Creatives explore, challenge and take risks.
Technologists analyze, problem solve and deliver.
Great. But is it possible to build exciting viable tech solutions and remain creative?
While creatives strive for ideas that enrich and captivate our lives, the perception is that those more focused on the ‘techy’ side of marketing, concentrate on data, performance, and results.
But is this really true?
Imagine what can be achieved when creativity and technology work in harmony together? When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Think Woody & Buzz. Bey & Jay. Fish & Chips.
A relative newcomer, in the right hands, technology is curious and playful, and when combined with creativity produces truly engaging activations.
Technology occupies a space at the forefront of all our daily business and personal lives, think how simply you Skype clients or ask Alexa about tomorrow’s weather, and so should be seamlessly embedded in all our clients’ marketing solutions. The idea that it is an extra, an add-on or something to think about once the ‘big creative idea’ has been bought, is outdated and counterproductive.
Start-ups and enterprises have successfully blended the creative idea with technology to create new business models, greater convenience and more engaging experiences for consumers. Spotify has revolutionized the way we listen to music. Amazon has transformed the way we shop. Netflix the way we binge-watch our favorite shows. These business models brilliantly combine creativity and technology, but at the heart of each of them is a simple idea that enhances our lives.
New technologies open up opportunities for telling stories, amplifying communications and creating content. You can now make the user a participant in the story with Virtual Reality, create personalized content using machine learning with your design software or use one of many thousands of digital and social platforms to amplify your experience. To be able to take full advantage of these tools, technology experts and creatives need to work together, sharing a vision for the experience they can achieve.
It is our responsibility as marketers to understand the technological possibilities and to do this we need to experiment and collaborate. Increasingly at here at GPJ, we are benefiting from inspiring briefs. Briefs that put technology at the heart of our creative solutions.
Working with some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including IBM, Cisco, and Google has provided us with an enviable platform on which to explore specific client challenges and build viable solutions that are grounded in emerging technology.
Technology sits at the core of the creative process from the very start, it’s the tech that can provide creatives with greater scope to flourish. When properly integrated it generates challenging and exciting live activations that celebrate clients’ brands and products where it matters most – in a hands-on, touch it, feel it, live it experience.
Using technology to inform and ignite creativity, from brief to delivery, means challenging ourselves, as a sector, to step out of our comfort zones and away from well-trodden familiar paths. Today, creativity should embrace technology and use it to open up new areas of thinking and more rewarding integrated experiences; It’s what clients deserve and should expect.
Adapting in this way allows agencies to embrace change and quickly establish collaborative, multi-disciplined and agile working groups. And by establishing dynamic teams of strategists, creatives, technologists, and producers we’ll no longer face the question of which discipline takes center stage or who leads the project because they work together harmoniously.
The process becomes entirely collaborative. It allows innovative creativity to flourish. And most importantly provides clients with the best possible experience.
Technology? Creative? They are the perfect partnership.
Welcome to the era of Creative Technology.
By Trudy Hardingham, Creative Services Director and Zara Kerwood, Creative Technologist at George P. Johnson and as featured in Advertising Week 360.
