CreativeSocial is celebrating its 10th Birthday. While we in our Sydney chapter can’t put that many candles on the cake (I think we started in or around 2006), we are still very excited to celebrate alongside our London comrades this November.
Co-founder Daniele Fiandaca posted about it already. Passing this decade milestone means we’ll be curating a month of content with the help of the socials and some of the friends we’ve made along the way. There will be plenty of video interviews, thought pieces and opinion posts all celebrating a decade of CS over on the official CreativeSocial blog.
Guest contributors will include Nathan Cooper (@Rubbishcorp) Founder of Rubbishcor, Gareth Jones (@CJ) Global Chief Brand & Content Officer, DigitasLBi, Patrick Collister (@directnewideas) Head of Design at Google, Emily Hare (@contagious) Managing Editor at Contagious Magazine and our ‘local boy done good’ Aden Hepburn (@adenhepburn) MD & DCD at VML Australia, founder of Digital Buzz Blog.
See the first of the videos that we made with some of the socials above, you will discover yours truly looking back on his role at MetaDesign in 2004
I am quickly coming back to my earlier post about Reactive working together with start ups. Now everyone can inhale a whiff of modern entrepreneurialism by watching the live YouTube project ‘That StartUp Show”. It kicked off in a pub-come-studio in Melbourne, which is by no means a statement on the city’s tech-edge over Sydney. Yet judging from how many times Fed Square, Flinders Street and downtown Melbourne were pushed in the interstitials (hello sponsor City of Melbourne) they kind of think it is. But being from the Emerald if not yet Silicon City, we’ll let that slide. So please watch the first episode down below.
Picking strong cues from ‘The Gruen Transfer‘ and a sprinkling of ‘The Dragon’s Den‘, it pairs stand up comedy with a bar-camp like crowd and light-hearted yet informative chat with founders, journos and (dare I say it) online gurus. I think the wild dancing sequence in the beginning of the show was a bit ill conceived. But keep on watching, the shows gets much better afterwards, decidedly more professional than lo-fi channels like Silicon Beach Santa Monica.
Thanks to host Dan Illic pounding on comic opportunities, we heard catchy lines like “St.Kilda is Sim City for Perverts” (take that, sponsor!) and “Google Plus is the Adelaide of social media“(take that, Google!). Guest and Google Australia’s engineering director Alan Noble just had to grin and bear it.
More entertainment came from Dan re-combining 2 random expressions to create start up ideas: Pinterest for Babies, SnapChat for Kebab lovers and Procrastination Tool for Bored People (‘That’s Facebook!”). Other guests included the founder of (show sponsor) Blue Chilli, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin. Start up incubator Blue Chilli is actually a place I have spoken at a while ago during one of their ‘Pizza and Beer’ weekly wind downs.
While incubators like Blue Chilli and Muru-D don’t really rival our own agency offering, they do sometimes provide or connect to UI/UX and development resources. This is another sign of our two worlds overlapping In my view it’s for the greater good of creative ideas and speed of innovation in Australia. But maybe you disagree, what experiences have you made at the intersection of agency- and start up land?
I am sure you have already noticed: digital creative agency work heavily overlaps with start ups. I am hardly the first to notice that talent, ideas, formats and processes are very similar in nature. It’s no wonder some talented staff leave agencies to pursue their start up ideas. Murat Mutlu has delivered a great rant on it here. Similarly, whole agencies team up with venture capital to pursue start up ventures. R/GA’s Connected Devices Accelerator comes to mind. Check out the crowd in this new YouTube content called ‘That Start Up Show’ (you can read my review here). You’d be hard pressed to tell the people apart: agency geezers or start up folk?
Photo by Heisenberg Media under CC
Or look at the photo above: is it a group of start ups or a digital agency? Click through to Heisenberg Media and you will find out. So in many ways there is little difference. The reason we are still somewhat different is how agencies deal with a variety of industries & clients rather than one target market or one vertical. And most importantly, we differ in the way ‘our businesses work’. We agencies handle risk and reward a lot different from start ups. More often than not, we agencies would love to follow up, evolve, optimise and perfect our ideas for apps and services. Yet the budget often isn’t there for those last hard yards. On the side of the start ups people must often re-adjust their ideas and pivot the whole entreprise. And still their genius might hit a wall. Or the money might run out. Or the market might not react at all.
Photo by Heisenberg Media under CC
Despite those differences, I thought there is so much to be gained from getting closer to the start up world. I investigated our own Reactive agency & start up relationship further. And as part of our constant Research and Development, Reactive has started a relationship with Telstra’s incubator program Muru-D.
Through them we got to know a Sydney start up called ISSUE. Their venture is a browser-based authoring tool that creates mobile/tablet ready magazines with e-commerce and affiliate marketing, all built in. Or as they would call it: “Mobile magazines with shoppable stories”.
Last week Reactive Sydney turned into a little film set, hosting the ISSUE crew shooting a demo reel with us. Reactive is acting as their partner agency in this video (with yours truly among the amazing cast). The final video (see below) features fashion & design bloggers Lisa Hamilton from See Want Shop and Terri Winter, founder of Top3 by Design. They worked together with us to create an amazing interior design and fashion mag – and we had a blast being part of it.
We will post this ISSUE hype video once it’s finalised. In the meantime you can check out the elaborate set and suave actors in these ‘Behind the scenes’ shots:
Only sometimes do I wish I resided in Australia’s OTHER city, aka Melbourne. PauseFest is one of those reasons. Apart from its good branding and art work, it features delectable content and experiences.
Continuing their strong momentum from 2012, PauseFest features everything from cool installations, games, music, animations and interactive design to creative panels about startups and the wider digital industry. Under the title ‘Masters of the Industry‘ Reactive’s co-founder Tim O’Neill will panel it out with some other Melbourne luminaries. Among them my friend and ex-colleague Dave King from The Royals and Erminio Putignano (ex FutureBrand, now PUSH Collective).
Understanding weight issues and weight loss as well as making healthier choices in your life has become a critical issue for Australians. By many statistics we rank as one the heaviest nations in the world. And that is tons away from our self-perceived ‘beach-bronzed surfer chicks and dudes’ ideal. Check out the various exercise tips, recipes and psychological advice in the University of Incredible or as a series of presentations on the WeightWatchers Slideshare account.
YouTube videos and live events like Google Hangouts and Twitter chats with WeightWatchers experts complement the offering.
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