Crowdsourcing questions for BDW’s Making Digital Work instructors?
I’m taking questions. Starting tomorrow I spend three days with some of the smartest people I know at Boulder Digital Works where we’re conducting another Making Digital Work workshop.
This time around we have the usual suspects –Matt Howell of Arnold; Gareth Kay from Goodby; Tim Malbon who hails from Made by Many in the UK; Scott Prindle of Crispin; and Kim Laama who joins us from AKQA– but we have some newcomers, too, including Ben Malbon, BDW board member and director of strategy at Google Creative Lab; Sheena Matheiken, who founded the Uniform Project; and Will McGiness, creative chief at Venables Bells and Partners. Plus, back for his second visit, Daniel Stein, founder of EVB.
Virtually everyone of the presenters is either a company founder or c-level executive. And all of them have been creating, leading, or initiating digital work for a long time.
I thought it might be fun to crowdsource a set of questions we can ask everyone. For example:
What do you see as the next emerging digital or social trend?
What’s broken about the way your company does business?
Will Mesh-type businesses pose a challenge to traditional marketers?
Can ad agencies really learn how to build stuff?
What changes to you plan on making inside your organization over the next year?
What holds your company back from evolving as quickly as it should?
How do you inspire innovation?
If you have anything you’d like to ask us as a group leave your comments here. It might be fun to see if the answers we get back are consistent, different or even contradictory.
I’ll take the five or 10 most provocative or original questions posted here, on Twitter or on Google+ and try and solicit answers from all 10 individuals above. Who knows, you might learn something, or simply conclude that no one knows what’s going on.
Comments
How can advertising agencies go back to the adult's table (i.e. CEOs, executive board) in corporate America? It seems that ad agencies are solving, very creatively, operative communication problems but they are not heard when corporations are formulating their long-term strategy. Is the ability of ad agencies to ride (better than many marketers) the digital tidal wave their opportunity to become again a strategic partner for companies?
If agencies start building stuff, what happens to advertising? Is there still a place in the world for advertising in a more traditional sense?
You can only read one book, listen to one album, and read one blog for the rest of your career. What are they?
Here are a few:
What is the chief role of the agency now that brands are structuring internallly for social media?
Who is the first person you go to for insight?
What does innovation look like next year?
What is the role of the traditional website in today's media landscape?
Sounds like a blast at BDW. Here's one:
If authenticity is a crucial element of a brand's social media presence, how is it possible to outsource a brand's social media management and community to an outside agency? Isn't that the opposite of authenticity? While there's money for agencies to run these, won't doing so effectively hurt brands over time? It's not the same as creating a campaign.
I've got a few potential ? to add:
• Given some client reluctance, uncertainty of outcomes, limited resources, budget restraint coupled with compensation models from a bygone era, (add your prevailing issues here), what does success look like for an agency producing digital work?
• If you could only hire a handful of digital talent into a legacy agency, which core talents do you think are most essential to help drive change and implement work?
Thanks Edward
This sounds really interesting. I look forward to seeing the questions that rise to the top ...and the answers.
1. How can ad agencies push their clients to do more innovative (leveraging emerging tech/trends) type work?
(Follow-up or Alternate Questions for this -- What are the top 5 things that clients do that stifles innovative work? What are the best ways to overcome client objections to innovative work?)
2. Should ad agencies be involved in community engagement/ management activities for their clients?
(Follow-up or Alternate Questions for this -- What role should ad agencies play in the social and earned media activity that occurs as a result of the work they create/produce/launch?)
3. What can ad agencies learn from software companies and game development companies?
(Follow-up or Alternate Questions for this -- What aspects of software/ game development can ad agencies truly adopt into their processes (agile, etc)? What aspects of UX and user behavior research done by game development companies can ad agencies learn from?)
Looking forward to all the Q&A.
Another question, can I be in your workshop group?
What is best advice you can give a young creative, both professionally and personally?
What are the first steps that a historically traditional agency can take towards a more digital mindset?
1. The future belongs more to data analysts than to copywriters. Discuss. 2. The death of <something> is greatly exaggerated. Unless you're talking about MySpace. 3. If we're not in a bubble, for how long can agencies stop the drain of talent to young startups and tech giants?
Damn ... no line break
2. The death of --insert the buzz of the day here -- is greatly exaggerated. Unless you're talking about MySpace.
armandoalves Question of talent drain is key. That is a very good one and will surely make the list.
What's the single most important step in creating quality work that gets skipped the most often? via mikerevolution on Twitter.
How do you find a balance and manage speaking gigs, travel, reading, staying on top of trends, social networking, spending time with family, exercising, having a social life, etc, etc, etc all while producing great work for clients?
HunterTerrito Shit, if we knew the answer to that it would be awesome. Good Q. Will ask it.
What are new questions that we should be asking in a creative brief?
[...] got plenty of questions here and on Twitter for the 10 folks who spoke at the last Boulder Digital Work Making Digital Work [...]