“What are you talking about?” I replied. It never dawned on me that he was referring to a team of social media strategists, creatives, media planners and developers who were gathering to get briefed on a new client initiative.

He pointed to the team that had just gathered.

“Oh them. No, they work here.”

His look suggested surprise that we could actually have that many young people in one place at one time working on an actual project.

Yesterday, I encountered a similar reaction when the founder of a big New York rep company was visiting to show off his clients’ work.

“So, how do you manage to stay fresh in this business after all these years?” he wanted to know.

“I get out of the way,” was the honest answer, explaining that the wisest thing anyone my age could do was to hire smart young people, load them up with responsibility, point them in the right direction and hover in the background until someone needs you.

He, too, was stunned, assuming that no one would do that out of a need for control, or a fear of becoming irrelevant, or a concern that everyone else would get the credit.

To me, these reactions reflect some of the vestiges of the old days in advertising. They’re left over from a time when the industry made people pay their dues instead of rewarding raw talent, an age when people spent way too much energy protecting their turf or their rung on the ladder, the days when agency staffers were more obsessed with crediting people instead of the idea.

I find that the smartest, most inspiring people I work with tend to be the youngest. They move seamlessly from one medium to another. They have the courage to try new things.  They’re so familiar with technology and its potential that nothing seems impossible.

In the last week I witnessed a team on which no one was more than a year or two out of college conceive and launch the Good Belly Project. They came up with the idea, took it to local restaurants, sold it internally, got it online and into the press.  No one cared about personal credit; they just wanted to make it.

It was the same kind of initiative and determination that led to TNGG signing a deal with boston.com. Three 24-year olds had the idea, did the work, initiated the dialog and have been delivering the goods.

Take a look at the companies that are thriving, inventing, creating new stuff.  Big companies like Google. Small companies such as Hubspot.  New companies like Kickstarter or SCVNGR or Livefyre. They’re filled with 20 year olds making products, reinventing service, and leveraging new technologies.

Want to stay young, relevant, and deserved of some control?  Want to attract the kind of talent you actually need to prosper long term? Focus on the bigger stuff: culture, vision, standards, organization and casting. Then let go and out of the way.

Thoughts?

Video: Young minds from Zeitgeist 2011. Eric Derdinis, 20-year-old U Penn student, talks about his prototype belt to aid the blind.

A month ago I crowdsourced questions here and on Twitter for the instructors at BDW’s Making Digital Work workshop.

We settled on five.

How do we get clients to embrace more innovative work?

What can we learn from software startups?

Do agencies have a role in social media?

How do we stop the talent drain?

What kind of people should we hire?

Here are the answers from my good friends and teachers Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Kim Laama, Tim Malbon, Sheena Matheiken, Scott Prindle and John Winsor.I weigh in, too.

Some of my favorite soundbites:

Matt Howell on innovation: If we’re serious about selling more progressive work we have to get serious about investing in prototyping, showing how something works and how you’d interact with it.

Gareth Kay on social media: One of the biggest problems with social media is that people are too focused on the media part of social media instead of on the social part.

Sheena Matheiken on software inspiration: Developers in general, especially the creatively inclined ones, are such doers. They just create stuff. They don’t sit around and noodle. They make and prototype.

Tim Malbon on software inspiration: Try not to treat what you’re trying to make like a piece of traditional media. It doesn’t need to be designed massively up front. It can be cruder; it can be quicker.

John Winsor on retaining talent: Traditionally agencies are siloed. The creative department stands on a pedestal. The account people are there to serve them. Strategy is somewhere in between. But great ideas come from everywhere so you need to set up a system that accepts that great ideas come from everywhere.

Scott Prindle on hiring: The core quality is an entrepreneurial spirit. Someone who is passionate about the digital space, maybe someone who thought about being in start-up. They have to come into the into the agency and quickly generate ideas and move things forward.

One thing about all of these folks is that they’re willing to share. Ideas, advice, insights. Take a look and connect with them on Twitter. It will be worth it. Thanks for stopping by.

Here’s what I have going on. Hope to see you at one of these events.

University of Colorado, Tuesday, April 5

The University of Colorado at Boulder is hosting me as this year’s “innovator.” On Tuesday evening, author and journalist Warren Berger will interview me at the ATLAS Black Box Theater in Boulder. Should be fun. Previous participants have been Alex Bogusky, Lee Clow and Bruce Mau, so I have some big shoes to fill. But I’ll do my best.

Radian 6 Social 2011 User Conference, Thursday, April 7

On Thursday I’ll join Radian 6′s Social 2011 User Conference in Boston on a panel titled The Wizards of API. I’ll join Alex Brasil of Google, Sean Greenlaw of Lashpoint, and Tony MacDonell of Teknision to talk about BrandBowl and Tweetsgiving and how we can all make sense of mass amounts of data to keep the public informed of real-time results. We’ll share how we visualize data for different campaigns and discuss how your organization can do this too.

Mirren New Business Conference, Tuesday, April 12

Finally, on Tuesday the 12th I’ll be at the Mirren New Business Conference participating on the Innovator’s Panel. We’ll discuss how to design the next generation agency. Joining me will be Crispin Porter + Bogusky Partner Winston Binch, HUGE CEO Aaron Shapiro, and Taylor CEO Tony Signore. TBWA’s Chief Marketing Officer Laurie Coots will moderate. We’ll cover a host of topics from new strategic consulting services, to strategy-only business models, mobile commerce, analytics,  launching new brands, and adapting an agency to better profit from project-oriented work.

I’m tired just thinking about it. But it’s good to do these things in part because we’re all responsible to give something back to the community and industry that supports us. Plus I usually get as much as I give. Hope to see you there.

The prank was brilliantly conceived and executed by some of the TNGGers at Mullen: twenty-somethings brimming with irreverence, fearlessness and no sense of corporate protocol whatsoever. Good thing they work in advertising.

Thirty-plus years ago when I was starting in the business I worked for an entrepreneurial computer company, Data General. As the company reporter and photographer I covered an employee celebration of DG’s 10th anniversary.  One of the founders cut the cake and jokingly I suggested he feed it to the CEO for a little photo-op. The request was met with stunned silence. And three months later my boss actually brought it up as the reason why my performance review wasn’t perfect.  That’s when I realized I needed to get out.

I like the fact that the new generation feels less intimidated than previous generations. And, I guess, I’m flattered that they think I can take it.  Even in a forum as public as the world wide web.

A couple of months ago David Haan, Executive Director of the Creative Circus, stopped by Mullen to talk about The Creative Circus, new programs offered there, and the changes to both agency recruitment needs and student training. However, I never got around to posting it. It still seems relevant so here it is.

As is evident in the increasing popularity of programs like Boulder Digital Works, Hyper Island and any of the dozens of annual digital conferences, this is a pretty good time to be in the business of teaching people new skills.

According to David, digital has hit harder and faster than anyone expected. Agencies are in great need of new talent. And students themselves demand the education they know will make them employable in an industry that’s starting to have more in common with the Silicon Valley of Mark Zuckerberg than the Madison Avenue of Don Draper. And Creative Circus graduates, who’ve been out for five or 10 years, realize they need refresher courses and additional training if they’re to stay relevant. All of which keeps institutions like the Circus on their toes.

If you’re among those who are looking to jump start your own digital experience, there’s no shortage of options. You can attend executive workshops at BDW, dish out even bigger bucks and try a Hyper Island session, or get your employer to bring in one of those organizations to put on a custom session for you and your colleagues.

If you’re a Circus grad, you can get in touch with your alma mater and take advantage of new programs they might have underway. And, of course, you can take matters into your own hands by friending your own company’s creative technology people, partnering with UX types rather than art directors and copywriters, and by playing with all the new tools, app makers, and social platforms that have become easier and easier for the lay person to master.

The pace of change and the importance of technology to marketing, advertising, service and customer engagement is only going to accelerate. So all of us need a way to catch up and stay up. If you figure out the trick, let me know.

By all means try this at home or at the office

Inside the typical ad agency there’s often a pretty narrow definition of who is creative. Historically it’s been the writer and art director who come up with the concept.  Or the designer who makes things look beautiful (a very narrow definition of design if you ask me).

These days it could also be the creative technologist whose sense of what’s possible with applications, API’s or mobile platforms inspires cool creative executions. And, of course, there’s the animator, the motion graphics person, and the film editor who bring essential craftsmanship to the project.

But in the last month I’ve witnessed a couple of really cool exercises that should make us question the premise that ideas and their executions are the exclusive domain of a creative department.

At our Making Digital Work workshop in New York last week, Made By Many’s Tim Malbon helped run an exercise to demonstrate the “lean startup” approach to conceiving, prototyping and actually building something.

We asked nine teams of eight people (strangers in most cases) to develop new business ideas. Tim gave each team:  a brief — make a new product for people over 55 that will have millions of them using it daily; a set of instructions — come up with the proposition, develop two variants, write three epic user stories for each, generate keywords; background on the segment – their lust for life, financial situation, etc.; and finally a template – shown above.

Less than an hour later we had nine new business concepts that included digital to analog family magazines, platforms to keep users better connected with their doctors, and another that connected less then tech-savvy seniors to willing and knowledgeable 14-year olds who could help them navigate non-intuitive buttons and wires.  Many of the participants didn’t have titles that labeled them “creative.”  They were account managers, strategists and project managers as well as writers and designers. But in a day when the definition of creative is less tied to craft and more to ideas that you can actually use, we should all consider ourselves creative.

A few weeks earlier I sat through start-up presentations from students at BDW in Boulder. Same thing. The kids went from zero to launch in three weeks. Built out ideas, got them online, and in the process learned how to make something.  Not how to say something or communicate something, but how to make something.

Inside Mullen I watch with glee as brainstorming sessions now include media, tech and strategy as well as the usual suspects. I get even more excited when the mobile person and her social media partner grab a planner and start generating ideas rather than waiting for the “creative team” to emerge with the big idea.

The BDW workshop proved what many of us have always believed: we’re all creative. We just sometimes forget.

So, if you’re still sitting on the sidelines jump in. In the digital, social, mobile, make-stuff-rather-than-advertise-stuff age, everyone can play and learn and best of all, do.

What do you think?  Do you need creative in your title to be creative?

Coming just a week after Fast Company suggested that there will be carnage if the advertising industry doesn’t adapt quickly enough, followed by an alternative view from Bloomberg Businessweek suggesting that’s a bunch of BS, Making Digital Work offered a little bit of reality.

The facts are this. Change is coming fast and furious, even accelerating beyond what we’ve seen so far. It’s not just about making digital experiences it’s also about understanding consumers’ new relationships to media, technology and community. It’s about mastering UX and engagement instead of the age-old art and copy definition of creativity.  It’s about changing every organization to learn new ways of collaboration.

Perhaps most importantly it’s about being far more agile and lean when it comes to inventing work, prototyping it, getting it to market, and as Tim Malbon of Made by Many tells us “Learning fast.”  Challenging the fail fast mantra of recent years, Tim instead argues we need to speed up the learning process.  Nail it and scale it as he says.

So what does it take?  If you were here at BDW’s NY workshop yesterday you may have concluded the following.

1.     The consumer is at the center of everything

And the most important thing to remember is that he is a participant, a doer, a sharer, a creator.  How do you create an experience that engages and motivates participation and action?  Awareness and attitude do not lead to changed behavior. Action and behavior lead to changed attitude.

2.     New teams and process are essential

You can’t make experiences with the same people and processes you used to make ads. Not everyone has to write code, but if they don’t enthusiastically embrace all that’s new bid them adieu.

3.      Put aside your fears and anxieties and make something

You need to just jump in and do it. Get over thinking that ideas and creativity are the exclusive domain of one department. Get your ideas on paper. Build a prototype, get it in front of people (you can easily hide things on the web so you get enough feedback without going big time public), learn and proceed.

More to come as we begin to post the decks and presentations.  So keep your eyes open.

This popular video from TAT predicting the future of screen technology

reminds us that we need to embrace innovation in all of its forms.

Yesterday was my last day as Mullen’s chief creative officer, a title I’ve held for the last 12 years. No, I’m not going anywhere. After 28 years as a partner in a company I helped build it seems a little late for that. But I am taking on a new role: chief innovation officer. That may sound an odd title for someone who’s spent most of the last 28 years working in what we historically refer to as the “creative” side of the business – making TV spots, videos, websites, apps, digital experiences, print campaigns — but from my perspective it makes perfect sense.

For one thing, it excites the hell out of me. The chance to focus on all that’s new, think about its impact on the agency and our clients, and work to inspire new behaviors and practices that might, as Faris Yakob says, “get us to awesome faster” is, well, awesome in itself.

For another, it’s a natural continuation of a personal evolution I began two and a half years ago. After helping define a new vision for the agency, expressed with the word Unbound, I’ve spent most of my time on projects designed to help us live up to all that Unbound declares as we transformed ourselves from a message making ad agency into one we believe is far more relevant to the digital/social/mobile age.

I’ve witnessed the enthusiasm of a company as it managed to integrate technology, UX, design, social and mobile into its creative department. I’ve watched with awe as our PR veterans joined with right-out-of-school digital natives to launch and build a social influence practice. I’ve rejoiced in the new business wins that validated our progress. And I have found myself incredibly grateful to our ECD Mark Wenneker — as of today or new CCO — whose talent, passion and relentlessness freed me to explore, play and learn about all the new stuff going on.

Finally, and best of all, it makes sense because it scares the bejeezus out of me. I’ve been a lot of things – newspaper reporter, speechwriter, PR counsel, account exec, copywriter, creative director and CCO – but I’ve never been anything like a chief innovation officer.

I can’t say I have it all figured out. But I’m excited about some of the initiatives in the works. We plan to formalize a cross discipline lab that comes at client problems from different perspectives. We’ll continue to develop new services – mobile and social strategy being our most recent – for clients. We’ll accelerate the introduction of new technologies and platforms into the agency and the work we create. And we’ll find even more ways to create partnerships and alliances with other companies.

All the lines have blurred. Creatives invent products. Technologists think like creatives. The Bernbachian team has morphed into multi-discipline collaboration.

Allegedly Dan Weiden once advised his many talented employees to “come to work stupid everyday.” No doubt there’s always something to learn and the greatest mistake we could ever make is to think we know all the answers. These days it’s more important to have good questions. I have plenty of those.

We have a great team of presenters; among them are (clockwise from top left): Tim Malbon, Matt Howell, Chloe Gottleib, Faris Yakob, John Winsor and Alessandra Lariu

If you, your agency or marketing department still struggle with all the disruption and change imposed by technology, digital and the Internet of everything, you may want to join Boulder Digital Works in New York, December 2 and 3 for what promises to be a great two-day workshop called Making Digital Work (MDW).

For the last few weeks I’ve been working with my friend Matt Howell, president of Modernista and a fellow board member at Boulder Digital Works, along with the amazing staff at BDW, to plan the sessions and we’re pretty excited.  The lineup of presenters and workshop leaders is nothing short of impressive. And the agenda flows smoothly from a look at the world around us, to strategy, organization, team structure, roles, digital awesomeness, and how to actually make things.

Having lectured at a few of these sessions, it’s become evident that there are two aspects to helping your agency (or yourself) learn to be more digital. There is the work you make: platforms, applications, tools, experiences, and creative expressions.  And there is the process you need to make it: strategies, teams, collaboration, project management, and prototyping.

We plan to cover both over the course of two days, combining lectures, presentations, panels and hands-on work sessions.

Here are our topic and speaker/teachers.

Making Digital Work, NYC, Day One

Introduction and Overview

That would be me, talking about the need to actually build things, collaborate across disciplines and learn by doing rather than watching.

Strategy for the Post-Digital Age

Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer for MDC Partners will inspire us all with thoughts on how strategy has to evolve if it’s to inform work that’s interactive, shareable and participatory.

New Teams and Processes for Making Digital Work

Matt Howell, President of Modernista, presents his vision for the new brand team, individual roles and the process necessary to go from making messages to building platforms.

The Shift from Designing Websites to Digital Eco-Systems

Chloe Gottleib, ECD for Interactive Design at R/GA will explain how to think about UX when the digital experience is no longer limited to a website but instead includes social media, apps, and a brand’s extensive online presence.

Great Digital Creative Ideas

Michael Tabtabai, Creative Director at Saatchi and Saatchi, takes us through examples of inspiring digital ideas that work in the marketplace.  He covers everything from robots to gaming dynamics.

How to Actually Make Stuff

Tim Malbon, the founder of Made by Many challenges us to build things faster, prototype as we go, and get to market more quickly. Better yet, he actually shows us how.

Making Digital Work, NYC, Day Two

The New Models and What They Teach Us

Ty Montague, co-CEO and founder of Co; Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus; and John Winsor, CEO of Victors & Spoils join me in a panel discussion of how their models differ from traditional agency models and what we can learn from them.

Changing Your Organization

Alessendra Lariu, a Group Creative Director at McCann Erickson, instructor at Hyper Island, co-founder of She Says, and Fast Company 100 Most Creative People to Watch, shares her experiences in helping change things inside a traditional agency.

The Role of Creative Technologist

Scott Prindle, Executive Creative Technology Director at CP&B, clarifies the role of the creative technologist and the qualities necessary if he or she is to make technology part of the creative team.

Propagation Planning

Griffin Farley, Strategy Director at BBH NY, introduces us to an entirely new way of thinking when it comes to the distribution of digital content and ideas.

Download a PDF of the workshop;

Most of the lecturer/presenters will be on hand the entire day of their presentation, if not both days, to help lead the four hands-on workshops that take place over the two days.

BDW’s MDW takes place at the Art Director’s Club.  For more information, check out BDW’s website. Or go here to register. Hope to see you there.

Related

PDF of the workshop

Books, blogs and people to follow for my friends at BDW.

Voices from Boulder Digital Works:  videos

An original art post card available at postcardsfromawesome.com, a new company created by BDW students

I just came back from a board of directors meeting at Boulder Digital Works. Established a couple of years ago, in part with some seed money from MDC and partners, BDW has a lot of support from the advertising and digital community in hopes that over time the school will train the kind of talent we all need to prosper in the age of digital everything.

While there are folks on the board from companies that include Apple, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the board also includes people from a number of advertising agencies, among them: AKQA, CP&B; Goodby Silverstein & Partners; Mullen; Modernista; and until recently BBH and TBWA, whose two representatives on the board went to work at Google and Apple respectively. (That’s another post for another time.)

In the next few months, BDW will graduate its first of three current classes enrolled in a 60-week certificate program (currently under review to become a masters degree-granting program).  As part of the board meeting, we had the pleasure of sitting through presentations from class number two, which shared with us five startup ideas for companies they had conceived and begun to build. I’m not supposed to share too much here so as to protect the “startups” that haven’t completed copyright registration or finalized URLs. However, I will say that a roomful of some pretty senior digital and ad agency folks were blown away.

As Chuck Porter said in summing up the board’s reaction, “Holy shit!” And holy shit it was. The teams presented clear, succinct ideas in no more than five minutes each  (let that be a lesson to your new business presentation team). They defined the market, the idea, how it worked and answered questions with the confidence of entrepreneurs on their second or third start-up. More impressively, the work they showed us had been conceived, developed and made ready for show time in three weeks.  In fact much of it had already been presented to Tech Stars a week earlier. Three weeks? Are you kidding me? I remember when it was three weeks to copy and layout for a print campaign.

Robert Reich, serial entrepreneur who teaches the startup class at BDW

But here’s the rub. When they were done, we asked the group of 20 how many wanted to go into advertising or work in an agency when they finished their stint at BDW. Answer? Not many. Virtually every one of them wanted to start their own company so that they could build something and reap the rewards. Repeat. They want to build something and reap the financial rewards.

This is what’s coming. A new generation of talent, ambition and digital chops. They’re the kind of people we all need in our agencies and marketing departments.

We have two choices. We can offer them opportunity to build things –products, platforms, services – with us, or watch them take their newly learned skills and passion somewhere else.

What is your company going to do?