Becoming a Creative Technologist. Interview with Trevor O’Brien

Trevor O’Brien, Partner and Chief Technology Officer at Deutsch has found a career that perfectly balances his right and left brain talents. He studied computer science at university in London and, upon graduation, veered away from the prescribed IT career path, accepting instead a job in media. “I got into a creative environment right out of school,” he explained, “and I realized that I liked the freedom to work in creative forms.” 

His creative/computer science background was well timed in the age of media data and analytics. It led him to a career in advertising helping agency clients leverage technology to best reach their target consumers. Today, his work in Deutsch’s NY office involves the use of A.I. (artificial intelligence) to build intuitive sites and mechanisms as part of a greater agency team that includes talent from across the agency landscape.

Charlene Weisler: You studied IT and yet found yourself in a completely different type of IT-based career. Does that surprise you?

Trevor O’Brien: Yes. I didn’t know about this world of creative interest in technology when I was a student and even today, when I talk at schools, they don’t know that a career on Madison Avenue is an option. The students only know the big tech players. I knew nothing about the creative space and the use of technologies to do creative things.

Charlene: How has the advertising industry evolved since you first started?

Trevor: When I first started my agency career, they were trying to figure out what to do with people like me - for example, which meetings to attend. And the project process was linear – once the creative was done it was then passed on to the technologists to place on platforms etc. But now we are collected into a project team, which is much more intuitive. Technologists, like creatives, are problem solvers and it all works well. At Deutsch, all participants working on a project that will take a month or two to complete meet in a room called a War Room in order to organize and prioritize. The team works on the project through its duration including design and software within and through the creative phase. The space has matured enough so there is value in having a creative technologist alongside a director, for example.

Charlene: Can you give me an example of a War Room project?

Trevor: Yes. We are excited about our client ACUVUE which is the premier contact lens company owned by J&J. In February we started a global website that was specifically developed for that brand. It allowed us to use the War Room model – with a producer, designer etc – to envision the user experience from all angles with all of us sitting together in the new development process. Every two weeks we would deliver a new piece of the project for review by the group to assess and attach storytelling to the general brand advertising and media mix. This was a business changer for the client. We will be launching in multiple markets this year. A.I. will impact how the content will connect to consumers.

Charlene: How important is TV in the media mix at this time and as it moves into connected TV?

Trevor: My expertise is primarily in digital but I work closely with our Chief Creative Officer, Dan Kelleher. We try to look at ideas with both a TV and digital execution. I was involved in personalizing TV ads for some time, based on browser data, so the consumer can see different versions of the creative at the same time. I see the future of TV as more addressable, more cloud based technology where the video is rendered dynamically creating the potential for thousands of personalized versions that can be targeted to your TV set top box. I believe that online will move to TV and other screens. TV today is an awareness driver and measurement is still tough – it is still not a perfect science. With the move to smart TVs, then TV will move from awareness to a more personalized messaging to you to better connect you with a brand.

Charlene: What advice would you give to the next generation of IT students?

Trevor: For me, the days of tech people being confined to dark backrooms are gone. The nerd is the new cool. There are new ways to take your talent in new creative ways. Take your technical knowledge and discover new ways to use it to do new things. There is so much data and there will be so much more. We need amazing data scientists who are also creative and have the ability to tell stories using data. The data scientist who can bring a narrative to the numbers will be golden.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

Facebook’s Katherine Shappley Advises Media’s Next Generation

For young people striving to forge a career in media, it is both the best of times and the worst of times. The best because there have never been so many companies and pathways into the media field. The worst because the transformative change in our industry could make some career path choices obsolete in a few years. How can one successfully navigate?

MediaVillage’s 1stFive initiative helps young up-and-comers navigate their entry into a media career from internship through the first five years. At their annual 1stFive meeting this past week, seasoned media executives met with current student interns to offer advice for a successful career entry.

Katherine Shappley, Head of U.S. Agency at Facebook, offered her insights on managing one’s online presence while at the same time going beyond technology to form impactful and authentic human interactions. She described a deft balancing act.

Shappley’s own career path took an international form. She participated in a Semester at Sea while at university and from there sated her self-described “curiosity bug” by teaching in Korea, the Czech Republic and Turkey before launching her media career at Microsoft, then Time Inc and now Facebook.

In her presentation to students, she offered the following insights as to how to best prepare for a career in media … or for any career for that matter:

1.       Curate Your Reputation through the Careful Use of Technology.

Most of us love to post our activities on social media and most activities are fairly benign. But Shappley offered a word of caution. “Technology is transforming the way we do business,” she explained, “and connections are important. You need to manage your online profile. So don’t post your drinking binges on social media, for example. We are in a more transparent world than before.”

2.       There is Great Value in Human Interactions.

It is very easy to rely solely on email to communicate with prospective employers and current contacts but that would be a mistake, according to Shappley. She advises, “Remember to pick up the phone and have a conversation. It is our digital nature to send a series of emails but stop doing that. Have a conversation. Look them in the eye. Make time. There are only 24 hours in a day and you have an opportunity to meet with many people. Make meaningful connections with those who can help you in your career path. Ask for a 30 minute meeting request. Have specific questions and make a relevant impact.”

3.       Yes It is a Career But Remember to Have Fun

A work environment should also be a comfortable and hopefully fun place for an employee to thrive. Shappley believes that one can best succeed by working for a company that is a cultural fit as much as a skills fit. “Find people who you want to work with, have fun with and laugh with,“ she recommends, “It will be an awesome experience no matter what you do.”


This article first appeared in MediaBizBloggers.com

Getting the Attention of Millennials. Q&A with Anne Hubert.

Anne Hubert, Senior Vice President, Scratch, is a polymath whose interests span from acting and the arts to the interdisciplinary study of symbolic systems (computer science, philosophy, psychology and linguistics).  Hubert, who studied at both Stanford and Harvard, currently heads up Scratch, a division of Viacom that behaves like a consultancy.

In this fascinating interview, Hubert talks about Scratch, sharing  Millennial insights,  advice for the next generation and some predictions as to what the media landscape will look like three to five years from now.

CW: Can you tell me about Scratch? What is it? How does it fit into the Viacom family?

AH: Scratch is a creative swat team that channels the power of Viacom in new ways. If you look at Viacom overall, it has properties in about 160 countries around the world. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, our fans invite our content into their homes, onto their phones and into their lives. We study them obsessively, receiving massive amounts of audience feedback that we use to engage passionate fans. Scratch is a group that brings our experience reaching and engaging audiences and cultural insights out into the world.

CW: How do you use Scratch to connect to brands and communities?

AH: There is so much information coursing through the organization about who our audiences are, what is driving them, what is connecting with them, what is breaking through the clutter and really reaching and engaging them. There is a lot of value in that for our partners.

Scratch takes all of that expertise and uses it to help partners deeply understand their consumers and develop strategies for where to take their business next - from the products they make to the brands they build to the kinds of organizations they build and the talent they attract.

Our work is essentially a cross between a management consultancy, a creative agency and a research firm all within the wrapper of the global media and cultural force that is Viacom.

CW: Looking ahead to the next three to five years, can you give me some predictions on the media landscape?

AH: One of the biggest things shifting in media right now is how we all think about the business we’re all really in. Right now eyeballs are eyeballs, impressions are impressions, but from my perspective, what we are really operating in is an economy of attention.

Attention is a topic that my team is very actively studying now. We are developing a much deeper understanding of what attention looks like, where it is valuable and how context matters. It will be about moving beyond tune in, click though and the approximations that we are used to. I think it is something that is a core idea and a core priority not for just this company, but also for the industry.

Here is a link to my TEDx Talk on The Question of Attention.

CW: Anne, I would love for you to articulate your advice to the next generation – those who are in college today.

AH: I got some good advice early in my career which was, number one, figure out how to be useful in any job. I also think, for me, my process on this long and winding road is to tune into what really lights me up, what I really get excited about. I think so often it’s easy for people to say that “I want to end up in this place” or “my goal is to be” or “to have this title at this company.” Those things are fine to have in mind but I have found that it is much more useful to start with “what do I really find myself thinking about morning, noon and night?” Figure out how to lean into that and make that the meat of your job. Figure out what makes you come alive and go after that. 

This article was first publsihed in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

ARF Re:Think Helps Researchers Rethink the Future Media Landscape

ARF’s annual Re:Think conference, scheduled for March 23-26, 2014, is a research extravaganza, if you will pardon the hyperbole. Each year, the ARF offers valuable insight into what is in the bleeding edge of media research, culling studies and insights from the best research papers in the industry.

This will be Gayle Fuguitt’s first ARF conference under her leadership and the list of topics and speakers indicate that the ARF is looking to offer immediately implementable and actionable research-based information from a range of industry experts. The conference focuses on three main areas: 1. Big Data, 2. How today’s Corporate management views Research and 3. Career Development and Mentoring.

This year’s Re:Think is notable for the number of agencies attending (+30% than last year) with 168 papers submitted around big data, cross platform measurement , social and mobile consumer engagement, and researcher of the future. The format of the conference has changed to accommodate as much new information as possible. According to Fuguitt, “Our new format will have shorter, 10-20 minute presentations focused on the business results and immediate practical applications.” An example: Artie Bulgrin of ESPN, will give a brief update on Project Blueprint, revealing “compelling new data that will validate last year's findings on multiplatform usage and the effect on incremental reach and time across day, week, month or campaign.” He will also share “unique insights about individual platform usage and fundamental principles that we see emerging and explain how ESPN plans to use Blueprint as part of our broader ESPN XP initiative for clients going forward."

I spoke to Fuguitt about this year’s conference in a series of videos:

Charlene Weisler talks to Gayle Fuguitt about the 2014 Re:Think in this 4:29 minute video:

CW: Gayle, what makes this year’s Re:Think different from past Re:Thinks?

GF: What I want to do is to take the biggest, most dynamic issues facing the industry and get them out into the public discourse as a conversation, not just a formal conference. I see an incredibly dynamic media landscape change with the consumer in control and new touch points creating all this new data -  It is the Big Data that everyone is talking about. The theme for day one is “rethink consumer engagement” in the new dynamic media landscape:  beyond big data to breakthroughs in cross platform measurement, and mobile, social engagement.  The second big dynamic is what I call “Impatient Bosses” of the C-Suite who are asking us in the Insights and Research part of the industry to sort all of this out and help understand how all the consumers are consuming media and how to create great advertising, how to allocate resources and how to make decisions in real time. The third big dynamic is looking at what we call the “Researcher’s Identity Crisis”. With all these new jobs and job titles, marketing and analytics jobs, social media strategists, there are a lot of new roles and the evolution of current roles in the research sector. Budget allocations are being shifted from what have been historically research roles to roles that fit more within the context of this new media landscape. So my goal at this conference is to help our members and the attendees at the conference to rethink consumer engagement, rethink creative, not just counting, and rethink careers.

Gayle Fuguitt talks to Charlene Weisler about the changing research roles in the industry today. The video is 4:12 minutes:

Gayle Fuguitt tells charlene Weisler what is not to be missed at this year's ARF Re:Think in this 5:47 minute video:

  

CW: What is not to be missed at this year’s conference?

GF: What should not be missed are the discussions of new applications of some existing techniques and the ability of leaders in research to apply new mobile connections with consumers. Consumers are on mobile and now we have some new insights into consumers and mobile media. There are also some surprising segmentation techniques that have been developed around television. While we are focusing on the dynamic media landscape as a broad landscape, television is still critically important in our industry. In a result that is both surprising and comforting, there is as much innovation going on in some of the traditional forms of advertising media for consumers as in the very new bleeding edge.

From what I see, the new ARF, under Gayle Fuguitt’s leadership, is committed to creating a relevant and valuable future for researchers. Whatever their new titles may include and in whatever department they reside, there has never been a better time to be in research. This year’s Re:Think not only will help current researchers stay relevant and knowledgeable, it may also encourage the next generation of media mavens to consider research as a viable and fascinating career path.