When I grow up… Career Jam

Saturday, April 21st was PAF’s Career Jam. Following last week’s AIGA Student Portfolio Review, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this event. I was originally scheduled to be on the “creative” panel, but the “interactive” panel was a bit slim so I shifted over a room. And I’m glad I did. Not sure what all was talked about in creative, but it sounded like a lot of discussion about portfolios. In my opinion, a great portfolio has beautiful work combined with powerful ideas. I love typography as much as anyone, and designing is one of my life’s passions. But without idea, concept and message, design is superfluous. Would this feedback help students with their portfolios? At this point, it’s probably too late to change much from school.

The interactive panel was comprised of myself, Ryan Buchanan from eROI, Kent Lewis from Anvil, and for two of the four sessions, Doug Lowell from ID Branding. I’ve known Ryan and Kent for a few years, and familiar with Doug’s work when he was one of the owners of ParisFrance. The four of us offered our insights and vision of where interactive is going to the soon-to-be-graduates. I found it to be a great lesson on taking their preconceived notions of what “interactive” means, explain how communication is changing, refer to a few gems (1, 2, 3) on YouTube, and explain that saying you “don’t get interactive” is quite possibly the worst possible position to put yourself in today’s advertising agency landscape.

My perception was that the schools saw interactive as a separate focus from design or advertising. I found this amazing. You’d think it would be obvious, especially in Portland, that advertising goes well beyond traditional media, and that interactive is playing a crucial role in the future of advertising. What bothered me the most about the students’ underpreparedness to enter the advertising/design business was the lack of strategic understanding for how interactive is changing communication and brand interaction.

Interactive is more than just HTML, CSS, Flash, AJAX… it’s more than technology. It’s a way to create two-way conversations between people and brands. It’s a way to create ongoing relationships between people and brands. It’s a way to give brands immediate feedback. It’s a way for people to do what they want with brands. It’s a way for brands to create community around their philosophy.

These ideas aren’t taught in design classes. They’re not taught in programming classes. People are creating these ideas through the combination of design, technology and most of all, concepts with purpose.

Interactive is part of the entire brand relationship, from advertising to marketing to design to implementation. Part of the responsibility is on the schools to teach this… but there’s also responsibility on the students. This is a gross oversimplification, but isn’t this supposed to be some uber technologically savvy generation that spends all their time online? I didn’t get that feeling. Start doing something with blogs, Flickr, Twitter, RSS readers like Google Reader or Netvibes, and posting videos to YouTube. While I’m against acronyms, people should at least know what Web 2.0 means. Because if you don’t know what it means, how can you change/evolve it? And start reading. There are millions of blogs talking about anything and everything. Yes, it can be overwhelming. But that’s why there are things like Technorati. Or even start in our sidebar… our tiny slice of links will take you to some of the best and brightest thinking in the industry. And those blogs link to other blogs. And other blogs. And you’ll learn a lot. We have.

Things are changing. Quickly. When I heard students say, “I want to be an Art Director,” or, “I want to be an account executive,” I cringed (see video at the top). Granted, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was just out of college either. But in a few years, in the agencies that matter, I doubt these titles are going to exist, and certainly the roles are going to change. It’s going to be people that can think full spectrum, and don’t limit their thinking to one specific medium or way to deliver a message. And they’ll do it with passion and purpose. Don’t limit your thinking to what you want to do today. We’re all still learning, still figuring it all out. Five years ago, blogs and YouTube didn’t exist. But ignoring interactive until someone else figures it out isn’t a solution.

Failure is an option. It’s the only option to learn how to change the industry, and change the world. We will fail. Count on it. We have in the past; we will in the future. But the only reason to be afraid of failure is if you don’t want to learn from it.

Since I’m not a teacher and don’t have the forum of a classroom, here’s a presentation created by Alain Thys that further explains what’s going on.

Hmm… now that I’m at the end, I didn’t start out to write a diatribe on the interactive education process, or what I want to be when I grow up. Of course I’m biased toward interactive (though my first love for print will remain… “interactive” barely existed when I was getting schooled in design). So I’ll end with one of my favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotes:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.“That’s interactive for you. Have fun with it.