creativesocial

RT @novytweety: Intéressante circulaire 11/528 de la #CSSF relative au #blanchiment d'#argent via #Luxembourg [PDF] http://t.co/7oKE0t6I

Intéressante circulaire 11/528 de la #CSSF relative au #blanchiment d'#argent via #Luxembourg [PDF] http://t.co/7oKE0t6I

Creative Social went down to meet Christine Turner and Simon Lloyd, Creative Digital Heads at Adam & Eve. The guys have just won gold and silver for their John Lewis ‘Harmony’ campaign at the Big Awards, and have recently launched Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s new Harry Potter website.

Christine and Simon met while at University, after working together they both felt the creative chemistry that makes a winning partnership. A meeting with Pat Dougherty & Rob Kitchen at a talent showcase led them to a position at Bates UK. Even though they enjoyed working on Royal Mail, Woolworths & Sky, six months after joining, the agency took a pretty serious nose dive and they soon found themselves out of a job. They decided to try the freelance route and landed a contract at Glue. ‘Basically we never left; we were there 5 years later. It was our introduction into digital and also an introduction to being in a really great agency at the height of its success’ Simon tells me. Here they learnt the fundamentals of great, interactive digital advertising by working with a very talented group of people. At this point they made the decision to leave the pure play digital world as they could see the industry tilting. ‘Being in a purely digital agency meant you were sometimes picking up the breadcrumbs from established ATL creative, we wanted to get to a position where we were there at the very beginning when the briefs where being created, we believe digital should be part of the mix from the off, not just an add-on or an afterthought,’ Christine explains. They made the move to Lowe where they helped set up the digital team (and for the opportunity to work with Ed Morris). It was here they experienced working at the top of the food chain with the ability to present digital along side more traditional creative. They then they met with the award winning start up agency Adam & Eve and it wasn’t long before they felt this was the right place for them. An agency that truly offered a mix of traditional and modern talent. Two years on, they have built up an integrated digital team, as well as touching much of the more traditional work that is produced.

Having worked as a creative partnership for over ten years, I wanted to ask what they think makes a good creative relationship. ‘It’s harder at the beginning, you have to prove yourself not only to your partner but also to your new boss,’ Simon explains. He feels that as you become more senior and more confident you begin to build more trust in each other. ‘You have to like each other, that’s a start’, Christine tells me, even if they have not seen eye to eye that day, being able to leave that in the office is crucial. They are both big advocates of the creative team, they feel that a single creative is hindered by not having anybody to bounce ideas off and is ultimately less employable. They don’t believe, however, that creative teams should be limited to the traditional Copywriter / Art Director set up, ‘when we started we were forced to give ourselves these titles, but we didn’t work like that’ Christine says. Simon’s view is that ‘as long as somebody takes responsibility for a certain part of the job, that’s all people are after’.

The biggest change that they have seen within the industry is the shift between digital and above the line. ‘There was always a bit of a fear of digital’ Christine tells me, ‘now people realise that the thinking is the same, it’s just a different media’. They also acknowledge that on the flip side of that there has been a real turn around in creating great, heroic TV adverts that everybody talks about, something that Adam & Eve have become well known for (their latest John Lewis ad notched up over a million hits in 3 days). They both agree that we are living in an interesting time for adverting where the really successful agencies will be the ones who not only create both, but can integrate the two. With a lot of the pure digital talent moving to the above the line agencies, it will also be interesting to see what niche digital can find.

We move on to talk about the success of the John Lewis and Pottermore campaigns. ‘They were both very different’ Simon tells me, ‘I think the John Lewis work stood out because it was really different for that particular client’. The campaign involved an interactive installation with a live performer on the South Bank (check it out here). They had worked with the client for a number of years and built a trusting relationship which allowed them to become more daring. The execution combined a number of different disciplines into one idea which they admitted was incredibly stressful, especially when you’re watching an installation being lifted into the air by a crane.

Pottermore was a completely different type of campaign. By far the biggest project they have worked on, they started over a year prior to the actual live date. Simon and Christine were the only creative team involved and worked on the marketing and advertising of the site, art direction and branding as well as the helping develop the concept of Pottermore itself.  The launch campaign focused on an announcement film in which J K Rowling would reveal Pottermore to the world. They utilized the huge fan base by releasing the co-ordinates of cryptic letters on the most popular Harry Potter blogs. The task to find them all and spell out Pottermore was supposed to take 2 days, it lasted just 3 hours. At this point the holding page for the official site went live, while at the same time owls started to gather on pages all over the web. When an owl was clicked on it would take you to a YouTube page with a countdown to the launch film featuring the author. ‘It was amazing to work on something with such a huge fan base. It was a bit like Christmas, you had this wonderful thing that was wrapped up and you could pull open a bit of the paper and tease people with it’ Simon told me. The level of success can be illustrated by the amount of user generated content that was created around the campaign, with fans from all around the world posting photos and videos of their ‘Potter Parties’ leading up to the launch.

Sorry pour #IDELUX, j'ai choisi mon camp #CSSF

Creative Social popped down to have a chat with Dave Bedwood and Sam Ball, two of the founding partners of Lean Mean Fighting Machine. After a quick look around the studio, a beautiful open plan space with a mini golf course on one of the upper decks, we found a quiet corner and I started firing some questions at them.

I began by asking what they think it is that has got them to where they are today. Sam is quick to answer, ‘a combination of luck and hard work really.’ Going into a little more detail he explains that he and Dave had met whilst at university, both studying Advertising. They graduated at a time before digital advertising. As Dave says “There was no such thing as traditional advertising then, as there was nothing to be traditional against”.  In 1999 a forward thinking Creative Director suggested to them that this new ‘internet advertising’ could be big. This led them to BMP Interaction, the digital arm of BMP (now DDP), an agency with a reputation for great creative ideas. Within the first couple of weeks they were creating the online brand positioning for the Pot Noodle account, enjoying the creative freedom that an above the line agency would not have been able to offer. ‘We were lucky in a sense that we were ignorant of what you could do with digital,’ Dave tells me. A lack of knowledge about what you could and couldn’t do with this new medium, meant they ended up in fresh areas. Today Sam is still confident that ‘digital work forges more opportunities to be creative than any other medium.’ While working at BMP they met Dave Cox, who they describe as a ‘yes’ programmer. It was this unrestricted creativity, combined with positive technical attitude and ability, which allowed them to create fantastic work together.

Setting up Lean Mean Fighting Machine gave Sam and Dave the opportunity to become masters of their own destiny. This control and creative freedom suited the way they worked and also who they are. ‘It suited us because it was very do-it-yourself,’ Dave says, referring back to those early days creating work for Pot Noodle when they would be writing, designing, filming and having a go at whatever else came along without being stifled by hierarchies. For them, setting up Lean Mean fighting Machine felt like the logical step after BMP. One of the biggest differences, they noticed instantly, was the amount of people in meetings. ‘It doesn’t take many people to do good work,’ Sam tells me, adding that many of the big agencies function as a service industry rather than a creative industry. The more heads in a meeting means more opinions, and can result in ideas being watered down to try and please everybody. ‘Keep it small and nimble, keep an edge,’ is the advice from Dave.

I ask the guys about the projects that they have been most proud of. Sam’s first answer is the work that they produced for Emirates. ‘If you set a benchmark of good work you want to reach that and surpass it every time,’ he says. Having looked at work on their portfolio it’s clear to see why they have been consistently proud of the communications they have produced. In particular Sam talks about the Nonstopfernando project, a campaign that would still stand up today but that was groundbreaking at the time of its release, in terms of social connections and distributing an idea. For Dave, the memorable projects have been ‘any of the ones that have had a massive amount of risk.’ With Nonstopfernando, for example, they had to get it in one take with the client looking over their shoulder the whole time. Sam adds, ‘Creative people don’t think of it as risky, what’s risky about trying to stand out, trying to be original? The biggest risk is to stay the same, pumping out the same thing that looks and feels just like all the other advertising. Over time you won’t be relevant to people, in the long term you’ll become a bland company and somebody more interesting will come and take you over.’

When asked about the future of advertising, Dave’s opinion is that not much will change: ‘It will be the same problems that you have now, people don’t change a great deal, media just allows it to be projected in different ways’. These fundamental human attributes will still be the same in the future; they will just be facilitated in a better way. One thing Dave is sure of is that there will always be a gap for people to invent buzzwords to tell you about the next ‘new’ thing, which turns out, in most cases, to be a different form of something that existed before. Sam adds, ‘I don’t think anybody has ever told me anything about the future of advertising that has been remotely helpful.’

In terms of current challenges facing the industry, both Sam and Dave agree that creativity can be a problem. Dave talks about the changes within advertising in the 50s and 60s that lead to agencies starting conversations with consumers, and yet even today there are campaigns that are developed to simply shout at people. ‘Not enough people in the industry seem to be enjoying it, they all seem quite tense,’ Sam tells me. He believes that until people start to enjoy it and be proud to work in advertising, creativity will never reach its potential. Dave highlights the issue of ownership, relating to the way clients use multiple agencies on a single campaign as a contentious issue. He also talks about the way that many of the smaller agencies that have now been bought up by larger companies are forced to spend much of their creative energy figuring out how they are going to integrate.

The next question I ask the guys is ‘If you could collaborate with anybody alive today, who would it be?’ Dave’s choice, William Goldman, as he would like to witness how somebody of that caliber would go about his process and find out what he would do with a creative advertising brief. Sam tells me it would definitely be somebody from another creative industry, an artist or a poet maybe, ‘Imagine the ideas you could come with if you worked with someone like Damien Hirst, they would be a million miles away from advertising’

I finished by asking what advice they would give to somebody starting out in their career. Sam told me he had been reading a book the previous evening about stars that died young, ‘Buddy Holly died when he was 22 and he changed the world of music forever. If you go out when you’re young, with enough energy and you’re prepared to work hard, you could change the advertising industry. You could certainly change the course of your own life and maybe even something bigger.’ Dave agreed that it is all about energy, people expect their ideas to happen but sometimes things beyond your control can stop them from happening: ‘It’s like waves on a shore, you just have to keep bashing them down with idea after idea, that’s the difference between the good and the great. Some people get bitter and that energy turns inward, you need to have a good capacity to let ideas go as well as caring about them immensely”.

Check out the Lean Mean Fighting Machine site here.

A new augmented reality experience greeted Singaporeans on the first day of the New Year. An interactive print advertisement placed by Volkswagen Singapore in the local daily, The Straits Times, allowed readers to participate using their iOS devices to discover the whole range of Volkswagen models. Users will have the showroom at their fingertips to explore model features and even book a test drive with just one touch.

Jeff Cheong, Head and Executive Creative Director, Tribal DDB Singapore said, “We look forward to using this application to enhance the overall showroom experience for Volkswagen. With technology and creativity, we believe the app will be able to serve as an ‘always on’ platform for customers to access Volkswagen.” The AR print ads will run through to February 2012 and will also be available at the Volkswagen showroom. The ‘VW SG’ application is available for download here.

Photography by Perfect Fools designer, Alexander Radsby, check out his photo journal here.

You can also check out the Amsterdam office here, which just happens to be equally as beautiful.

Well, 2011 is over. We hope you had a wonderfully festive time and are feeling as excited about 2012 as we are. The start of a new year is always a good time for a bit of advice, and Creative Social has been collecting some fantastic nuggets of knowledge for our new book ‘The Best Piece of Advice Ever’. We thought today would be a good time to share some of the entries from our CS Beirut trip…

Kamal Mouzawak, Souk El Tayeb founder 

Be the change you want to see. It is what Ghandi said and what I keep repeating to myself and to others. It is not just about nagging about what has not been done, or what others did not do. It is about what each and every one of us can bring as positive contribution to life, anywhere, anyhow. Regardless how big or small, important or not, each action will make a difference.

Jackson Allers,  Beats and Breath

Life should be contributive rather than competitive.

Kyle MacDonald, One Red Paperclip

Attitude is Everything. The way you choose to interact with the world determines how the world will choose to interact with you.

Kameel Hawa, Al Mohtaraf Director

I must have been around five years old or so, when my father used to walk me some distance away from home, where the school bus stopped every early morning to pick me up and take me to the kindergarten. It was quite a walk actually, maybe a whole kilometer or two.

On the way he sometimes told me an interesting piece of information or opinion, or recited one or two lines of poetry, usually with a motto, in either Arabic or English. One line of Arabic verse I remember so clearly, he explained with a lot of vigor said what was to the effect of: say not I am of this descent or that. . a fellow’s descent is what he achieves. After dwelling on the profound meaning, he would recite it again this time more poetically. But that was not the best advice I got from him during the morning walk. It was the second best.

One day he asked me how would I prefer to write my name! He said that there was the French way “Camille”, or otherwise I can chose a simpler way, explaining that a person has the right to spell his name the way he prefers. Frankly speaking if you ask me now, I can hardly name a third thing he told me in that walk, without putting real effort. But I think that with this one, he actually planted the seed of individual choice in me irreversibly, and I was so young!!

Apparently I found free choice attractive, and I ended up writing my name the way I do. This gave me some trouble every now and then, since as French is the more dominant second language in Lebanon, officially my name is written the French way. But I believe the early discovery of this additional opening of freedom characterized my life indefinitely. At secondary school when an English teacher, for example, would write 3 titles on the board to chose for a composition quiz in class, still I will always raise my hand and ask for a fourth which is free. A student’s choice! And since, then looking for the better alternative to anything became the real title of my life occupation.

To add some extra pepper to the moral of the story, there is another dimension to that principle, namely that when I am made to understand at such an early age that I am free to spell my name the way I like, it also tells me that this unconditional freedom is in the realm of what is very much mine, but outside that realm you need to raise your hand.

The bus is here son, up you go!

NasrI Atallah, Our Man in Beirut

Quit a job you hate about six months to a year after you start really hating it. That way you get to really resent it quite a lot, which means you’ll never come back to something similar. It gives you plenty of time to hatch an evil plan for world domination. The best part is: You can steal plenty of office supplies since you hate the place already.

This strategy landed me a career I love. And I have plenty of staplers.

Toni Öyry , Project Manager, Batoota Films

A very dear friend of mine started his business in the financial industry in London in the early 2000s. Within two years his company had a turnover of over £2 million and what started as a one man show has turned into one of the most respectable financial consultancies in the City.

I was always intrigued of the way he managed to enter a rather saturated market and win clients from his competition of multinational companies with years of track record and prestige.

Obviously, if your product or service fills a gap in the market, winning business should be easier, but he gave me a simple advice that I have personally cherished: “When you want to win business, don’t talk about business”.

Spot the decision maker and try to catch them away from their work environment. Industry events, lunches and dinners work well. Talk about everything else, except what you do for work or what your business does. Relate, open up and try to get them to know you as a person and impress them with your general knowledge, unusual ideas and above all, ability to deliver and to be trusted. At the end of it, they will tell you: “We should do something together, what is it that you do again”.

#CSSF - Circulaire 11/529 (22/12/11) relative à la lutte contre le blanchiment et contre le financement du terrorisme http://t.co/p7SU6pnZ

Last week the D&AD Awards 2012 judges were announced. We are very happy to say that this year the list includes 6  Socials across Digital Design and Digital Advertising. Check out the full list here.  You can find information on pricing, categories and how to enter here. Final entry deadline is Wednesday 1 February 2012.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the D&AD Foward 50 and take a journey through time, design, space and advertising… www.dandad.org/50fwd 

Creative Social went to have a chat with Daljit Singh, founder of Digit, Executive Creative Director at Conran Singh and sketcher of beards…

CS: How did you get to where you are today?

Daljit: I studied Graphic Design at Nottingham Trent University. After graduating in 1991, I went to work for IBM as an Interaction Designer. Two years into the IBM job I decided that actually the next thing to do would be to set up my own business, and that was when Digit was born. From its inception, Digit grew to about twenty people in the first five years. We were in Soho to start with, and then after Soho we moved into East London and were one of the first companies in Hoxton Square. In 2005 we sold and became part of WPP, so in total I ran Digit for about fifteen years. I left in March 2010 and thats when I started Conran Singh.

CS: Why was Conran Singh created?

Daljit: The Conran Group is run by Terence Conran, they’ve been around for almost two decades and the businesses include the Conran Shops and the Conran restaurants, of which there are about thirty around the world. There is also a publishing arm to the business, called Conran Octopus, and then there are the actual design studios which are based just behind the design museum. Within those businesses there are Conran and Partners, which is an architecture and interior design business with about sixty people in the practice doing jobs all around the world. There’s Conran Studio which is product design and branding. There is also Conran and Company, which is involved with product developing and licensing. The one thing which they have never had was a digital division. I started speaking to them and they asked if I would be interested, and here I am a year on. It seemed like the right thing to do and quite an opportunity, so I guess that’s the straightforward reason for it being born.

CS: What work have you been involved with that you are most proud of?

Daljit: Throughout my career there have been lots of things. I suppose some of the highlights have been in the Digit years. The stuff that I have always been very passionate about is  R&D. I think Digit was one of the very first companies to really invest in doing research and development. We developed lots of our own projects, non-commercially, which ranged from looking deeply at interactive design and seeing what you can do with interaction on screen, and then physical interaction, which lead to some really interesting commercial projects. We did the redesign of the Habitat site many years ago which at the time was very groundbreaking. In more recent times, some of the physically interactive work that we did for Motorola has been really interesting. There’s also a project for the National Gallery which we did in collaboration with The Partners, it won a Black Pencil at the D&AD awards, I am very proud of that.

I think now, being with Conran, I am really looking forward to applying a kind of design sensibility back into what interactivity really means. There are a number of very interesting things we are doing at the moment, none of which I can talk about. Its fascinating because it is maneuvering away from straightforward marketing and advertising, into the realm of actual design and solving problems, and that is very exciting in terms of what the future holds. More importantly, I think our clients are very interested in that kind of attitude, they need it for their business.

CS: You have been quite heavily involved in education throughout your career. If you could change anything in the UK education system what would it be?

Daljit: I think we need less people. Design education is suffering at the moment, in some cases there are over one hundred people in a year group. There are simply too many students, which is a problem because there just aren’t enough jobs. I would have less students in classes because that way you are able to concentrate on solving a particular problem in a particular way. Less students would mean they have more chance of actually getting something at the end of it. In terms of interaction design, it’s so new that I think being able to teach or study it requires people from industry to be involved. Close collaboration is really important. So, I think there’s an issue of size and scale, and I think with newer design disciplines it’s equally important to be able to teach people the kind of fundamentals of what design is, above and beyond new techniques and using software. Understanding an idea, understanding how that idea functions, so when you leave as a graduate and you go out there with your portfolio of work it has got something that is different in it, as opposed to the same as everybody else.

CS: What majour changes, in your opinion, can we expect to see in the Digital Communications industry in the next ten years?

Daljit: That’s a big question. I think the multi-platform world will become less multi-platform. We will be doing much more than we already are on the move, as opposed to being tethered somewhere. I think there will be a significant change in our notion of entertainment and the way that we view it. Look at television and you can see this is already happening. Up until now it has always been in the corner of your living room, this is fundamentally changing. I think our engagement with information will become simpler because we will get rid of all of the noise that is in the market place at the moment. I also think that strong, creative ideas will have to become more prevalent and more important to cut-through, because I think that brand and business can only survive where they have a very strong notion of what they’re trying to say and what they are trying to talk about, and actually the technology will need to become better designed. Apart from looking in a crystal ball I don’t think I can do anymore than that!

CS: The title for the last CS Presents was: “Creative Looting: Whose Idea is it Anyway”. What have you stolen?

Daljit: I once stole a packet of chewing gum when I was about eight years old, but I ended up going back to the shop the next day and paying for it because I felt so bad.

I think we all, in some capacity borrow from other disciplines. Originality as a notion is not true. Everything, generally, is taken and interpreted in a different way. I wouldn’t like to say I have ever stolen anything creatively, I don’t think I have, but like every other designer we interpret stuff in different ways. The Motorola Motoglyth project is a good example. It was a digital spray-can we made that sprayed light into glass. That was stolen, other people stole the idea, in fact lots of my ideas have been stolen by other people. You could argue that a spray-can that sprays with light is not that different to a spray-can that sprays with paint? No, it’s not, but you’re reinterpreting. The idea of looting, sounds a bit like being in a riot, smashing your way in and taking something, but actually it is about interpretation. We all interpret stuff in lots of different ways all the time, you can’t help it – as designers we are like magpies, we’re always picking up stuff and reinterpreting it in different ways.

CS: What is the most interesting thing that you’ve seen recently?

Daljit: I’ve been obsessed with beards recently, so I’ve started sketching them in quite large scale drawings. I’m finding facial hair quite interesting, which is slightly worrying, but it has been my obsession for a while now. I think the act of drawing is interesting because it makes you stop and think about things – it’s quite relaxing and you kind of maneuver away from the complexity of different types of communication and the commercialities of messaging and business. It allows you to just stop, think and focus about a crafted act, I find craft very interesting. I find lots of things really interesting, but specifically I think art and what it can do is quite magical.

CS: Are there any buzz-words that you would like to erase forever?

Daljit: Yeah loads. Buzz-word in itself I think I’d like to get rid of because what does it actually mean? I think the language that we sometimes use in the new media, digital, new web 2.0 environment, is actually absolute bollocks, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. There is a whole language that we use in our industry which is just there to confuse people. We are ultimately still dealing with how we get an idea across, and you should do it in the simplest way. Technology doesn’t help, it’s full of acronyms, phrases and words which are completely made up. I try and stay away from them, they just really piss me off.

CS: What do you think the biggest challenge for the advertising industry is at the moment?

Daljit: Integration is a big problem. I think the way that organisations integrate with other forms of creatively needs to change, the problem is that everybody wants to hang onto their own idea. The way that you come up with those ideas, and the notion that it has to be owned by a Creative Director, is fundamentally changing. I think that the idea of compromise and integrating with the wider team where the skill base is much broader is important.

For me the biggest challenge is the way that some of the traditional advertising businesses are set up, it has to change. There is a new wave of thinking and they have to engineer themselves to follow that.

CS: What has been your biggest learning throughout your career?

Daljit: That’s a good question actually. I think that my biggest learning is that in order to get to a good idea, don’t look in-front of you, look sideways.

CS: As agencies start to look beyond advertising and towards creative business development, do you think they will have to start acting as cultural change agents within their client’s organisations?

Daljit: I think that that already happens. As business faces bigger and bigger challenges, particularly at the moment, I think they look to creative people for new ideas and new thinking. To do that successfully you need to get to the the heart of how you can culturally affect the way that a brand works. Good creative business has always done that but there needs to be a recognition for us to be able to do it more. Creativity in new market economies is really, really important. Where new ideas come from is really important, but then being able to make them happen is also really important. Doing this means understanding the client and the business that you are trying to deal with, as opposed to trying to sell them ideas which make no commercial sense whatsoever. As a creative business I think you have to do that more and more.

CS: What keeps you awake at night?

Daljit: Sleepwalking. I’m an avid sleepwalker, I will often wake up in different rooms.

CS: CS’s new book is called the best piece of advice ever, what piece of advice would you give to somebody starting out in their career?

I think it would be to mentally walk very quickly. Think about stuff and try and do things very fast, stop, think about them, repeat the exercise ten times, and don’t stick with the first thing that comes into your head because invariably that will change. You very rarely get to change tact and move in a new direction once you are into a process. Early on I think it’s worth trying out as many things as possible, but you must stop and think about them. Just have a very good plan and write it down, refer back to it every once in a while and make sure you’re hitting all the goals. This is basically another way of saying do a business plan, but it can be done in a very creative, conducive way, which i think is important.

LBi have just released this fantastic new showreel featuring a unicorn, projection mapping and some balloons. It also shows the fantastic work that has kept LBi at the top of its game. Lovely stuff guys!

Founding partner of Deepend and Poke, President of D&AD 2006, creator of bespoke suit company Social Suicide and now Creative Director of Fray. Creative Social went along to have a chat with the one and only Simon Waterfall.

CS: How did you get to where you are today?

Simon: I’ve always been very focussed and I’ve always known what I wanted to do. Ever since a very early age, I have always been moving forward, sometimes zig zagging, but always moving forward. One of the hardest things to teach a graduate, or someone new to the business, is that you have to keep on moving forward. Nothing stays still; nothing has ever been given to anybody. The amount of tenacity, energy and patience it takes, especially today, is immeasurable. Skills and passion are a must, and of course you would have those because it’s such a hard journey that you wouldn’t try and do this without them. Just keep moving forward, that’s how I’ve got here, one foot in front of the other.

CS: Why was Fray created?

Simon: Fray was created as a vessel to allow me to learn new things. My past companies have always had open statements at their surface level. Poke was about never repeating yourself; it’s a very internally aggressively creative company, so it struggles with itself rather than the client to do new work. I wanted my next steps to be in new directions with people in different territories.  Design is like a big loom, weaving together different threads of skills. You mix advertising, design, communications and PR to build this beautiful single piece of work. But as the industries have developed people have expected constant improvement, they expect silk, but sometimes that’s not appropriate, and I think today’s brands and behaviour is much more about being appropriate rather than shiny or new. If you want to carry potatoes, carry them in a hemp bag not a silk one because that wouldn’t be appropriate or honest. To stretch the metaphor, Fray takes all of skills and connections in my career and unpicks it until it’s just threads that I can re weave into new things, make new connections and wear that for a bit. It allows me to be honest again, which is good.

CS: Both Fray and Social Suicide have broken the mold when it comes to the way that they work. Which other industries do you feel need a rethink?

Simon: There are so many industries that got away with a lot of things because communications used to be one way. Now that there’s a lot more conversation, maybe not amongst the brands, but amongst its audience, you are finding that their behaviour needs to be appropriate. Those brands that over reach or over claim, are the ones that are falling by the wayside, they are the ones that need to behave with different manners. They need to be more appropriate to their core reason. For example, why are you sponsoring a French film? Is it because you’ve got a French sounding name? Or do you really care about film? Because it doesn’t make sense – I know, you know, we know, you’re buying this association. That cheap sponsorship dollar doesn’t work anymore. When you say that particular companies that I work with work in different ways, we work in a way which I hope is more connected and more honest. A suit is just another kind of uniform and it is too serious sometimes, it is something that men hide behind. You need to play with that and that’s exactly what we did. I think that it’s fun to take systems and try to pull them apart. I am hearing the word ‘truth’ at board level more often, and I think that that’s a very good thing to happen to this industry.

CS: What in your opinion are the major changes that we can expect to see in the digital communication industry in the near future?

Simon: I’ve been lucky enough to work with one recent client exploring the future of technology. It’s very interesting when you look to the future how far you want to jump forward. If you look at the field of 4G networks, my last clients were the biggest 4G network in the world and what they’re doing today is our future in 2013. So, is it a future? or are we using them as a test bed?  In the late 20th century the world used the UK as the test bed for interactive television. We had 4 set top boxes, what came out of it? We are still seeing echoes of those competitors in our interactive TV today.

In the very long term future, there’s some horrendous statistics out there, some big dangers. I read that on 2nd September scientists told NASA that they had lost control of the environment, the amount of junk up in space has got to a tipping point where one more collision, which will create lots more space debris, might wipe out our satellite network, all of it. In the last ten years we’ve launched 76 satellites a year, and from 2012 to 2020 we are going to launch 1145, these cost billions each, a piece of space debris travels at 17.5 thousand miles an hour. A flake of paint will go through both sides of a satellite, or a spaceship, and that’s really worrying, seeing as our technology, our GPS, our banking system is all connected through it, our entertainment is downloaded through it, everything is tracked by it. We could lose that tomorrow – you could wake up tomorrow and that’s gone. Those are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. Is that the near or far future? Well unless we change it now, that will definitely be our future.

CS: The last CS Presents was titled, Creative Looting: Whose Idea Is It Anyway? What have you stolen?

Simon: There’s a fantastic website called youthinkwewouldntnotice.com, check that out. The amount of different stuff that’s been stolen by communications agencies is disgusting. There are some very large pieces of work, highly awarded, that we all know have been ripped off. The person you should ask is Joel Veech, with his singing kittens. He found that his song about these fantastic singing kittens had been completely ripped off by an agency, they had just replaced the kittens with Coca Cola bottles. The agency wouldn’t answer, he tried to speak to Coke and they wouldn’t answer, the only person who would actually listen to Joel Veech was the BBC, because he has won five Webbies, and the BBC News service had also won a Webby that year. So he spoke to the people at the BBC who put it on their site. Coke then of course had to talk to  Joel,  – you think we wouldn’t notice? We fucking will.

CS: Creative Social recently had its first Fanboy event. If you were to do one, what would it be on?

Simon: I was at it, and I’m sure I will try and do one. The Fanboy thing for me is about something that you are so passionate about but maybe not totally involved in. Obviously I do fashion, and I’m known for that, so it would be nice to do something that was new for the audience. I do a lot of talks and I speak a lot, I love the sound of my own voice, so what is it I actually do?

For the last fifteen years I have bought flowers from the same flower seller on Columbia Road market, every single Sunday for fifteen years. His name is Karl, and everyone who goes to the market knows him and he knows them, their name, their family their lives, my wedding present from him was the flowers for the big day. Every single Sunday I arrange flowers, at my sink, and then read the paper. I’m not very good, but I’ve been doing it for fifteen years now and I have learnt a little bit. That is the kind of stuff, the hopeful amateur, the average hobbyist, rather than just launching into something that once again is sell more T-shirts or make more brands.

CS: What is the best mistake you’ve made in your career?

Simon: I’ve made shit loads. There’s no such thing as the best, they’re all genius. Failure is always really good – I failed my maths A-Level, I hated the teacher, and because of that I went round Europe in a 1966 split screen camper bus. I went surfing, hung out, and when you’re that far away from home and you’ve only got a socket set and a vague idea of the mechanical, when the bottom of the van falls off, you’ve got to fix it. You can’t phone anyone because it’s a 1966 so there are no parts made anymore; you’ve got to fix it. Stuff like that, when you know it is an accident at the time, but, that you are the only one who can dig yourself out the situation, that changes you forever. That was good.

CS: If you could change one thing for a day, what would you do?

Simon: I would like people to see themselves in a more human capacity, and make a few more things. To actually physically make, rather than making information or making pixels, I’d like people to be much more involved with their hands and with a craft, they don’t have to be particularly good at it, but if I could have an amnesty on competition and give everyone a day off if they made something, i’d love to do that.

CS: Creative Social’s new book is called The Best Piece of Advice Ever, what piece of advice would you give to somebody just starting out in their career?

To be consistent, and also don’t partner with somebody like you, try and find the absolute opposite. It works in the short term and in the long term, because there should only be one of you in any company and the differences make the partnership rather than similarities. That’s why I married a lady from Manchester.

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