As you know from my previous post, I had the privilege to attend a workshop at Boulder Digital Works last week. The topic was “Making Digital Work” and it was setup in a workshop session style with a series of fantastic speakers & leaders of the advertising industry setting the tone with their presentations. All of the presentations will be made available online and when they are I will post them. In addition, the entire workshop was taped and can be viewed on UStream.
I went to the workshop with fellow Martinite, Kevin Rothermel, and between the two of us we tried our best to create a Twitter Fail Whale from the massive amount of tweets coming from @edubble_u and @KevinRothermel with a #digiwork hashtag. We tweeted the notable quotes and pics from the workshop throughout the two days as they were occuring and based on the ReTweets and comments it looks like several people were following.
I have a newfound respect for professional bloggers and journalists who manage to Live Blog and Tweet from these types of workshops and conferences all day, and then still find the energy later that evening to pound out a blog post recap on the key takeaways of the day. Seeing as it is 1 week since the workshop and I am just now getting my blog post recap published …my hat is off to the pros.
Yes, I can confirm that it actually is this gorgeous in Boulder…

This blog post is a recap of all of the speaker action from Day 1 of the workshop. The reason for not combining Day 1 and Day 2 recap into one blog post should be evident by the coma inducing length of this blog post. Enjoy!
Day 1 Kickoff/ Intro – Matt Howell, CIO @ Modernista
“What can we as individuals do to move our agencies forward?”

Matt Howell, CIO at Modernista, kicked off the workshop and served as one of the primary leaders throughout the 2-day event. He focused his intro presentation on giving everyone a good base of knowledge about the current state of advertising to use as a foundation to work/ think from. The gist of the presentation can be summed up as …How did we get here (A Brief History of Interwebs & Advertising)?; What things have changed (Mass Media 1-way Yelling is Dead, Consumer has Controls)?; and What challenges do agencies face due to the changes (Agencies Must Change Model and Process or Die)?
Now that you get the basic idea of Matt’s workshop kickoff speech, here are the notable quotes that I thought were great:
- “The structures and processes that guided our industry for the past 25+ years has begun to fail. It is not working now, and something needs to change. The old structures are actually becoming liabilities to the business.”
- “83% of the Mad Men viewers fast-forward through TV commercials (..we don’t even watch our own commercials!)”
- “TV and Print are not going away, nothing is DEAD but…growth will NOT come from traditional channels anymore.”
- Tobbaccowalla quote “it is much better to have a smaller share of an exploding industry verses a growing share in a dying one”
- “Be uncomfortably unsentimental about the old days. Rip off the bandaid already!”
- “We have a lot of money invested in people who are no longer capable (or willing) of contributing.”
The New Digital Landscape – Alastair Green, Digital ECD @ Team One
“Ideas are now more important and powerful than ever. The big idea is not dead, but it definitely has changed.”

Alastair Green gave a presentation that provided a quick overview of the “new digital landscape”. Since Matt Howell had just kicked off the workshop with a solid foundation on a similar topic, the bulk of his presentation was really more of a roll call of various new things (new companies, new apps, campaigns, etc) that are happening with digital advertising and communications today. Alastair is clearly very knowledgeable about the space, and to me he actually seemed more like a developer than what I am used to for a creative director (…he had a StickyBits t-shirt on, that seems pretty KPow-ish to me). The main points to take from his presentation is very similar to Matt Howell’s, with the notable addition that he places a TON of importance on the role that User Experience (UX) will play in digital advertising and communications going forward.
The sound-bite quotes that I took from Alastair’s presentation are the following (read them with an English accent to get the full effect):
- “User Experience (UX) is one of the most important disciplines to emerge in the new digital landscape.”
- He recommended checking out WeePlaces.com for a cool FourSquare visualizer.
- Brands who “Get It” today — Nike, Gap, Levi’s, Bravo, BestBuy, Starbucks, Old Spice (well Weiden really but OS gets some credit)
- Where are we headed — More mobile, More socialized layers and Location-Based Contextual Awareness (messaging relevant to where you are at the time)
- Some important new roles in advertising – Creative Technologist, Technical Strategist, UX Designer, UX Planner
- “If you are going to play in this space, its about commitments not about campaigns. The conversation does not stop when the campaign does.”
- “It is ok to not know the answer. There are a lot of geeky helpful people + the interwebs. Just ask.”
- “Try and fail. Fail and learn. Failure is part of the DNA, get comfortable with it.”
Defining an Audience – Kim Laama, CD @ AKQA
“A demographic profile does not cut it. Who are your users? What is their story?”

Kim Laama is a Creative Director at AKQA San Francisco, and is leading the charge there for using persona development as a means to identify and segment the audience over the typical demographic profile. Kim comes from a software design background before joining AKQA which I thought it was really interesting. I think some type of mashup of the software design process & the advertising creative process is a good place to start when thinking about how agencies need to change. That being said, Kim’s presentation was not about fixing the agency process — it was about a better way to identify the audience specifically for designing & developing online experiences (digital advertising, websites, etc).
Although she seemed a little nervous in the presentation delivery, Kim definitely has a mastery of using persona’s to inform how something should be designed/ developed. She presented her topic by looking at three case studies. I thought that the connection from case-study to UX/ Persona power was weak in parts (nerves), but in the end she made a very good case for using persona’s to really dig into the emotions, behaviors and actions of each of the user group and how to use that to inform the information architecture/ messaging/ and design of whatever it is you are creating. I had an opportunity to chat with Kim after her presentation, and she is delightful and super-smart and someone you would want to partner with on a project to learn from.
I captured the following takeaways from her presentation:
- “Consumers today have more control over the experiences they choose to have. The best way to reach them is to understand them & understand where they are thinking/ coming from.”
- “Personas should be driven by quantitative and qualitative research.”
- “Personas should never be anonymous. Give him/her a name.”
- “You need to be able to map the online personas back to the demographic profiles/ segments that media is probably using as their guide.”
- “Figure out ways to make your research output be visually descriptive. If you have the time partner a creative with your planner to reach some visually explanatory outcomes of the persona work.”
- “To me the Team Trifecta = Art Designer, Interaction Designer, Engagement Planner.”
- Two book recommendations 1) Designing for the Digital Age, Kim Goodwin; 2) Storytelling for User Experience, Whitney Quesenbery
Creative Briefs in the Post Digital World – Gareth Kay, Director of Brand Strategy @ Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
“The piece of paper is far less important than the journey. This is NOT a baton race.”

I think Gareth was probably my favorite speaker of the group. This is partially because I had been following him before the workshop ever since hearing of the first surfacing of his “New Brief” proposal, but also because he is a skilled presenter and has a humorous way of delivering his message with nuggets of wonderful wisdom folded right into the laughs. As the title of his presentation indicates, the focus of Gareth’s presentation was on the fact that advertising has changed so much over the years (…well the world has changed & advertising changed with it) but for some reason the creative brief has not changed with it. Bottom line, he thinks this is WRONG and his presentation tells you why it is wrong and what he would propose as the new brief for today.
My list of bulleted quotes is not going to do this thinking the justice it deserves. I would recommend you click on the link and go read the presentation & his POV on the matter to get the full understanding. Gareth was full of quotable material throughout his presentation, but the ones that resonated with me included the following:
- “This is NOT about digital. This is about digital as a type of idea, not a channel. This is about the long, slow channel …culture. Advertising is in the culture business.”
- Gareth got into advertising after his band broke up in 1992. No strategic importance in this bullet, just thought it was funny.
- “Culture has moved on — but planning has not kept up.”
- “We live in the age of ideas that DO.”
- “Customers don’t own brands …but they do want to participate.”
- “The bigger a brand gets, the smaller it should act. (PSFK reference)”
- “5% of ideas will thrive over time, but since you cannot tell which ones those are you need to try a ton of them.”
- “Doing and then learning is a much better strategy these days VS Learning and then doing.”
- “The modern ad agency should live on Madison Valley (Madison Avenue + Silicon Valley)”
- “If all else fails, go to www.whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com”
How it All Comes Together – Dave Schiff + Alex Burnard, VP/ GCDs @ Crispin, Porter + Bogusky
“…Um sort of by accident, but with a hellovalotta passion and commitment dude!”

Let me start by saying that Dave Schiff and Alex Burnard are the reason “don’t judge a book by its’ cover” is accurate. They don’t look like your average creative director, and I am pretty sure that they could kick your average creative director’s ass or at least scare the bejezzus out of him/her. While the ass kicking and scaring might be one of their skills, what Dave and Alex do for a living and do very well is to serve as Creative Directors at CP+B. Their presentation was to tell the group how to take an innovative, progressive and no-precedent type of idea for a client and figure out how to get it done. Oh yeah, and how to get it done on a budget that is next to nothing.
The vehicle that Dave and Alex used for covering this topic was to tell us about a groundbreaking project/ campaign that was their brainchild – Shocking Barack. The concept was for one of their clients, Brammo Motercycles, and essentially the idea was to go on a roadtrip along the same route that the Auto-Execs took in their excessive travel to get to Washington, D.C. to get their government bailouts. They documented the entire trip, came up with a lightning-fast process for editing/ legal/ community-management, and learned that what they had initially planned for the project turned out to be absolutely NOTHING like what the end product ended up being. The key is that they started out with something small, and then got that out to the audience to begin building a following — and then took the community feedback to inform what their next moves were (literally if you want to look at the map).
I think the best way to gain knowledge from this presentation is truly to watch the video on UStream + to go check out the Shocking Barack site to see how things ended up. The key takeaway for me was that the ability to build and shift and optimize on-the-fly was the key to their success, as opposed to the traditional approach of a HUGE campaign creation & single massive launch. Here are the key takeaways that I got from their presentation:
- Previous to this campaign neither of them had any “real-time advertising” experience. They figured it out as they went along guided by the community.
- “People began following us and our journey, but it was clear that they were holding their cards (participation, advocacy) close to the vest until they knew we were not just a silly ad campaign – until they knew we were for real.”
- They developed relationships with the PR/ Media/ Journalists who picked this up early on in the trip. They collaborated and shared inside info with them constantly along the way which led to better stories written >> which led to more following >> which led to more stories >> and so on.
- They had a 24 hour cycle that they developed for all video, blog-posts, etc. That cycle included several typical touchpoints along the way including …client approval and legal. In addition they included the media team in the loop on this cycle so they could optimize based on what was coming up.
If you are still reading this, I am shocked. This is by far the longest freaking blog post I have ever written.
If you are still reading this, then check back tomorrow for the Day 2 recap.
Hopefully the recap provided some additional value or context to the slides that will ultimately be made available for all the presentations or from just watching UStream.