ANDY Potential

1. yes. big ideas make sense of the micro devices that multiply fast.
2. the future belongs to 'T' shaped people. Horizontal overview and depth on one specialty.
3. I would have thought so but I don't really see evidence yet.
4. yes. They create emulation and give visibility to good ideas. Intelligent, artful and creative people are qualified. It's a question of sensitivity Vs tech saavyness.
5. coffee and the Real Housewives of Atlanta

1.Big Ideas? If by BIG you mean important, relevant, culturally
significant, obviously the answer is a resounding YES! The question is, why is this a question? Big ideas are the only things that matter in a world where advertising as a medium looses significance every day. The only ideas that survive are ideas that transcend any specific medium and can touch consumers in ways that give real meaning and value to their experience.

2.Technology has and always will play a significant role in the future (yes, an interestingly constructed sentence). Gutenberg, Edison, etc.
were essentially all specialists notwithstanding their broad
interests. The future belongs to not to hyper-visionaries who create
from the fabric of what does NOT exist.

3.Recession is not feeding creativity. This is one of the least
creative times we've seen in the last fifty years. Take a real view
and notice that very little feels different or revolutionary. Even
the so-called disruption is merely a distraction. Creativity will get
jump-started when we recontextualize our business and stop (or are
forced to stop) feeding old models.

4.Award shows do not matter so no one should judge them. They are an anachronism. A Self-congratulatory, recursive structure that is not inspiring and leads to less creativity.

5.What keeps me up at night (in o particular order): Greedy bankers, the state of women in the world (read "Half the Sky"), a broken health care system, the state of education in our country, The jury system, politics and violence in the Middle East.

1. Yes as they always have been, even before advertising existed.
2. Technology won't change the way we think but, as always, it will change the way we do. The future doesn't belong to anyone.
3. No, surprisingly the opposite.
4. Not a lot. However they do matter when you want your next job.
5. Anal itching

1. Big Ideas might be all there is. Don’t hold on too tightly to the channels and technologies.

2. Technology needs content. Great cameras need shots of laughing-so-hard-milk-shoots-out-your-nose. Cool new phones need, “I miss you” and “pick me up at the airport” and “you’re hired.” The next music player needs the next “rumble out on the promenade and the gambling commission's hanging on by the skin of its teeth.”

To whom does the future belong? The specialists and generalists who help us feel less like -ists and more human.

3. Is recession feeding creativity? Not when the middle managers (at our clients and within our own walls ) are worried about feeding their families (or having to pass on the new BMW). Here’s to all of you who are ALLOWED to be courageous.

4. Award shows matter. And judges who choose to inspire will always be qualified. Unfortunately, there will always be those who choose to guard their reputations. “In the category of magazine spreads, there were no Golds, no Silvers and one Bronze awarded.”

5. What keeps me up at night? No much beyond, "Does Rob Schwartz know I exist?"

1. Big Ideas are always relevant, as an independent or a conglomerate.
If it's good, makes you look/think/feel, it works.

2. As technology become cheaper, and ingenious designs and programs increase Plug & Playability, the generalization has definitely started.

I can only hope this fuels an increased dependence and importance to nurture those who work with passion. Rather than for only the benefits that come with certificates, economic and marketing advantages.

3. Recession feeds creativity (probably sometimes necessary) because positive people create to move on.. Wouldn't it be more of a question of weather the economy can sustain the new?

4. Awards do self impose a sort of guide/clique/group/ego display to the best of any category.. Its always an honor to win any award! So long as judges are not influenced to vote against their decision.

5. Bad ideas...

1. Yes. Big ideas are like water. We can't live without them. Water can take on any shape. Now that there are so many ways for brands to connect with people, so can big ideas.

2. Technology is a great servant, but a terrible master. This questions reminds me of an interview from the early 70's (about the time I was a fetus) in which Roger Waters was asked to respond to critics' complaints about Pink Floyd's use of synthesizers, which was pretty taboo for serious musicians at the time. What he said in essence, was that if four strangers came into the same studio and played around with the same synthesizers, they would create completely different music than what the band had done. It comes down to what creative minds will do with the technology made available.

3. I hope so, because it sure ain't feeding anything else.

4. When I was nineteen years old, working in the mailroom of McCann Erickson, I remember coming across a stack of award show annuals that someone had left out on a desk for anyone to take. It was like finding my dad's Penthouse collection. Well not exactly, but it was a life-changing moment nonetheless. I'd never seen work like that. Up until that point, I'd never thought of advertising as something that could be great, or even something that mattered. But there it all was in those dog-eared books. I took the whole stack home and decided I wanted to be a Copywriter. All the politics, posturing, and ass-kissing involved with award shows aside, they actually do sometimes inspire people.

5. Coyotes. I live in the woods.

1. the big idea is really really really really really really important. there's too much focus on the tactic du jour. people don't care about a brand's tactical efforts, they care about the connection the brand makes to their lives.

2. technology is the means to the end. but it also opens up new possibilities and inspires new ideas. the future belongs to a combination of specialists and generalists. the specialists will always be the ones to understand what's really possible in their specialty, and the generalists will be there to tie it all together in a way that's hopefully meaningful. [I'm somewhere in between.]

3. in bigger shops with bigger brands [and more to lose], I'll bet the recession is a limiting factor, at least in terms of media and reach. But that doesn't mean it's limiting creativity. What I've seen in the past year+ at a small shop, and now as a freelancer, is people on all sides of the equation being forced to become more creative in order to solve big needs in a less expensive way. clients are becoming more open to non-traditional ways of reaching the audience, and in some cases the recession is forcing them to admit their own limitations and let the creatives create with less and less interference. the downside is that some clients expect the same [or better] results for a fraction of the money - or think that all they have to do is just follow the latest trend and their audience will still care.

4. Award shows can help inspire creatives [and everyone else] to do better, more thoughtful work - as stated above, those award books are great to flip through. But when that's the primary motivation in a campaign, the creative starts to slip away from being a solution for a strategic problem into a showcase of how awesome we are. Judges should look for substance, not just flash.

5. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. If not for them, I'd get a full night's sleep.

Thanks for all of your insight. Here's how I answered the questions.
http://vimeo.com/7420488

1. Are big ideas relevant anymore?

Absolutely, the death of the big idea has been widely mooted but the reality is quite the opposite. Big ideas are more important than they were, not less. The intensity and fragmentation of media mean that consistency, relevance and resonance are needed at an overall level for brands to connect with the greatest efficiency and potency. That said, smaller ideas matter, and it’s not either / or as often presented. If we think of big ideas as platforms and smaller ideas as fuel for those platforms, it’s clear that we need both. There’s no fire without a spark. There’s not much heat without fuel.

2. What role does technology play in the future? Does the future belong to specialists or generalists?

Technology … is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
–C.P. Snow, New York Times, March 15, 1971–

Never has that been more true than for the communications industries. Technology fuels creativity. It allows us to hack existing channels and platforms, using them for new, sometimes unintended, sometime provocative, occasionally ill-advised, purposes. Technology has allowed us to create new channels and platforms, creating more engaging, useful and entertaining content for brands, delivered to people in forms and at times they prefer. Technology provides opportunities to create more immersive, vivid, and exciting experiences. Technology also creates opportunities for brands to establish different types of relationship with people.

Within creative businesses we will always need specialists in the area of technology, because that’s a full-time job (and more) just on it’s own. But we also need hybrids, people who get excited by technology and the potential it offers, and are inspired to think in new ways about what they do. For me, the critical thing is that one knows whether one is a specialist or a generalist.

3. Is the recession feeding creativity?

Completely. As so may people have noted, certainly in our industry this seems like more than a recession, it seems like a re-set. We’ve yet to see the really provocative fruits of the downturn rise from the rubble, but most of us will know people, groups, agencies who have been plotting radical, experimental or disruptive projects. So at a model level, I’d say yes, it’s definitely fuelling creativity. Let’s wait and see what emerges. I have my eye on a few people and places.

I’m especially excited by programs that some of the schools (VCU Brandcenter, the new Boulder Digital Works) are putting together. They understand that we don’t need more people in the industry, we need better people, more radical and challenging people. We need more mavericks and hybrids. People with craft skills but who are also boundary-testers. People who have none of our built-in respect for departmental or disciplinary boundaries or linearity. People who don’t respect orthodoxy around channels and technology use. People who think of integrated in a smarter more multi-platform and technology-powered fashion. People who embrace data as a route to magic.

That’s another area where I hope to see real energy and transformation emerging in coming months.

4. Do award shows matter any more, and who is qualified to judge work?

Yes, for sure. I see a critical role for awards shows today in setting the agenda in a time of phenomenal flux and seemingly limitless possibility. Some might say they have always done this. I disagree. For many years certain categories of certain shows were in most ways indistinguishable from previous years. Craft skills were awarded (and this is still vital – let’s be very clear about that) but innovation and disruption were frequently in short supply.

The marketing and communications industry is currently enduring an identity crisis: unsure of what it produces, how, with whom, and how to charge for it. Awards shows have an opportunity to gather some of the most respected and experienced people in the business and ask them to give some guidance in return – what should we pursue harder? What less so? What are some fledgling uses of technology or channels that they believe have potential for greater exploitation? What has the potential to be hacked, and made into something new, more creative, more effective?

There is no right or wrong, but experience does matter here.

5. What keeps you up at night?

If anything stops me sleeping as easily as I might, it’s a pre-occupation with finding and working with the right people.

We’re currently experiencing one of the most exciting and challenging periods in the history of marketing. Technology – especially the internet and mobile – have dramatically increased the scale and the nature of the canvas for our creativity. At the same time, everything we do is more measurable.

Yet more than ever, what we do relies on talent. Arthur C Clarke may have been near the mark when he noted how ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. But finding the right people to make sense of what’s emerging, and who can produce applied creativity for brands, remains the most difficult task. People still provide the real magic.

1. Are Big Ideas Relevant Anymore?

The problem is that we know that the idea is big only after it becomes big - that is, only when it succeeds. More often than not, we don't know why and how this happened. When something succeeds, we say: "it resonated with the target", "it tapped into consumer culture", "it was smart". But, in reality, we don't know in advance if an idea is going to be big or not.

2. What role does technology play in the future? Does the future belong to specialists or generalists?

The real question might be not when/why (technological) innovations emerge, but when/why they succeed. And answering this requires a network approach: are creativity/technology/strategy part of the same network ... or each of them does their own thing? It's all about how an invention in any of these 3 domains is conceptualized and evaluated by the rest. And, it may not be about "specialists" vs "generalists" anymore but if we encourage, in our agencies, creative friction between them.

3. Is the recession feeding creativity?

"Necessity is the mother of invention" - Plato.

4. Do award shows matter any more, and who is qualified to judge work?

It should be those whose business ultimately depends on agencies' work. If agencies are judging each other, then in the absence of the objective criteria, seniority, personal ties, and politics tend to creep in more often than not.

5. What keeps you up at night?

Resistance of people to experimentation and them finding excuses against doing things differently.

1. Yeah they are, with so much noise they are rarer today and execution matters as much as the idea itself, a great idea executed poorly is just not good at all.
2. Tech opens the doors for all of us and there will always be a need for specialists and generalists no matter where we go moving forward
3. I think it is feeding different ways to approach things, innovation and creativity in not just advertising but in business models, conversations and how to the next stage
4. I think they matter to get an agency press but beyond that with so many out there they get overly redundant
5. Trying to find a job when no one is hiring has forced me to do things differently and opened other doors but I still want to walk though the ad one if I can.

1. Are big ideas relevant anymore?

Of course, what Ben said.

2. What role does technology play in the future? Does the future belong to specialists or generalists?

Generalist or specialist…could go either way. I think people naturally select into specialties… What’s more important is whether agency/client appreciate the thinking coming from those people. Is it celebrated? Is it cultivated? Is it part of the process? Or is it just a “me too” tactic and pitch theatre?

3. Is the recession feeding creativity?

Absolutely. I’m loving some of the work lately. The recession has created a new creative constraint that makes this business fun [again].

4. Do award shows matter any more, and who is qualified to judge work?

Sure. About as much as they ever did… As for judges? Would be great to see greater diversity…which is something you’re already after. #electthejury

5. What keeps you up at night?

Caffeine, and a healthy optimism. I am excited about what the future holds. So excited, in fact, that I dream about work…and for the first time in a while, that doesn’t bother me.

1. YES! But they need to be bigger. A big idea used to be springboard for campaigns, it is now the seed for cultural movements. Big ideas have an obligation to think beyond "company" and "consumer" - big ideas change "culture"

2. Technology defines culture today - and it will continue to do so in the future. What is more fascinating than the pace of technological development, is the speed at which it is permeating each and every sphere of life and changing it forever.
And when it comes to generalist vs. specialist - the future belongs to neither. We need them both - the generalist to keep it together and the specialist to get down and dirty with the details.

3. Yes, the deliberate constraint of doing more with less constantly pushes us to come up with unexpected solutions whose impact outlasts the recession.

4. They do. Good work rewards itself. But the workers themselves rarely get the same privilege.
Only a person who can check his/her prejudices at the door can truly judge someone else's work for what it's worth.