Last week, Pier 94 hosted Creativity magazine’s CaT Conference. Backed by AdAge, this is the second year the conference has been in NYC. The pier, originially constructed in 1894 and serving the Cunard ship line for most of it’s life it is now a “premier event venue” [according to their website]
1961 NYT article
The event started out a little too early in the morning. Someone had forgotten to tell the super to turn down the air conditioning because it was refrigerator cold inside.
You can see the entire schedule below. The better events for me were in the morning culminating with a great lunch panel with Boulder Digital Works at CU. They are spearheading a great hashtag campaign #10rules. A on-going working list of one liners that everyone in the business should read. I’ve posted the first 24 they handed out below. May favorites today are #’s 1, 7, 16 and 19.
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These open in |
Alexander's collateral from CaT 6/10/10
The morning was one discussion after another that was engaging. Thor Watson talking about building truly interactive machines that help a former graffiti artist, now paralyzed write again to environments for kids (and grown up kids). Nick Law and Gerry Graf going at each other about story-telling. Just check out the schedule above and search for #crcat tweets to see the conversation.
Even though the room was freezing and the WiFi was terrible it was overall a great event. Though the afternoon was slow, they had an excellent food and cookie spread. Teressa Iezzi and the rest of the gang from Creativity/AdAge did a great job pulling it all together. You could even get a real tattoo at the Pointroll booth by an artist from Daredevil/Funcity. I’m not sure why.
 Get a real tattoo courtesy of Pointroll |
 Cookie Spread |
 Food Spread |
10 Things Not To Do: A Working List of Candidates
2. You can’t preach it if you’ve never practiced it. 3. If you reorganization isn’t painful, your’re not pushing far enough. 4. Jettison hangers-on. Deconstruct teams to essential parts. 5. Don’t tackle everything at the same time.
7. Don’t keep ’em separated. 8. Don’t think about the technology last. 9. You can’t make the new fit in old boxes. 10. Embrace marketing R&D. Some ideas won’t meet the brief. 11. Stop building tools. Start adapting to them. 12. Remove legacy. Force changes. 13. Don’t ask “what”. Ask “why”. 14. Advertising doesn’t alwasy have to be media based. 15. Less talk, more rock. Don’t just talk about ideas. Make them. Early prototyping is cricitcal. 16. Don’t leave mobile as an afterthought. 17. Presenting yourself in a torrent of techno-jargon isn’t a great way to make friends. 18. It’s not story versus utility. It’s about both. Find the right balance to meet your client’s business needs. 189. Interactive work that no one interacts with is a problem. Don’t confuse the user, provide a clear call-to-action. 20. Creative fricttion is healthy. But not every disagreement is ideological. 21. You can’t create advertising at the speed of culture when your organization operates at the speed of procurement. 22. Love architecture. Not concrete. Keep focus on the story, not just the underlying technology that delivers it. 23. Learn to organize around the minority. 24. Less egos. More chief common sense officers. |
1. Want to make bad interactive work? Set up a separate group called “interactive”
6. Don’t hire a messiah.