What I Learned at 4A’s CreateTech 2016

By Jose Andrade, Vice President and Director of Creative Technology at Flashpoint Medica

I remember attending the inaugural, 4A’s CreateTech in 2011. It included J.P. Rangaswami (then Chief Science Officer of Salesforce) delivering an evocative and moving keynote on the rise of social enterprise; Zynga’s very cool physical installations engaging in fun and dynamic experiences; an animated panel of professionals on collaboration, expertise and agreements; and much more.

It set a high bar that five years later still makes good on its promise. As far as conferences go, I put CreateTech up there with CES, SXSW and AdobeMAX. A bold claim many would argue, except for those that have attended CreateTech. And since I haven’t missed one since its inception, I can report that I’m not alone: Almost like an exclusive biker club (yeah, I ride), we all look around at each other with that single knowing nod; acknowledging each other’s return year after year—as though to say, “Yeah, you know where to be”. And then you look at the agenda and host of marquee speakers and topics, and you nod a second time, acknowledging, “Yeah, you know why you keep coming”. In this eruptive and disruptive time of fight, flight, but ever forward, the trajectory of digital experiences acts as punctuation to these signs of the times. If you compare the first CreateTech to this most recent 2016 incarnation, attending constituents would surely nod a third time, and say, “Yeah, they have their finger on the pulse of what is and will be”. And while the 4A’s core focus has been the same for advertising agencies over the past one hundred years, the message and informational bytes it delivers via CreateTech always speak to current—and future—trends.

CreateTech 2016: Key Takeaways

The Changing Face and Phase of the Agency Model

The TV show Mad Men highlighted a paradigm of the agency model in the 1960s—a time that experienced one of the biggest eras of upheaval and division in our nation. Civil rights, segregation, war, political unrest and fights for our rights and our voice. (Pardon the interruption: As much as I want to keep politics out of this, but that sounds far too familiar right now!)

In the Thursday opening session, Tom Goodwin (EVP Innovation, Zenith Media) kicked things off with Thriving in Advertising: The Post Digital Age.

Goodwin suggested the following six points for advertisers and agencies to consider, as they strive to be more innovative:

• “Digital” needs to disappear: People don’t know what “offline” means anymore. They are always connected.
• Infinite screens: Devices will converge—not just radio, TV and newspapers.
• More intimate screens and data: We’ll store highly personal data on health apps and other places.
• New realities: Augmented and virtual reality will become commonplace.
• More mediated: We could fit 30 hours worth of activity into 24 hours, thanks to more multi-tasking capabilities on new devices.
• Newborn businesses: We should imagine a world where everyone has a device—and where trust is behind everything that we do.

Designing for the User Goes Into Overdrive

The dimension of experiences has exploded the walls of experience beyond uni-dimensional architecture. While VR/AR seem and feel more traditionally novel, leave it to the minds of audaciously creative and technical to refine and design for it. Two amazing sessions that illustrated this included:

Immersive Design: Creating In 360, VR and AR, with Marc Jensen, Managing Partner and Chief Innovation Officer, space150; and Erinn Farrell, General Manager, space150.

Experiments in the Wild: Some wild future forward innovations breaking the boundaries and creating new opportunities in experience design.

Moderated by Angela Fung, Executive Director of Digital Production, Ogilvy & Mather. The session included the following featuring panelists:

• Jason Wurtzel, Executive Director of Technology, Ogilvy & Mather
• Joe Laquinte, Creative Technologist, Ogilvy & Mather
• Freddie Bologno Mobile Product & Messaging Manager, Do Something
• Matthieu Lorrain, Creative Innovation Lead, The ZOO (Google)
• Michael Villaseñor, Creative Director, Marketing & Innovation, The New York Times
• Mike DiGiovanni, Mobile Architect, and Beryl Bai, Visual Designer, Isobar

Artificial Intelligence: Defined, Refined, Then Redefined

AI is also characterized as:

• Machine Learning, which defines it as a dynamically learning and refining model.

Cognitive Computing does so under the programming hood highlighting its core differences and advantages over traditionally structured formulaic systems.

Artificial Intelligence, which can be considered the overarching label, characterizes it as that which emulates human intelligence and as such the far scarier of the labels.

There was a lot of discussion around AI, but a key session was presented by one of the biggest leaders in the space. The New Breed of Brand Intelligence, was presented by Kim Dunbar, Digital Agency Lead, IBM Watson Partner Program; and Marc Blanchard, Global Head of Experience Design, Havas Worldwide.

The session demonstrated how AI is one of those technologies poised to evolve as a game changer. It was great to see Dunbar and Blanchard get under the hood and start to frame this technology into real-world practices and methodologies.

Diversity Indivisible

Diversity is a hot button of discussion and more necessary than ever before. If you were to look at all the innovations we’ve had in our nation since its inception, it would easily fill several pages of a Wikipedia instance. If you then added the diversity within those innovators, be it ethnic, lifestyle, or gender—the content would overflow. This year at CreateTech, a distinguished group of panelists held a very compelling discussion titled Designing for Diversity + Inclusion: Authenticity & Advertising, and moderated by Charles Duncan, SVP, Director of Technology, Leo Burnett; and the following featuring panelists:

• J. Hassan, Executive Creative Director, R/GA
• Tim Allen, President, North America, Wolff Olins
• Lawrence Edmondson, Director of Technology, Mullen Lowe Profero, Founder and CEO of The Weekend SPIN

One of the notable quotes came from gay and Muslim speaker A.J. Hassan, who said, “There’s a responsibility to being authentic—not only a responsibility but more and more it’s driving effectiveness.”

Epilogue

Open letter to agencies: Don’t practice AI. That is “Artificial Ignorance”. You can’t afford to. Not now. Put down that gin and tonic and pay close attention to CreateTech’s call to action. It has its finger on the pulse of what could help you become scalable, even future proof.

I’ve watched Chick Foxgrover, Chief Digital Officer of the 4A’s, toil endlessly year after year, scouring the planet for the most compelling topics, best minds and influential groups to present not just information-rich content, but information that could evolve or save your business. It’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity.

And by the way, I don’t work for the 4A’s, in a way you could say they work for me—actually, they work for all creative professionals looking to remain relevant in today’s fast moving and ever evolving landscape.