Otto Bell
began his media career in the WPP fellowship program which spanned three years
in three different jobs in three different countries, giving him a borderless
view of the media landscape.
Now as VP and Group Creative Director,
Courageous, his responsibility is to create and manage a brand building studio
that is the pipeline for native content for all of Turner’s properties across
all possible platforms. This enormous effort, with currently forty projects
completed since its official launch in June 2015, is, according to Bell,
“growing at a fierce pace.”
Located in
Union Square in lower Manhattan, the Courageous enterprise currently boasts
twenty full time employees from all media sectors and disciplines in a 12,000
square foot studio “We have 4k cameras, drones and cranes to create beautiful
branded content,” explains Bell, “and employees with editorial backgrounds,
Emmy and Morrow winning journalists from companies like Mashable, VICE and CNN,
video producers, documentarians, storytellers, web designers and developers,
etc, all in-house. We are fully self-sufficient and never outsource.” Courageous
has hit an inflection point, Bell reports, to air fourteen programs currently
in production from around the world. “And,” he adds, “We are currently shooting
aerial VR in Pennsylvania.” Their productions are designed to be format
agnostic with the ability to reside comfortably across any platform and media
type. The question becomes, Bell says, “what is the right channel for the
content we create? We find the unexplored angle for an advertiser’s traditional
media buy.”
As part of
its branded content effort, Courageous is producing a one day event called Human By Design, on August 3, 2016 at the Paley Center for Media in conjunction
with client Square Enix to support the release of their video game Deus Ex: Mankind
Divided. “This video game is set thirty years into the future but these are
present tense problems,” notes Bell. “There is human augmentation and mankind
becomes divided between those who are augmented and improved with technology
and others who are in an unadulterated state. Conflict ensues” and, he adds, “These
issues are bubbling up today.”
This event brings
together leading minds to explore the current state of human augmentation,
trying to answer the questions of how to police this brave new world, how
technology is shaping the human condition and what does it mean to be human. The
event is divided into three panels. Panel one is a discussion of whether
augmentation is a human right. Panel two reviews selective versus therapeutic augmentation
– that which corrects a disease like the insertion of a microchip for
Parkinson’s disease or condition like being able to walk while paralyzed as
compared to a technological augmentation for cosmetic purposes only. Panel
three, titled, The Future of the Far Far Next, will delve into the future of
human augmentation and how we will get there. One of the results of this
conference will be to “publish a code of ethics, independent of the game and of
CNN from this brain trust of luminaries” according to Bell.
For Jon Grant, Senior Manager,
Product marketing for Square Enix, “Creating Human by Design in conjunction
with CNN’s Courageous studio felt like the perfect fit for Deus Ex: Mankind
Divided. Video games stretch the imagination, and lead people to think outside
the box – a quality shared with those leading the bionics industry. This
conference is a big step for everyone involved as we broaden the overall
awareness of bionics for the science, sci-fi, and Deus Ex fans alike.”
As opposed to the uncertain, somewhat
pessimistic future of humans vs technically augmented bots, the future for
Courageous looks bright. “We approach branded content with a compass and not a
map,” explains Bell, who adds, “and we will succeed as long as the work we do
meets our clients’ objectives with surprising, additive ways with their
audiences. We want to do more to add to the public conversation as well as the
marketing objectives of the client. Branded content can be great content.”
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