Today’s marketer has to wrestle with a plethora of new platforms,
channels, and delivery medium. She needs to deliver emotionally
resonating messaging to online, offline, out of home, set top, personal
computer, mobile, laptop, occasionally connected, touch sensitive, and
always on devices.

A week or two ago, Randall Rothenberg’s post on “heartbeats and mouse clicks”
broke open a topic that has been seething below the normal work-a-day
lives of interactive marketers for a long time. Randall opens his
article with:
Quick — name four fantastic, emotionally resonant, culturally
significant and successful interactive advertising campaigns from the
past year.

How did you do? Did you find a campaign that really emotionally engaged
you? That nameless visceral reaction to an idea, an image, a word, an
experience. Like Randall, I couldn’t name any. Nothing. The closest I
could come was the RG/A Nike+ integration. I didn’t have a visceral
reaction to it, but the elegance and simplicity and the change in
behavior it has wrought with me is certainly something that stands out.

The central tenet of Randall’s piece is that with the “change in
medium” or more likely the divergence of the digital medium and the
ever increasing inclusion of that medium in our daily lives, marketers
must change the core of their creative engine to accommodate this.
Designers who understand technology. Copywriters who get how to
encapsulate a concept in a world of pixels and aspect ratios, and
technologists who understand the importance of the total experience not
just getting the rounded corners and drop shadows correct, but why
focusing on the design as much as the functionality creates an
immersive experience.

When I joined Organic our software teams were in a department called
“Engineering”. In my minds eye, I had a fundamental problem with that
department title. Were we just engineers? Awaiting the designs, plans,
and dreams of the architect and urban planners, ready to command armies
of construction workers to create the master plan? Surely, we had the
skill set to have ideas, provide concepts, and make sure the bathroom
stall door still swings open despite the artistic placement of the
equipment.

Computing has evolved, we have evolved with it. Traditional
technology delivery was designed to handle the captive audience. You
could ship a 1000 page manual to those who would have to use your
software. Today, users choose the best software for the task, they
interface with many pieces, often assembling a whole that the software
team never envisioned. How can you “codify all requirements first” in
this world? We need a new way. Today’s technology doesn’t fit this
pattern at all. Feeds, interfaces, APIs and services evolve on a
monthly basis across the internet. It is an axiom of software and
hardware development that requirements change, clients change their
minds, and customers want something more, something different,
something tangible and new every day.

One of the things that many agencies have been struggling with is
the perception and inclusion of technology in the creative process. As
Randall points out: in the beginning there was the copy writer, and
life was good. The graphic artist was the layout man. Sometimes a very
talented layout man, but purely layout. Then the shift to more engaging
media pushed the graphic designer into the forefront. She or he became
the focal point of a creative team. Mass media drew us to the 30s spot,
that small snippet of your lives, lost to a marketers idea of how to
entice you to remember their brand, their product, their creative next
time you were in a purchase situation.

Randall posits the rise of the creative technologists as those who
understand the Craft of weaving technology into a concept. Technology
development is already part art, part science. Adding the right kind of
technologist to the process is what is required to weave together a
creative team that is ready to adapt to changing user and media needs
in real time.

Bang, clunk, kerthwop. This was what had been
seething below the surface, this was what had been bothering me about
engineering. In light of this, I began to envision how to create a
creative technology team. A team that can seamlessly integrate with
creative concept teams, design teams, quality teams, clients, and
customers. We will need some new skills, a re-prioritization of current
skills, and an refactoring of how we work together. The first step down
this path for us is a simple rebranding. 

Today, developers at Organic
are no longer Engineering. We are Technology. We are masters of our
Craft. We are strong. We are conceptual, we are creative, we are the
total experience engine that powers the modern agency. We are
Technology.

Dean McRobie