1AmongMany

As Court TV made a shift to embrace their new prime-time identity - truTV - they came to us with a mission. The brief was simple: “Agency X is handling our branding. Agency Y is building our website. We want you to tell us what’s missing.” So we presented them with a recipe that would change the world of television forever.

Outlined in a 100-page handbook, we gave truTV an instruction manual for the creation of the first-ever “open sourced” TV network. The manual includes two primary strategic ideas, both intended to embrace the brand’s ideal of capturing truth and actuality, coupled with a new business model that would redefine the role of a TV network in today’s digital landscape. The first strategy allows truTV to bring their audience into every step of the creation process, from ideation and script-writing to casting and distribution, creating an entirely new show based on the unbelievable moments of “actuality” that truTV viewers have experienced in their everyday lives.

The second idea was born from the insight that each “character” on truTV is also a real person – they most likely have a life online just like the rest of us. So we envisioned a digital toolkit  - a socially connected search engine that would allow truTV fans to visualize, add to, and share trails of information related to their favorite show (and anything else they find online). Essentially, it’s equal parts social network, browser plugin, search engine, and SEO optimization platform. This tool would allow people to share video content, notes, links, and swap live images as well as visualize and search the “breadcrumbs” of ideas as they connect and overlap across the internet. And, in turn, it would associate all of these tagged datapoints with the truTV brand based on the trail each breadcrumb relates to, thereby building the brand’s SEO footprint. Not even Google can do that…

Want to know more? Grab the .pdf here.

After sharing my previous post on process, I was bouncing a few emails back and forth with Deb Morrison, one of my former UT professors who’s now heading things up out in Oregon. She’s a mastermind when it comes to inspiring young creative folks, and she spends much of her time experimenting with and teaching the ideals of creativity and creative process. In our conversation, Deb mentioned that she and another former UT prof., Glenn Griffin, are working on a new project about creative process among creative professionals. As part of that project, Deb asked me to draw out my creative process.

The result was actually two drawings, one from a company perspective - a “how do we work” evaluation - and another from a personal perspective - a “how do I work” evaluation. While not necessarily all-encompassing (these were done quickly), it was an interesting experiment to try to put into words and images a process that happens almost without thought. Here’s what I came up with (click to view larger):

How I Work (reads bottom to top):

How We Work:

I’m quite certain that my process will continue to grow and evolve as I move forward, but for the moment, as of this week, that’s a good moment-in-time look at how I work.

I recently spent the better part of a week locked in the small conference room here at POKE preparing a pitch presentation. After a couple days of continuous concepting and brainstorming, I sat down to compile our thoughts into a coherent story. With cuppa coffee in hand and a spare computer coercing my thoughts via iTunes, I set aside my laptop - the research phase was done - and reached for a stack of paper and a Sharpie.

Over the next two hours, a couple of people wandered past, giving me odd looks through the glass door, but all were smart enough to keep their distance. By the time I was done, the room reeked of permanent marker, my hands looked like those of a kindergartner after an intense coloring session, and the walls of the conference room looked something like this:

Our presentation was done. No, we didn’t put it in front of the client in this format - though I won’t deny that, for a client who stated that they wanted to learn how we work, I was quite tempted. But the essence of the story was there.

It wasn’t until a day or so later, after some more scribbling (and quite a few jokes about needing to put padding on the walls of the room) that my Creative Director suggested I include the above photo on my site. It was a unique opportunity to capture the essence of my work style in its undisturbed state - post-it notes and piles of scraps included.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how I work. A computer will always be a useful tool for digging into the background of a brief. The internet is a world of information at our fingertips. And I’ve certainly used Keynote or InDesign to prepare my fair share of presentations (including the one described here, later in the process). But when its time to put the raw idea into a semblance of a presentable form, this is how I work.

In much the same way that I’ve learned to embrace that moment of “free falling” every time I stand in front of a client to make a presentation (a story for another day), this is my equivalent moment in the creation process.

Assimilate everything you can. Then let it all go and see what comes out the other side. Feel free to give me a shout if you’d like to know more.

We were commissioned by Tauck World Discovery to help envision and realize of a new kind of travel company. One that focuses on experience-driven travel where you don’t just hear about the field Cezanne painted in, you paint in it yourself. One where each destination package is curated by an experience-minded tour-guide. One designed for people craving a more dynamic, hands-on, and immersive style of travel. That company is Culturious.

In order to help potential travelers understand what Culturious has to offer, we designed a web experience that embodies, and grows with, every adventure Culturious travelers take. Instead of the usual top-down structure that most travel sites use – one in which the marketing department fills in the information about each destination as they see fit – we created a site that grows from the bottom-up. A site that will utilize the experiences and social connectivity that every traveler has come to expect in our digital age to create a robust repository of information and experiences about each destination in the Culturious portfolio.

Sure, the site begins with a description of the trips that Culturious offers (the section of the site that’s currently live). But the tour directors who create the trips, and the travelers who experience them will continue to add to the content on Culturious.com. Each tour director is responsible for keeping fresh, interesting information flowing onto the pages of the Culturious site dedicated to their destination. And each traveler will have their own travelog where, from the moment they sign up, they can begin to meet and interact with the other travelers in their group. During the trip, each traveler has the ability to add their own thoughts, photos, and stories about the places they visit to create their own personal “memory book” on the fly.

Culturious will then collect these stories and use them (with permission, of course) to continue populating their trip description pages so that each potential traveler who visits Culturious.com can learn about the trips directly from other travelers who have already visited the destination.

agency: POKE NY

In partnership with Droga 5, we set out to rescue and revolutionize the New York City public school system. The idea: take the most hated object in classrooms across the city, the mobile phone (which is currently banned from school grounds), and turn it into a learning tool that neither students or teachers could live without. As part of the Million program – named for the one million students currently in attendance in NYC public schools – students receive a free Million mobile device and earn points toward talk time, txt messages, discounts, and freebies based on their academic effort, attendance, conduct, and grades.

To back the pilot launch of the Million, we created a website to serve as the home for the 10,000 mobile devices already active as part of the program. We utilized the notion of “the Million” in conjunction with the logo to create a motion design piece which now lives as the entry to the millionnyc.com homepage. This short, narrated story explains in concise terms exactly what the Million project seeks to accomplish: the creation of a merit-based reward system that will encourage and entice public school students to gain a greater appreciation for their school work.

We also created a comprehensive strategic plan that outlines the full-scale launch and development of this extremely ambitious program. Deploying a network of a million mobile devices is no small task, but the possibilities for true integration into the education system are nearly endless and will only continue to grow as technology and adoption gain momentum. We designed a long-term roll-out plan outlining the potential partners available to increase the academic potential of the Million device, and the steps necessary to put an education-specific mobile device in the hands of a million students. If you’d like to flip through the strategy, it can be downloaded here (be forewarned, it’s a 25MB file and is very long).

To date, this highly ambitious effort has been awarded:
•a Titanium Lion, Cannes
•The Richard T. O’Reilly Award for Public Service, ANDY’s
•The Innovation Award, ANDY’s
•a Gold Pencil, New Media Innovation & Development, One Show Interactive
•a Bronze Pencil, Innovative Media Single, One Show
•a Gold Clio, Innovative Media, Clio Awards
•a Black Pencil, Integrated, D&AD Awards
•a Yellow Pencil, Integrated, D&AD Awards

agency: POKE NY

How can a brand tell you what “sexy” should mean? Is it the perfect bedroom, with the curtains drawn just so? Can you narrow it down to a hair color or a specific body type? No. “Sexy” is personal – and something that only you can define. Keep Life Sexy gives everyone a chance to stand up and shout to the world: “SEXY IS _____!” This site marked a new beginning for K-Y – an effort to reach out to the world and redefine what “sexy is” on everyone’s terms. This is what it looks like when a brand stops shouting and starts listening.

After viewers submit their thoughts on what “sexy is” to the Keep Life Sexy site, they can sort through the data by age and gender, allowing them to gain a narrower perspective on what men and women in specific age groups believe sexy is. Of course, this also becomes a wealth of information for the K-Y brand to use in its development of new products and messaging. The Keep Life Sexy site is a social experiment that doubles as a research project for the brand, and its value to the end user keeps people coming back to continually add to, and explore, what sexy is.

agency: POKE NY

Saving Grace, a new drama from TNT, gained popularity beyond anyone’s expectations throughout its debut season. To support the launch of the second season, TNT wanted a place where fans could connect, discuss, and dig deeper into the messages of this dramatic, and sometimes controversial, series.

Embrace Your Grace does just that, inviting fans to embrace their inner Grace and share with the world the moments of their own lives that make them feel more like the hard-edged star of the show. The site takes the standard blog platform and stretches it into a far-reaching invitation for discussion and drama, even amongst the ranks of its visitors. It also brings the notion of competitive commenting into blogosphere by introducing point/counter-point arguments for every post, as well as giving visitors the ability to demonstrate support for comments from other readers (in addition to the standard commenting mechanism found on most blogs).