Nimble

Thinking Creatively in the Digital Age

Robin Landa

• Publisher: HOW Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781440337574
• eBook ISBN: 9781440337635
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

In graphic design, creative thinking skills are undoubtedly important, but sometimes the importance of critical thinking skills is overlooked. Nimble will help you discover how to develop a creativity that is strategic and also able to cross platforms, industries or sectors. You'll discover a creative thinking process that allows you to generate scalable ideas that are both sticky and stretchy.As you develop a?exible mind that is ideal for visual communication, digital marketing, or social media, you'll increase your value as a designer - to your clients, your employer, or simply your own work.

CHAPTER 06
INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW WITH
MARK AVNET

Photo courtesy of 360i

DEAN OF 360iU

As dean of 360i’s educational center, 360iU, Mark is charged with educating employees on cross-functional skills to inspire big ideas catalyzed by the collaboration of strategy, technology and creative. For 360i’s roster of Fortune 500 marketers, Mark advises on how to leverage digital technologies to create closer connections between people and brands.

Mark has more than twenty-five years of experience in media, technology and education. Prior to 360i, he was a professor and chair of the Creative Technology Track at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Brandcenter, widely heralded as the nation’s top graduate school in advertising and marketing.

Avnet’s agency background includes time at Ammirati Purls Lintas’s APL Digital as SVP and Director of Production & Technology, and time at Lot21 Interactive Marketing as CTO and head of its Emerging Media Development Lab.

Mark holds a Master’s Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a Master’s Degree in Media Psychology from Fielding Graduate University.

How does your agency foster a culture of ideas, experimentation and collaboration?

We have built 360i to be powered by curiosity. For us, that means constantly asking Why? and looking for those sometimes hidden threads that connect different ideas, thoughts, insights, feelings and behaviors, and then creating from that something new that achieves our clients’ goals. Rather than focusing on what we know, we focus on what we don’t know about consumer behavior and how it is rapidly evolving, especially when it comes to how people are using mobile, social and technology. We want to identify all the ways brands can engage in authentic and relevant ways.

Because we grew from a digital start-up, unencumbered by the way traditional agencies are run—based on silos and separate departments—our process has been collaborative from the start. In fact, it almost has to be for us to do the digital-centric work we do, and to build marketing strategies for a rapidly changing technological ecosystem that intersects with a rapidly changing culture.

This is not to say we’re about the technology—we rarely start with tech in our thinking. We start with our clients’ goals, what their audience needs, the currency that will drive those connections that give these brands the authority to speak to those audiences in a mutually beneficial manner, and finally what will be the best way to connect the dots. And often the best way has a digital, social or technological component.

To come up with better ideas, we make sure that our meetings include a mix of subject matter experts who represent cross-discipline expertise, as early as possible. Some agencies talk about T-shaped thinkers; I like to think of ours as being Tetris-shaped—not just a single deep descender, but the ability to think deeply across a number of areas, to fit dynamically into the changing landscape in which we work.

We value curiosity and experimentation. It’s how humans (and agencies) learn and develop. So experimentation is a deeply engrained part of our culture—everything from prototyping in the lab, to thought experiments, to running pilot test-and-learns with clients and vendors. We value learning and iteration, taking the results of our marketing engagements and experiments and applying the lessons to enhance our performance the next time around.

In addition to focusing on earning the rewards of good client relationships and industry recognition, we reward good ideas internally by making sure they’re heard in the first place and that the people who have them get credit for them, even when the idea evolves to something different. We make sure that the provenance is clear.

How do you educate employees on cross-functional skills to inspire big ideas?

Training has always been a priority at 360i, and we launched 360iU three years ago to bring more academic rigor to our educational and professional development programs, helping ensure support for a diverse community of thinkers. My background is in both advertising and education, and as dean of 360iU, I ensure our programs have useful outcomes and that they are designed to help us think across channels, across disciplines and across domains. We have courses in different ideation techniques, presentation skills, creative technology, journalism, even how to manage and prioritize everyday workflow in order to clear up time to think. Our classes and workshops are open to everyone at the agency, and we are constantly working to ensure we have a good mix of departments represented. When someone has something they’d like to teach, I’ll work with them to develop a good program and find an opportunity for them to present either as a stand-alone class or as part of one of our ongoing series of drop-in sessions.

How does your agency create authentic experiences?

Our ability to do this ties back to consumer behavior and understanding how consumer behavior can help us reimagine the role of a brand in consumers’ lives. Because people’s behavior is rapidly evolving, we are in constant pursuit of knowing how people discover brands and share stories, and this helps us create campaigns that connect with consumers in relevant and authentic ways.

How do you leverage digital technologies to create closer connections between people and brands?

We strive to be the best digital-centric communications agency with integrated earned, owned and paid capabilities. That is, we look for the best strategy, based on insights about a brand and people, that solves our clients’ business challenges, and then look for the best mediating platform or technology to bring everyone together. Sometimes that’s television or print or radio or OOH, but often there’s a digital touch point or insight that may be closer to the life people are living—especially as the world gets more mobile and social, and people increasingly use digital devices to connect. So we make sure that we acknowledge how people are living, and then build the connections based on that—by keeping our thinking “digital/social/mobile by design” and not making digital an add-on. We’re not tied to a single favorite platform, or even two or three. By having a very deep knowledge of all the platforms people use, from traditional to the latest digital and technology innovations, we can design our programs to work across all the platforms in ways that make the most sense for each program.

How do you help people become creative makers?

What’s the old adage—give someone a fish, they eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they can eat for a lifetime? We help people learn to fish. We do this by encouraging big thinking and by answering the question “Is it possible to…?” with a resounding “Yes!”

But more importantly, we get people over the paralyzing fear of making mistakes that can stop them from even trying. Getting hands-on with tools and tech, showing how easy it is to use things like IFTTT or a MakerBot, helping people ease into Arduino through Lego Mindstorms, or putting ad hoc teams together for a pet project—all of these things inspire and help people realize that they can think of things outside their area of expertise and make stuff that actually works.

Our lab, open to everyone, is stocked with all sorts of tools and toys, and anyone who wants to learn how to do something is able to. For people who aren’t ready to be hands-on, they can submit an idea and we’ll figure out how to bring it to life. In that way, ideation becomes an important part of being a creative maker.

What kind of mind-set is optimal for digital marketing?

Really easy: Start with people. Always start with people. What do they need? What are they trying to do in their lives? Then look at the brand: What does it have to offer that might help people do whatever they’re trying to do? Does it have the cultural authority to offer that to a particular audience? If so, what creative things can we do, knowing what’s possible from a technological standpoint, that will connect people and the brand? And then we can apply all the great stuff we know from advertising and marketing experience to build on the things that work. It’s important to learn from everyone’s history, not just from a postmortem of our own work.

Long and short: Starting with technology might make you a great production company, but starting with people can help you become a great strategic and creative marketer.

What is a creative technology mind-set?

I came up with this when I founded and ran the creative technology track at VCU Brandcenter and have adopted it as 360iU’s motto: learn, do, teach.

It’s important to learn, and then you have to apply what you’ve learned. To really make it part of yourself, you have to teach it as well. But teaching isn’t mono-directional. When you teach something, you clarify what it means, and you also open yourself up to learning how what you’re teaching can apply to someone else—that’s cross-pollination coming into t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Embracing the New Challenges
• Chapter 01. Thinking Creatively
• Chapter 02. The New Creativity Prep School
• Chapter 03. Thinking Actively
• Chapter 04. Story: Crafting Narrative Experiences in the Age of Digital Content
• Chapter 05. Staying Nimble
• Chapter 06. Interviews
• Resources
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright