They tend to look long in the tooth as the years go by, such is the nature of an industry that thrives on the new and novel. And digital work, in particular, can be ephemeral. Below are samples of efforts that (fingers crossed) still look passably relevant when you see them. We can only aspire to have legacies as lasting as the Absolut ads from the 1990s, my favorite being George Rodrigue's iconic blue dog from 1993.
International market research firm Synovate would fly 500 of its top employees to various locations around the world for an annual conference. At each location, the company would organize a team building activity for delegates to build better working relationships.
For its 2008 conference in New Orleans, Synovate employees broke up into 40 groups, with each group assigned a New Orleans artist chosen by a local arts organization. Hurricane Katrina had decimated New Orleans in 2005, and many of these artists were still struggling to get back on their feet.
Two weeks before the conference, the artists were given $500 to create a work of art with the theme 'My New Orleans'. It was the groups' task to understand the artist's current business situation, offer insights and advice on how to get them back on their feet, and craft a description for the completed artwork which would be auctioned on eBay to all of Synovate's client base worldwide.
The Synovate auction generated $32,591 in sales and the art is now housed across the world, from the US to Norway to Australia. Glass artist Mark Rosenbaum broke down afterwards, saying he thought he would never sell his glass vases again. At the Synovate auction on eBay, his vase entitled My New Orleans, Between Swamp and Sea sold for more than $5,000, a price he had never dreamed of reaching.
To this day, this auction remains my most profound and rewarding internal marketing event. In creating team building activities for conferences, designing those that a) leverage attendees' skills and experience to b) have an economic impact on the surrounding community unifies delegates like nothing else and strengthens corporate culture.
There is also the impact on the company brand. Synovate became more than a market research provider; in this exercise, the researchers' expertise and advice transformed the lives of people who would not normally be able to afford their services. And more than the money raised was the optimism these New Orleans artists regained after Katrina had swept away their studios and livelihoods. As one artist told me a year later, "Synovate made me want to make art again."
Like all marketers, I am fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence on our work. The most immediate application for me was how it solved the problem of trawling stock libraries for hours to find the right image.
Midjourney, my preferred AI tool, seems limitless and magical. The challenge is always how to tweak a prompt so the four options that result have enough potential for fine-tuning.
For Albers' annual internal audit conference focusing on AI in audit, I wanted to get away from the stock photo trope of white cyborgs on laptops. I borrowed Rodin's Thinker and clad him in circuit board wiring. Despite the enormous promise of AI in audit or any other field, humans have to think through the implications and possible pitfalls that this technology brings.
In the 1960s, David Klein created a very memorable poster for Trans World Airlines (TWA)'s Egypt route featuring a tassel-festooned camel against a vivid blue sky, gold-hued pyramids and another camel with his handler in the background.
India does not have Egypt's pyramids but it has its own share of magnificently decorated camels. I liberally borrowed from Klein's book to create a poster and social media assets that played up India's striking colors, with a camel as the cover girl.
First-generation students have often voiced their frustration on the dearth of information for them when it came to higher education. As the first in their families to earn a degree, they had few, if any, mentors to guide them as they navigated an unfamiliar world.
Fabio Peña is one such first-gen student who, at the time we filmed him, was aiming to be the first in his family to have an MBA. The founder of a management consultancy and a mentorship program that paired first-gen students with first-gen mentors spent a day with the video crew, talking about his past, his challenges and his dreams for the future.
Unlike other videos I have worked on with a professional crew, we opted to keep the shoot organic, with the barest of storyboards, and let Fabio's narrative unfold. What resulted was a story that is a testament to parental love, a young man's ambition and the power of hope.
