidence. Culturally, people will gladly take a step ‘to the side’ for the opportunity to learn something new, to grow and educate themselves. We do have traditional roles, but we find that, in the creative process, those roles get blurred.”

Five go on an advertising adventure

People take roles seriously because they feel personally responsible for the agency’s future.

“You work 125 per cent,” says Kristiansen. “You work 100 per cent in your own field and then you’re expected to give 25 per cent across other people’s projects; 125 per cent commitment and zero per cent prestige. So, you’ve got to be a 125 per cent kind of person…” Just not necessarily a masochist.

SMFB’s story started in 2004 when five friends from different disciplines left Leo Burnett to create Shnel & Melnychuck (the name comes partly from an acronym of their initials), and vowed to create

“amazing advertising with no rules”. After a speedy ascent, the teams were soon too small to keep up with their clients’ demands. By chance, Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B) wanted to build its presence internationally and so, in 2006, F&B bought 50 per cent of Shnel & Melnychuck’s stock, subsuming it into a new agency, SMFB, and bolstering its teams. Since then, SMFB has been slowly repurchasing its original stock and redistributing it among its most deserving partners and, this summer, with F&B facing a new structural arrangement, SMFB has managed to buy back its remaining shares to be completely independent again.

Everyone’s a winner, baby

SMFB prides itself on the diversity of its workers –reflected in Kristiansen and Askim’s contrasting advertising backgrounds. Askim took the traditional route into the industry, going to Oslo’s Westerdals arts, communication and technology college, graduating in 2005, and then working at Saatchi & Saatchi as a copywriter, before joining Leo Burnett and eventually SMFB. Kristiansen’s journey, on the other hand, was slightly unconventional. Working client-side initially, he started at Diesel Norway in 1997, moving to lead its international marketing division in 2002. After 11 years he wanted a change and approached SMFB after a friend suggested it would be a good fit. He met the then-CEO, Giorgio Presca (now CEO at Italian clothing brand, Geox) for a coffee and a chat and four hours later, he was hired. It didn’t take long for Kristiansen to feel comfortable in the office – winning the Diesel account early on helped ease the transition into agency life. SMFB’s performance at the Norwegian award show Gullblyanten (Golden Pencil) a few years later in 2013 was stellar. “We dominated it. We literally walked on stage about 18 times that

1 Diadora, Delivery

2 Geox, Seven Days Of Rain

night. I love that year not because of the quantity of awards that we won, but because we won awards on five different ideas across four clients. That means the confidence rippled through the whole office. There was not one person who wasn’t on stage that night. And I love that,” he says.

In fact, there was one standout winner from that night and that year, the digitally-activated campaign Seven Days Of Rain for Geox. To promote the waterproof technology built into the brand’s shoes, the team – including Askim, one of the creatives on the job – produced an interactive website that tracked the shoes’ performance in extreme weather conditions. It won a gold Cyber Lion at Cannes in 2013 and the Grand Prix for Promo & Activation at Eurobest that same year.

Marathon work for sprint reward

Cannes 2016 was quieter for SMFB than in previous years, but the Diadora Delivery campaign was still shortlisted for a Cyber Lion. Volunteers ran a total of 35 marathons across nine days to deliver a pair of trainers from Italy to an online shopper in Barcelona. Documented in real time on a designated website, the campaign proves that the agency is still capable of excelling digitally.

Awards are viewed with a healthy dose of realism in the agency, however. “Nothing lasts shorter than an award,” says Askim. “It’s over in seconds.” For Kristiansen, clients are more of an inspiration. “They push us every day,” he says. “And they push back on our ideas – that friction and that love for a great idea executed perfectly is what drives us forward.”

Ten years ago, the agency employed just 15 people, but now it has 70 workers to its name. Despite this growth, the same goal remains: “to make world-class advertising”, says Askim. It’s always been about the right people realising the right ideas… and giving 125 per cent.

Challenging the ordinary

Boredom isn’t the usual reason for starting an agency, but then Very CEO Thomas Bjerg, natural free-thinker, norm-challenger and problem-solver, isn’t your usual agency head. His route to the Cannes Lions stage, where Very took Entertainment gold, has taken in community art projects, a degree in medicine and running the Copenhagen ad industry’s favourite club night

Speaking with Very’s CEO Thomas Bjerg is like playing with a puppy. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm, even though he’s just got back from a music festival. His demeanour is unsurprising considering the agency’s unexpected success this year at Cannes, and reﬂects his go-getter entrepreneurial spirit. It’s clear that Bjerg’s rebellious side has helped lead the 25-strong team into the global spotlight, something even he wasn’t expecting so soon.

When Very won Entertainment gold for its short ﬁlm for Ford, The Family, both Bjerg and his right-hand man, COO Martin Vibe Jacobsen, were unprepared for their success. They’d decided not to go to Cannes despite being shortlisted, thinking there was no way they’d win. So when Jacobsen emailed Bjerg at 4.30am to tell him the news, Bjerg – awake with his new baby – was understandably confused. By the time the morning rolled around, the pair were on a plane to the French Riviera, ready to collect their Lion that evening. It wasn’t until a journalist called to congratulate them, though, that the reality of it sank in.

Spending just 24 hours on the strip known as adland’s summer playground was a bit of a blur for the duo, especially for Bjerg who’d never been before and admits he was unaware of its reputation. “I’m not in [the industry] for the glamour,” says Bjerg. “I’m in it to make a di erence.”

What made The Family so di erent, apart from its length (16 mins), was the fact that it barely ‘sold’ the car, instead focusing on the family whose lives rotated around it. Inspired by the fact that the vehicle “was a space where families meet”, the team created a branded piece of content that told the story of a family going through the di erent stages of divorce. Choosing this format could be seen as a brave move for an agency that’s still establishing itself. But Bjerg conﬁdently says, “If we don’t have the courage to challenge the

ordinary, then there’s no space for us in the market.” Besides, they argue, if it’s interesting and relevant, why wouldn’t somebody sit down and watch a 16 minute-long ad?

Winning gold at Cannes has opened up new opportunities for the agency; it’s also led both current and potential clients to request similar work. But Bjerg refuses to o er this same format to other clients, citing that the one-size-ﬁts-all solution doesn’t suit the agency.

For many clients, the biggest worry is how to remain relevant to consumers and Very can o er access to numerous communities across fashion, music and skateboarding, among others.

Described as a ‘community marketing agency’ on its website, Very strives for “non-intrusive [advertising] that’s created for a [speciﬁc] target group”, according to Bjerg. Its USP is its connection to inﬂuencers, trendsetters and connectors in 25 di erent industries. By regularly engaging with these external “agency planners”, Very is able to tap into their way of thinking and gain a unique insight into what consumers want.

Don’t arrange a pitch for Thursday

Very’s special access is due to Bjerg’s unusual route into advertising. Always independentminded and a free spirit, his parents – both professors of psychology – supported his ideas and nurtured his ambition, sending him to the ‘alternative’ Bernadotte school, which didn’t conform to traditional learning practices. “I was taught from an early age to always try to challenge [things] but to also come up with a solution to the problem,” he says. “Not just to complain but to come forward with suggestions.” That he did. Aged 14, Bjerg organised a dance with the neighbouring schools in his area, securing two local DJs and attracting 400 pupils. Though it was a relatively small venture, Bjerg says, “That experience taught

1/2 Ford, The Family

me that instead of working for someone else, you could do something for yourself.”

After school, Bjerg spent some time with Diesel New Art, running projects within various communities, and started studying medicine, before settling on a university degree in business studies and communications. His next project was running a club night with four others, Very Disco, which became the spot for a certain crowd on Wednesday nights: “The whole creative industry was hungover on Thursdays,” Bjerg recalls.

A Very brave thing to do

This experience in giving the people what they want inspired him to create his own agency. But he realised he needed to get some on-the-job training ﬁrst, and secured a job as project manager at agency Reputation. After six months, he got a bit bored, took out a loan and started Very. This year, the agency celebrates its 10-year anniversary.

Bjerg’s distinct background gave him an advantage in communicating with a range of sub-cultures, and made him the perfect partner for Jacobsen, whose strategic approach, learned from years at McCann Copenhagen, added to Bjerg’s connections, creating a perfectly balanced skillset.

Still, there’s always room to improve. “I always want to do better and take it to the next level… Maybe I forget to celebrate sometimes,” he admits. He wants to remain grounded, be humble and not get caught up in the excitement of such things as awards. “We’re not better than [we were] yesterday – we need to keep performing,” he adds.

Yet winning the Lion has inevitably opened new doors for the agency and it means Bjerg now has to get serious and focus on its future, whether that means opening up a new o ce overseas or partnering with other like-minded agencies internationally. But for now, this puppy deserves a treat for all that he has achieved so far. S

“If we don’t have the courage to challenge the ordinary, then there’s no space for us in the market.”

Tinsel Town on the frozen tundra

There’s an old Icelandic saying that “when God created the

was practising in

rest of the world he

Iceland” and it’s hard to deny the country boasts a huge diversity of landscapes – from glaciers to black beaches. And there are plenty more reasons it’s being dubbed the ‘Hollywood of the north’, as worldoflocations.com reports

Iceland’s otherworldly landscape, a 20 per cent tax rebate (to be increased next year), as well as low production costs, skilled, hardworking crews and accessible locations, make the territory a favourite for filmmakers.

Christopher Nolan made use of its glaciers for Interstellar (having shot Batman Begins on the island), Ben Stiller recreated the Himalayas, Greenland and Afghanistan there for The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and Clint Eastwood found the perfect stand-in for the black sands of Iwo Jima in Flags Of Our Fathers. Darren Aronofsky’s biblical drama Noah was shot in Iceland, as was Prometheus, Oblivion and Thor: The Dark World and countless commercials

from brands such as Nikon and Mercedes. HBO’s Game Of Thrones is among the long list of major TV shows that have utilised Icelandic landscapes, along with Sky Atlantic’s icy drama Fortitude, produced by Tiger Aspect and Fifty Fathoms. “We looked at Greenland, but we would have had to use helicopters to get everywhere, “ says Matthew Bird, producer at Fifty Fathoms. “Iceland was a really good choice. We shot for 11 or 12 weeks out on the east fjords, which doesn’t get much filming. But the infrastructure is brilliant. We picked up a lot of crew locally and we had great support from [Reykjavik-based production outfit] Pegasus Pictures.” S

“Sci-fi

features are well served thanks to the geothermal glaciers, lava fields, lagoons with floating icebergs, snow-clad mountains, active smoking volcanoes and black sands.”

The Lowdown

Financial incentives

Iceland currently offers a 20 per cent tax rebate to film and television productions shooting in the country – though there are no tax incentives for commercials. The rebate is available on eligible costs incurred in Iceland, with applications made to the Ministry of Industries and Innovation. In June of this year, the Icelandic parliament approved the rebate’s increase to 25 per cent, effective from 1 January 2017, which will further enhance the country’s competitive edge compared to its Nordic counterparts. Get further information from filminiceland.com

Film services

Iceland offers English-speaking crews experienced on large-scale international productions and, though it currently lacks an adequate studio in Reykjavik, a deal was signed this summer between local film mogul Baltasar Kormákur’s RVK Studios and Reykjavik City Council to convert a former fertiliser factory into Hollywood-style studios. At present, the country’s largest filming facility is Atlantic Studios. Located at the former NATO base by Keflavik International Airport – which is just a 45-minute drive from the capital – Atlantic offers a 2,200m sq sound stage and a 500-seat cinema. Local production companies include Pegasus Pictures and Sagafilm.

Locations

Iceland has doubled for Siberia, Minnesota and Scandinavia – and post-apocalyptic vistas – among many other landscapes. Sci-fi features are well served thanks to the geothermal glaciers, lava fields, lagoons replete with icebergs, snow-clad mountains, active smoking volcanoes and black sands. The country also has beaches, majestic waterfalls and lakes, as well as the modern city of Reykjavik, the world’s most northerly capital.

Where to stay

When the cast and crew of Fortitude descended on the small town of Reydarfjördur, they took over the two main hotels and a number of apartments for six months, boosting the population by 20 per cent in the process.

Reykjavik has a wide range of luxury apartment rentals and hotels, with the most popular among film crews being the two Radisson Blus, Hotel Borg and the boutique 101 Hotel.

Hot pools and cool culture

Like other Nordic countries with land inside the Arctic Circle, Iceland offers long summer days, with the sun only setting for three hours around the summer solstice. This not only gives directors long shoot days and magical light, but offers cast and crew outdoor leisure opportunities, such as the enduring Viking tradition of taking early morning dips in volcanically heated pools. For indoor cultural pursuits, Reykjavik is bursting with art galleries, hip cafés and bars, is considered one of the world’s safest cities and makes a good base to strike out to locations in the rest of the country.

Getting around

There are regular direct flights from European cities, with a London to Reykjavik hop taking just three hours. From the US east coast, it’s a five to six hour trip. Once in the country, the extremely diverse locations are short distances apart and easily accessible from each other.

Roads are good, with the main one being Route 1, an 832-mile ring road that does an entire circuit of the island. Local production services offer four-wheel drives or helicopters for remote locations. Mountain guides are a must for shoots in harsh terrain and weather.

First person to call Einar Hansen Tomasson, film commissioner, Film In Iceland: einar@filminiceland.com

Going native: Helsinki

Hanna Tuovio, EP/MD at Helsinki production company Grillifilms, strips off the layers of her small, safe, but special city to reveal its hottest hotels, bars and, appropriately enough, saunas

What’s the best thing about working in advertising in Finland?

The size of the business. Everybody knows everybody else.

What is the worst thing about working in advertising in Finland?

The size of the business.

There are only 5.4 million people living in Finland, which influences the size of the budgets… and they are not huge.

If you were booking a hotel in Helsinki, where would you stay?

Out of the more upscale hotels, I would choose Hotel Haven. The service is excellent and so is the location. If I wanted something less fancy, I’d go to Hotel Helka, which has a lot of Finnish interior design.

What advice would you give to a visitor?

Helsinki has a lot of nature all around it, really close by. You should visit the islands just outside the city, especially the fortress of Suomenlinna, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Take a ferry – it’s just 15 minutes from the centre of Helsinki.

What’s the best Finnish ad you have seen in the last year?

I loved Hidden Powers Of Arto Smeds for Helsinki Regional Transport, directed by Teemu Niukkanen.

One table, four places. You and who?

It would be a ladies’ night out: Kathleen Kennedy and Michelle Obama. And, of course, my best friend so we could talk about it afterwards.

If Helsinki were a product, what would it be?

An ice cube. It’s rather small and cold, but it melts easily. Nothing too dangerous.

Who do you/would you love to work with in the industry?

Ex-Grillifilms director Pete Riski, to see if he’s changed now his career has kicked off in the UK and US. And director Rane Tiukkanen, because I’ve never worked with him before.

Where’s the best place to eat in Helsinki?

I tend to choose the more classical restaurants, like Kosmos. The whole restaurant scene is bustling at the moment – there are a lot of young chefs starting new restaurants. Finnjävel is particularly interesting; they cook traditional recipes in a modern way. My favourite is Baskeri & Basso because they have a very nice wine list and are conveniently located in the same building as our office.

And the best place to have a drink?

Grotesk bar in the colder months – that’s most of the year. For a visitor, I’d recommend Kafe Moskova, which is owned by director Aki Kaurismäki… It’s a bar in the spirit of the Soviet Union.

What’s Helsinki’s favourite pastime?

We love saunas. They’re everywhere. The biggest one right now is Löyly: a new public sauna/ restaurant in an eco-friendly, cutting-edge wooden building facing the sea.

What do you miss when you are out of the city?

The smallness of Helsinki. The safety. The fresh air.

What’s your one-line life philosophy?

Never explain, never complain. I’m not very good at it, though.

If you could have one question answered, what would it be?

Who’s next?

“There are only 5.4 million people living in Finland, which influences the size of the budgets… and they are not huge.”

I SEE IT

THE WAY

Ajaz Ahmed

As founder and chairman of ideas and innovation giant AKQA, Ajaz Ahmed is one of the biggest success stories in advertising today, despite dropping out of university aged 21. He launched the agency in 1994 as a riposte to identikit advertising, and oversaw its meteoric rise, building an enviable client list spanning Virgin, Nike, Delta, Starbucks and Rolls-Royce. Now, more than 20 years later, AKQA continues to dominate the digital and interactive space with a slew of award-winning, groundbreaking work, from a fitness app that has democratised the world of personal training to the first ever interactive basketball court. A prolific voice on business, leadership and innovation in the digital space, Ahmed has also found time to publish two bestsellers while presiding over AKQA’s global expansion. He tells Selena Schleh how beautiful bricks-and-mortar led him to the online world and why modern ads will rot your brain

I was born at the Canadian Red Cross Hospital in Taplow, a village in Buckinghamshire, England that sits on the River Thames.

My earliest memory is my mother peeling and deseeding a pomegranate for us to eat.

I went on to learn that they were the world’s largest database software company. They had about 80 per cent market share at one point. When you think that almost all the digital services we use these days are databases of some kind, this company could have been one of the most powerful in the world if it was still around today.

“Nature makes all the senses light up: sight, touch, smell, sound and taste. Digital is not truly multisensory in the way that nature is, not even close. My memorable moments with nature are engraved into my heart. I can’t say that about digital experiences yet, but it will happen.”

Both my parents worked remarkably hard. My father has a zen, meditative calm about him and my mum is a force of nature: restless, very energetic. My mother worked in the local hospital and my dad as a machinist in a local factory. We didn’t grow up with much but what they did give me is the best gift: a limitless love of learning and liberty.

My childhood was wonderful. I grew up in a big family surrounded by nature, the sunshine and freedom, which is a paradise for me. As a teenager, I went sailing most weekends and in those moments the sea cast its endlessly seductive spell on me, creating many of my life’s happiest memories. It was idyllic. Nature makes all the senses light up: sight, touch, smell, sound and taste. Digital is not truly multisensory in the way that nature is, not even close. My memorable moments with nature are engraved into my heart. I can’t say that about digital experiences yet, but it will happen.

I’ve always loved reading, so as a child the idea of becoming a writer had an appeal.

At school, I probably asked too many questions because I’m curious about examining the root of things and the way things work. But if it was a choice between being a good student or being able to enjoy my life at school then I chose the latter option. There’s no rule that says you need to be at school to be a good student because the desire to learn never actually stops.

There are so many subjects I’m interested in but what got me into technology and communications in the first place was architecture. I fell in love with a building. I grew up in the Thames Valley, essentially the Silicon Valley of the UK. There were technology companies sprouting up all over the place. Most workplaces were anonymous office blocks that lacked soul, but there was one perfect building that I used to walk past almost every day on my paper round when I was 12 years old. I wanted to know everything about the company that occupied it, what kind of work they did, what the people in it were like.

I wrote one letter after another to try and get a job with them. Then one day, after I had written my 11th letter, an envelope arrived at my parents’ house. The lady who delivered it looked like an angel to me! The letter said that as soon as I had a national insurance number I could work for them. That year I got my national insurance number and they employed me for a week. A week turned into a few years, working after school and during holidays. I loved it. They had me work in every department: development, logistics, distribution, finance, marketing, sales, operations, training, everywhere. I learned such a massive amount.

At university in Bath, I lived on campus with two friends who also had four names [Ahmed’s full name is Ajaz Khowaj Quoram Ahmed] so we would playfully refer to each other using our initials rather than forenames. It’s a very ‘university’ thing to do.

In the same way that I knew if I didn’t go to university I would regret it, I also knew if I didn’t leave university to start AKQA then I would have regretted that too [Ahmed dropped out of his business studies degree aged 21]. By the time I got to university I had already been working for about six years. In that time I had learned a lot about the standards that the best companies have. I won’t ever encourage anyone to drop out of university but I do encourage people to never lose their curiosity. I enjoyed my time at university because I met people who have become friends for life, and AKQA still has an association with the university today. We hire a lot of people from Bath University because it’s a wonderful place that attracts good people.

There’s no question that while I was growing up every adult I met was a mentor of one kind or another – there were so many saints in my life. Today, we hire people for what they can teach us and not just what we can teach them. Over the years I’ve been tremendously lucky to have worked with or learned from remarkable people like Angela Ahrendts DBE, Gail Rebuck DBE, Sir Richard Branson, Sir Martin Sorrell, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jamie Oliver.

‘Welcome to the fast lane!’ was my attitude to work in the early days of my career. There’s always been restlessness and even as I’ve got older it has not been diluted. If anything it has accelerated.

[At AKQA] we are so fortunate to work with progressive clients around the world that share similar values and perspectives, creating a ripple eﬀect that extends far beyond any of our own organisations. Virgin has been with us since the beginning, when a project I designed and programmed as a youngster caught its attention. They invited me in for a meeting and we just clicked. The shared values, the enthusiasm, the fun, the love of creativity made a strong connection and it has got stronger ever since.

I’m always going to be grateful to Nike for the journey so far and the adventures ahead. There really isn’t a company on earth like Nike. It’s in a category of one. We’ve learned so much working together. In the early days we were approached by one of their competitors who oﬀered us an extraordinary amount of money to start working with them instead. We turned the oﬀer down politely and told them: “Nike isn’t just another client, it’s a part of our soul.”

What sets AKQA apart is we’ve never lost our ability to surprise. All our best ideas can be explained in one line. They have a sense of humanity and universality to them. Our work is the imaginative application of art and science. We know we are not in the business of creating technology, but we are in the business of applying it in an exciting way. That’s why we say that the most powerful force in the universe isn’t technology, it’s imagination.

How would I deﬁne innovation? Well, they say ‘Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s tradition.’ And there’s a quote by William Gibson: ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ So I think of AKQA being in the ‘evenly distributing the future’ business.

You have to stay hungry, otherwise you go stale. AKQA is about the duality of what may first appear to be opposing forces. We’re about pushing the limits and explorations, counterbalanced with good engineering and execution. We’re about youth and energy, counterbalanced with maturity and experience. We’re about the cutting-edge, the state of the art, but we’ve never forgotten our origins. We’re about creating what’s next, but nostalgic and loyal too.

This means we’re open to drawing upon outside inﬂuences beyond the narrow confines of one industry. We’re always searching for sensory material that can challenge us in new ways. But while the pillars and foundations of our company are firm, we’re adaptive, sensitive to changes in the business environment and society.

Two truths have given us a head start. The ﬁrst is that technology will shape culture. The second is the need for professionals to help organisations navigate this landscape in the best way so the productivity of their investments is amplified.

The advice I’d give anyone seeking to enter this business is that you need to be vibrant and resilient. If you can’t tolerate the honest feedback it takes to make the work better and if you can’t suﬀer failures and setbacks then this business is not for you. From our early days we’ve aimed to hire as many fascinating, eccentric, abnormal and unusual misfits as we can.

When [CCO] James Hilton decided to leave AKQA [in 2014], it honestly wasn’t something we really talked about much. I suppose that’s how it is with brothers. The history and respect is there so there’s no real need to get too far below the surface.

The advertising industry is ﬁghting a perpetual battle against its own obsolescence. Most of the work produced is destined for the scrap heap and this makes for inconvenient knowledge. If the ad business is rooted in creativity then why are most ads disposable and dull? How many commercials are a revelation and leave the screen with you? Most ads are like fast food. You eat it and a few minutes later you’re hungry again. If you do it too much it will numb your mind.

The problem with a lot of advertising is simply that the sum is less than the parts. It’s become too much about the copy and not enough about the feeling: that’s just lazy. If the words were any good then it would be more bearable but there’s an abundance of clichés. We live in a world of images, but there are more words than ever. Given the visual sophistication of international audiences, you’d think the industry would try harder to raise its head above the parapet and avoid just going through the motions.

“We’re always searching for sensory material that can challenge us in new ways. But while the pillars and foundations of our company are firm, we’re adaptive, sensitive to changes in the business environment and society.”

“How many commercials are a revelation and leave the screen with you? Most ads are like fast food. You eat it and a few minutes later you’re hungry again. If you do it too much it will numb your mind.”

“The problem with a lot of advertising is simply that the sum is less than the parts. It’s become too much about the copy and not enough about the feeling: that’s just lazy.”

Then there’s the predictability. Take the ‘manifesto film’ that’s so popular at the moment – usually a voice-over set to a montage of feel-good images tuned to a trite rendition of a longforgotten song. Audiences filter out this selfrighteous ‘talking to itself’ nonsense. Good work carves a crevice in your synapses, it stays with you.

What’s the secret to my success? The conventional picture of entrepreneurs as ‘one-person-wonders’ is a romantic one. We need a hero behind the events we witness to help make sense of them, but the reality is more complicated. We need to get away from the narcissism that comes from propagating the idea that the progress of an organisation can be down to just one person. It’s not about being an auteur. It’s about the humility to accept that everything we do is an ensemble piece.

You can read as many books about leadership as you like but it basically boils down to one thing: be a decent human being. There’s a straightforward course in management for anyone who wants to be better and it goes along the lines of: make a short list of all the things that have been done to you that annoyed you. And never do them to others. Then make a list of the things done to you that you’ve loved. And do those always. I think business is not about complexity but about simple philosophies that anyone can understand. That’s what really resonates.

Velocity [Ahmed’s ﬁrst book, published in 2012] has been the gift that’s not stopped giving. People used to know me as the founder of AKQA, but now I often hear: ‘Oh, you’re the guy who wrote Velocity.’ Then they tell me about the impact that the book has had on their life and the way they think about business. It was written for entrepreneurs and businesses but a lot of feedback I get is from not-for-profits and community organisations implementing the thinking and getting results. That’s rewarding.

My co-author Stefan Olander [Nike’s Digital VP] and I had been talking about writing a book for some time, but with demanding day jobs and families it was tough to dedicate the time a project like this needs. It was the combination of the financial crisis in 2008 and the 2011 London riots that really spurred us on to complete the book.

We started AKQA in a recession and I wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in my mouth, so I suppose Velocity was a humble reminder that, with the right motivation, you can help create jobs in a world of business turmoil. The thought was that if this book inspires a single company to keep investing or helps an entrepreneur to start something, then that’s mission accomplished.

Shortly after ﬁnishing the book I came across some pretty remarkable figures about the absence of longevity in business today: 87 per cent of companies in the Fortune 500 in 1955 no longer existed in 2011. The 500 most valuable companies in the USA today will only have a lifespan of 18 years. In 1958 that lifespan was around 61 years. For start-ups it’s even more accelerated: 71 per cent are gone within 10 years, while 55 per cent disappear within three years. But we all know there are companies that have existed for decades. So I was curious to discover if there was a philosophy common to those organisations that I could learn and share.

In that respect Limitless [Ahmed’s second book] was more of a personal project, paying respect to the organisations and people that have meant something to me by telling the stories of leaders who, with egalitarian vision, invite the chance of creating real change by giving to the many what is held by the few. But the learnings from it are universal, namely that the most transformative organisations and teams aren’t the ones whose leaders shout the loudest.

The last book in the trilogy will be out in 2017. And then I’m done with writing for a bit.

My dad doesn’t talk much but when he does he usually has a proverb or some wisdom to share. The best piece of advice he ever gave me was: ‘Health is lost, half is lost; wealth is lost, nothing is lost; character is lost, all is lost.’ The point is, basically, don’t sell your soul. If you lose money you always have the opportunity to make it again but with the others once they’re gone, they’re gone.

In the beginning and the end, what matters is the results. Is our work eﬀective and enjoyed? Creative merit and commercial success are just two sides of the same coin. Brands that vault past their competitors are the ones that have purpose at the core, creativity in their veins and a strong sense of identity.

Whenever I’ve done a personality test, it always says I’m an introvert, but I think most people, including me, fall somewhere in the middle of being an introvert or an extrovert. We all recharge our brains through sleep. When we’re with interesting people or being stimulated through learning or trying new things, we get energised and when we’re not, our energy gets depleted.

I’ve never done a digital detox. In my job I don’t think it’s the responsible course of action not to be connected. But the way that I use technology is that it is of service to me rather than the other way around. I’m not particularly organised with my life outside of work and there have been so many occasions where my phone has pro-actively helped me get somewhere on time or given me health advice just because an algorithm recognised its importance in my life. When the technology is an agent of sorts, then that’s the ultimate detox because it takes the pressure oﬀ.

My hobbies are swimming, reading and movies. In addition to family, friends and work, these are my greatest sources of pleasure. My happiest days involve sport or being with family and friends. I’ve not been sailing since I was a teenager and I’m saving it up so when I go I can really enjoy it.

The greatest human invention is probably the compass or inventions related to healthcare, medicine and improving people’s lives. The worst are the ones that harm the lives of people or species we share this planet with. But you don’t want to be part of the problem, you want to be part of the solution. As Leonardo da Vinci said: ‘Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superﬂuous.’ Nothing is lacking, nothing is superﬂuous – I think that’s the ultimate aspiration.

I’m an optimist and an idealist so, if I were UK Prime Minister for the day, I would champion the idea that world peace is both possible and inevitable. I would make it our government’s single most pressing priority to help create world peace with all nations in the smartest, most intelligent and non-violent way. And that’s mostly about education.

With the combined forces of knowledge, technology and wealth that the world has access to today – an abundance that’s really unprecedented in history – I really believe we can create more progress in the next few decades than we have in the past 200 years. Considered collectively, the world has an unlimited amount of knowledge and resources: hopefully it will lead to more meaningful and enjoyable lives for everyone too.

The older I get, the more I learn how little I know. But if I am remembered then it should be for being a man who had nothing left to give. I love this quote from Robert Frost: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”

“You can read as many books about leadership as you like but it basically boils down to one thing: be a decent human being.”

“…make a short list of all the things that have been done to you that annoyed you. And never do them to others. Then make a list of the things done to you that you’ve loved. And do those always.”.

SHOULD A ROBOT EVER WIN A CANNES LION?

At Cannes Lions this year, we had an intriguing and engaging panel discussion on the topic ‘Should A Robot Ever Win A Cannes Lion?’. The conversation concerned the recent emergence of artiﬁcial intelligence in the area of marketing and experience design. It was a topic I approached with a little trepidation since, as a creative, I might ﬁnd myself out of a job. I am pleased to say, however, that I am still employed, and by the end of the discussion we had more or less reached a consensus that, yes, a robot would probably win a Lion. But should it win?

The answer was ‘no’.

Human foible-fuelled creative

I believe that a human being will always be an important part of the creative process if we want originality, and that will never change. As individuals, we bring a lot to the room when asked to come up with an idea – irrationality, impulsiveness, unpredictability (all of which are very human and emotionally-driven traits).

When we put personalities together, we can’t predict where we will end up, and isn’t that the beauty of doing what we do?

That’s why we cast and build teams so carefully, getting the right blend of people (or ‘good chemistry’). I’m not sure artiﬁcial intelligence would ever have arrived at Burger King’s Subservient Chicken without human intervention. Is it great work?

That’s a matter of personal taste, but it’s certainly original work. Human input drives originality and the unexpected.

If all we needed was the same thing over and over but done better each time, I don’t doubt for a minute that AI could create a repeatable process to do it. AI is great at optimising and being fast. It can look at past behaviour and replicate it so that we can’t tell the difference between what computers make and what humans make. A great example (and the cause célèbre of the panel discussion) is the The Next Rembrandt campaign by JWT Amsterdam for ING. The double Cannes Grand Prix-winning project involved teaching a computer to paint like Rembrandt. It then created a real painting –

a Rembrandt, for all intents and purposes. Afterwards there was a lot of debate about whether or not the artwork’s creativity started with the ‘code and data’. Our panel ended in agreement: AI will never replace Rembrandt as the artist himself is really where the creativity started – but AI did a very good job of paying him a massive compliment by making an incredible copy. It was the ultimate form of digital ﬂattery. In my day job, I work at a digital agency where we constantly hunt for innovate ways to infuse technology into the creative process. Technology has been an indispensible enabler for me over the last 15 years. In general, I tend to look at AI in the same way: it’s going to be an incredible thing for us to work with – the next powerful tool. I would love our creative teams to have access to that kind of computing power. In a creative session, it would be wonderful to have AI be part of our conversation. For us, it represents something we can push against creatively.

AI? It’s a no-brainer

Maybe it’s not such a stretch to see a brand dispose of an agency and just rely completely on a piece of custom AI that fulﬁlls all their marketing needs. Programmatic advertising has already taken a step in that direction. I guess it depends on the type of brand you are and what marketing needs you have. Do you need a balance of originality and efﬁciency? Is your brand comfortable having a robot control how you communicate with your – very human – customers? Are your customers comfortable with that? It’s going to be interesting to see how this space evolves.

I think AI is a long way from reaching full potential. We’re at the start of something that is probably beyond our imagination; something profoundly powerful – perhaps inevitable. It’s going to become an increasingly big part of our daily lives, and will no doubt change how we interact with the world and how we receive information.

But I believe there are some things that humans will just be better at, and one of those is being creative. Although, I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Irrationality, impulsiveness and unpredictability – not qualities you’d usually attribute to a robot, but exactly the traits that humans bring to the table when being creative. They are the wellsprings of originality, which is the ad industry’s holy grail. So can artificial intelligence ever replicate those emotionallydriven traits? Conor Brady, CCO of agency Critical Mass, has his doubts and believes that AI, though set to change

the world, will only be truly creative working in tandem with us quirky

mortals

“When we put personalities together, we can’t predict where we will end up…”

ALEXANDER REA head of creative technology, Framestore

FAVOURITE KIT

1 The Apple Watch

People question the usefulness of the Watch, but I like it for notiﬁcations, and every time I raise it up I see one of my favourite photos of my family.

2 Leatherman Wave Multi-tool

In my life, I never know when I might need a plier, knife or screwdriver. Having this tool to hand solves that problem.

3 Skip Hop Moonlight & Melodies Nightlight Soother

We’ve used some baby tech with success, such as Owlet’s Smart Sock [baby heart rate and oxygen monitor], but this elegantly simple item is our son’s nightly companion. It plays music and soothing sounds; the belly glows, and it projects moons and stars on the ceiling.

4 Vitamix Professional Series 200 blender

I purchased this because I like to cook, and this model's near-2-horsepower motor can mash up anything. It's great for making baby food purée.

5 SSCY Tack Sling bag

This bag transforms from backpack to tote. It's made from water-repellent, duck cotton canvas and is great for work, travelling and baby supplies. It's made in NYC, too.

6 Anker Astro Pro

This external battery pack is a staple in my road kit. It quickly charges multiple devices at the same time and lasts for ages.

7 Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine

This classically designed, commercial-grade machine is ideal for the coffee nerd. There is also a DIY mod that adds a circuit board for more precise temperature control. Like I said, nerd.

8 Nest Cam security camera

Instead of a traditional baby monitor, we use Nest Cam to monitor our son through the cloud. We also use another one to monitor our dog.

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To ensure you have the log-in details you need, email shots@abacusemedia.com or call +44 20 8955 7047

PASSION PROJECTS

This issue’s pick of newbies all battled adversity and relied on sheer passion to get their ﬁlms in the can. One faced scheduling hell in ﬁlming pro athletes, another handled a sensitive topic with little funds and a busy adland duo had zero hours to shoot a dancing cloud puppet with no CGI

Chiara Grabmayr

SHORT FILM

Perspektiven für jugendliche Flüchtlinge Moonjourney

As the European migrant crisis deepens, it’s easy to become jaded by the sheer scale of the problem – something director Chiara Grabmayr has sought to overcome in Moonjourney, a spot for Munichbased refugee NGO, Perspektiven für jugendliche Flüchtlinge (PFJF). “You need to get into people’s hearts to trigger the wish for change,” says the Austrian ﬁlmmaker, who concepted, scripted and directed the ﬁlm in its entirety.

Moonjourney follows a journey to claim asylum made by a father and his daughter; told through the eyes of the latter, who imagines them as astronauts on a voyage to the moon. Emerging from the ‘rocket’ (a people-smugglers’ van), they cross strange lunar terrain to reach a phosphorescent sea, ‘the place where stars are made’. But as they huddle on a dinghy for the final stretch, the engine suddenly stutters and dies. “We’re preparing for landing!” says the little girl. Pause for a beat. “I guess...” It’s an emotional sucker-punch of an ending that was, for Grabmayr, the hardest part of the filming process. “It was a very fine line to get the right tone.”

Grabmayr, who confesses to spending hours “laughing and crying in the cinema”, is not only

clearly in touch with her emotions, but has a passion for storytelling – prerequisites for ending up in the director’s chair. She traces her interest in ﬁlmmaking to watching the 1971 cult movie Harold and Maude, a dark comedy about a boy’s meeting with a lively septuagenarian. “I was fascinated by the way di erent people’s lives and stories can a ect each other. Even if it‘s just for a brief, magic moment; when your eyes meet a stranger’s on the street.”

It was such a chance meeting, while Grabmayr was at Munich’s University of TV and Film, that inspired Moonjourney. On a train back to her hometown of Vienna, she chatted to some Syrian refugees: “One of the stories was so touching I couldn’t get it out of my mind,“ she recalls. She got to thinking about the risks refugees take and their motivation to save their loved ones. The astronaut angle in the ﬁlm came from news footage she’d seen of soldiers in white plastic suits pulling refugees from capsizing boats.

Despite securing a production company, Trimaphilm, soon after writing the script, Grabmayr says it was a long slog to the shoot “with basically no money”. Casting was vital.

“It was important to ﬁnd the perfect girl – someone with eyes you fall in love with, someone you want to protect from harm,” she says. In order to build a believable relationship between the father and daughter characters, Grabmayr asked the actors to play games and get to know each other slowly before shooting. Another challenge was ﬁnding European locations with an otherworldly aspect; they eventually used Spain’s semi-desert national park, Bardenas Reales, for some of the scenes.

Having scooped a Silver Screen award at this year’s YDA, what’s next for Grabmayr? Besides working on web-documentary series Fat And Fat, which is “a portrait of Generation Y”, she hopes to direct commercials in the future. But ultimately, her goal is to make work “that has an impact on people’s lives. You have to at least try. Right?” SS

“It was important to find the perfect girl, with eyes you instantly fall in love with and someone you want to protect from harm.”

Dan DiFelice

SHORT FILM

Jordan Brand Night Shift

After winning Gold and Silver Screen awards at the CFP-E/shots Young Director Award in Cannes this year for, respectively, his World Surf League spot, Chaos Theory, and beautiful short ﬁlm, Carved In Mayhem, plus being highlighted at the 2016 Saatchi & Saatchi New Director Showcase for the latter, this spot for Jordan Brand from American director Dan DiFelice caps o a stellar year for the 29-year-old, who started his career working in motion graphics and visual e ects before making the leap to directing.

DiFelice plied his VFX trade at shops including The Mill and Framestore which, he says, “allowed me the opportunity to gain an understanding of the inner workings of the directing process”. He never set out to be a director but the route to being one “unfolded” and he pursued projects which he felt connected to. One such connection was to this Jordan Brand spot, Night Shift, promoting the Jordan Breakfast Club initiative.

“When I ﬁrst read through the script [from Wieden+Kennedy New York], I knew immediately that I had to throw everything into this one to try and land the job,” says DiFelice. “It was such a unique perspective on unveiling Jordan Training as well as the Jordan Breakfast Club, and I needed to be part of the team that would do it.”

The spot, shot through Pulse Films US, follows NFL player Dez Bryant as he winds his way to an early morning training session, along the way relaying his recent dream about being Michael Jordan. Night Shift is a stylish, monochrome ﬁlm – like Carved In Mayhem – which transitions into muted colour when Bryant reaches his destination and meets with fellow athletes, basketballer Victor Oladipo and boxer Andre Ward.

Working with pro-athletes can often make for a challenging shoot due to their time constraints, but DiFelice also had to factor in a two-week turnaround from the time he received the boards,

plus a holiday weekend within that two-week period. It was, DiFelice confesses, extremely di cult. “We were aware of [the holiday] from the start and I knew that everything would pretty much shut down,” he says. “However, hearing about it and experiencing it were two very di erent scenarios. I underestimated how much things would come to a halt two and three days before production and found it extremely di cult to maintain momentum, which is key with such a short pre-pro window.”

“When I

first read through the script for Night Shift

[from

Wieden+Kennedy

New York], I knew immediately that I had to throw everything into this one to try and land the job.”

Despite the di culties, or maybe because of them, DiFelice also found the shoot very rewarding. “Being aware that this could sound trite, I found that the most rewarding part of the project was just the overall experience,” DiFelice says. “I was fortunate enough to work with an extremely welcoming client and agency [and was] supported by an incredible team of producers and crew. I really love walking away with a great spot when I can, but walking away with a happy client and agency along with a great experience is such a tremendous win.”

DiFelice, who recently signed to Pulse Films UK for representation, says that he’s now working on some personal projects but also marrying those with commercial work, and has recently wrapped on a couple of Reebok spots for the US market. So, far from Night Shift capping o a great year, it seems like it’s simply a mid-way point for this talented director. DE

Ali Dickinson and Jack Walker

MUSIC VIDEO

London record label Workshop’s new series, Music In Colour, is all about pairing up emerging creative talents in the fields of music and film. Judging by the first fruits of the initiative – a sweetly surreal promo for British house music producer Alex Arcoleo’s new track, First Sunset, helmed by Ali Dickinson and Jack Walker – they’re not doing too badly on the matchmaking front.

Based on a children’s book by Dickinson’s partner Naomi Sta ord, the ﬁlm follows a friendly cloud who’s shunned by sunworshippers for his pesky habit of throwing shade. Things are looking a tad lonely for billy-no-mates Nimbo, until he ﬁnds an appreciative pal in a pale-skinned gingerhaired lad. The promo marks Dickinson and Walker’s directing debut: a copywriter/art director team at FCB Inferno by day, they had always been interested in directing but were “just waiting for the right project”. The chance came about through music consultant Liam Klimek, who they’d previously worked with via Audio Network, Workshop’s parent company. “I’m not sure he was actually o ering us the job,” Dickinson says, “but we leapt on it and gave him no choice.”

First Sunset might have been the ‘right’ project, but the pair admit the timing couldn’t have been worse, as they were in the middle of shooting a big ad and ended up working weekends and evenings to bring their directing vision to life. The concept was inspired by 90s music videos, which they are both selfproclaimed fans of. “Modern music videos are often so cool and edgy or overly stylised that they can lack a little soul. We wanted to make something that went against that trend – and I guess that’s how we ended up with a dancing cloud,” explains Walker. However the deliberately lo-ﬁ aesthetic belies an incredibly time-consuming production process, almost ﬁve months in the making, thanks to the

“There’s something really special about the texture on the cloud and there’s real comedy about simply switching his expressions on cuts. You can’t get that with expensive special effects.”

intricacies of creating and shooting a freeﬂoating cloud puppet in-camera without recourse to CGI or green screen.

“We started o by sketching out how we felt Nimbo would look and then [puppetmaker] Emma [Powell] took it to the next level,” explains Walker. “There were loads of logistical and framing challenges, so as the puppet developed we had to adapt how we wanted to shoot the project against the limitations.” The puppet’s strings were then removed in post, a lengthy process. Nonetheless, he adds, the decision paid o : “There’s something really special about the texture on the cloud and there’s real comedy about simply switching his expressions on cuts. You can’t get that with expensive special e ects.”

Aside from this, the biggest challenge, say the duo, was “trying to schedule a day [for shooting] where the sun was actually shining –without that, the idea died.” Two days before the shoot – with the entire crew having been on standby for three weeks – it started snowing; “then, out of nowhere, we had two days of sunshine, which was ridiculously lucky.”

And the pair’s future directing prospects look similarly bright: since the release of First Sunset, independent labels have been in touch and there’s a follow-up project with Arcoleo on the cards. Ultimately, they hope to both write and shoot their adverts: “It’s always a hard sell-in to the client, but we’re hopeful that the right moment will present itself.” SS

Alex Arcoleo First Sunset

1 Rovaniemi, Finland, our home where two rivers meet in the middle of nature

2 Saluting the midsummer holiday of ‘Juhannus’

3 Our DP, Ilmari Mannermaa shooting the midnight sun

4 Each spring the snow from Lapland melts and floods parts of Rovaniemi

SNAPSHOTS

Miikka Niemi, CEO, founder and partner at Flatlight Films, shares lush views of Lappish splendour at company HQ in Rovaniemi, capital of Finland’s northernmost province

5 Our office in the autumn sunlight

6 My favourite local cafe, Kauppayhtiö, serves Lappish egg and salmon pizzas

7 A screening at Arctic Design Week

8 Living in Lapland inspires creativity

9 The River Auttijoki at the Auttiköngäs trail near Rovaniemi

10 Kuninkaanlaavu; a good place for camping and filming with drones.

11 Jätkänkynttilä Bridge is one of Rovaniemi’s landmark sights

12 Late fall or early winter, you can see the Aurora Borealis just outside the city

14 A big blanket of snow on the terrace in front of Kauppayhtiö cafe

15 Architecture that makes the most of its surroundings

16 Me enjoying fresh powder with a locally-built Ilahu snow ‘surfboard’

13 During early winter we have no sunlight, then at the start of February we see the sun again.