Culture | Arnold Worldwide

One Young World

April 19, 12

During the week of October 18–22, young leaders from around the world will gather in Pittsburgh for the 3^rd annual One Young World Summit. OYW is a global young leadership summit initiated by David Jones of Havas as part of a mission to continually grow the global network and give young people a voice, empowering them to make changes in the world.

One Young World provides an opportunity for the future leaders of tomorrow to have their voices really heard and to effect positive change together with their peers from across the globe. The delegates, all in their 20s, will discuss a range of global causes including education, youth unemployment, sustainable development, health, social business, and other key areas of concern. This summit truly provides the impetus for change. Young people here aren’t just talking about the issues; they’re doing something about them.

During the three-day summit in 2011, total media reach globally hit over 3 billion impressions, 1.75 billion of which were online. On Twitter alone, we saw 19,602 individual tweets, an increase of 409% from 2010. Additionally, a staggering 2,386 companies were recorded as watching the live stream online. Young people continually leverage new social media outlets to make their voices heard, and this summit serves as a great example of the reach they can have.

And while businesses are tuning in to these sessions, they are also sponsoring the delegates attending. Each year, leaders of business and the public and voluntary sectors from countries around the globe nominate young delegates to the summit. This year, 300 of the Fortune 500 companies are sending their best talent. If you know a young leader who would be an excellent candidate for the 2012 One Young World Summit, you can register him or her on the “nominate and sponsor” section of the website (http://www.oneyoungworld.com/register/nominateandsponsor.asp). The cost per delegate place is just $5,200 and covers everything – food, travel, the summit itself and return flights. Please let us know if you are registering someone. We would love to learn about your nominee and follow his or her experience at the summit. This is an amazing opportunity, not just for the nominees, but also for nations around the world, as these are the people who will effect future change and progress.

You can contact David or Oliver at One Young World with any questions.

David Alexander, Tel: +44 (0)20 7017 1541 david.alexander@oneyoungworld.com

Oliver Stacey, Tel: +44 (0)20 7017 1546 oliver.stacey@oneyoungworld.com

A Culture of Making. More make, less talk. #makesh*t

March 8, 12

In the first installment of our “A Culture of Making” series, we invited a hundred Boston and Cambridge friends to hear from Ethan Marcotte of the new BostonGlobe.com and a pioneer of responsive Web Design, and Matt Krom, a Cambridge-based expert in Rails development. These guys know how to make sh*t. A lot of it.

Over Arnie beers and snacks, we talked about everything from the benefits of live coding in our client meetings to changing our design workflow to build better Web experiences across devices. We met computational biologists, software engineers and new friends from our advertising sphere.

Truth is, we know a thing or two about designing great creative ideas – we’ve been at this gig since 1946. But we’re also software developers, industrial designers, tactical urbanists and other “build first” oriented craftsmen and craftswomen.

We’ll be bringing in more “makers” from across industries, and hope that you’ll bring a fresh perspective from yours.

If you’re interested in attending Arnold’s next #makesh*t affair:

Getting Started with Neo4j in collaboration with our friends from Vermonster

3/27, 7-9pm @ Arnold Worldwide.

http://guestlistapp.com/events/91101 for more details.

Arnold R&D Visit RIT

February 29, 12

Anthony Stellato and Nick Hardeman from our R&D Lab recently gave a talk to students at RIT about the need to experiment, explore and play with technology as part of the agency's creation process. They talked about their daily objective to prototype and share, and presented some of the projects their prototypes have spawned like Arnie and Follow This!. They also presented TwElement, a 3D Twitter visualizer that pulls in tweets in real time based on a hash tag. Students quickly began communicating using the TwElement hash tag that was projected on the large screen.

Anthony and Nick taught a hands-on workshop. The program at RIT prepares students to be versatile to meet the needs and challenges of the quickly changing technological landscape. The students had a wide range of skills, from illustration to design to 3D modeling to development, among many others. All of the students had a basic understanding of code. Anthony and Nick gave a workshop in Processing, an open source programming environment. The goal of the workshop was to provide examples of code that could be helpful in creating tools to help applications talk with each other, analyze audio or create content.

One of the more popular examples involved code for creating gifs using the computers camera; this is available for download: Gif Recorder. Anthony and Nick demoed the Xbox Kinect camera in the Processing environment along with its potential applications. They walked through the process of setting up the Kinect on each student’s computer so they could create their own programs.

Recruiting and Collaboration: Scandinavian-Style

February 17, 12

It doesn’t take much to get us to agree to trek over to Scandinavia, and it takes even less when you tell us we’re about to meet with a bunch of the most well-prepared and insightful students we've come across in some time.

Matt Howell, Chief Global Digital Officer, Kryssy Bloch, Director of Digital Talent, and Keith LaFerriere, SVP/Director of User Experience, had the opportunity to visit Hyper Island, Mälmo University and Berghs School of Communication on behalf of Arnold for a recruiting and information-gathering journey that provided a preview of the talent presently hitting the market at breakneck speed. Even better, they’re hitting the market at a time when the convergence of more collaborative, nimble team structures position them to get deeper into building useful solutions while meeting less resistance.

While the advertising industry at large has been working on refining the core offering to meet the above mentioned dynamic, programs across very diverse markets are preparing students of all backgrounds to do the same. For once, it seems like cart and horse are at least on the same path.

We had the chance to meet with art directors, UX professionals, copywriters and planners, who presented the deliverables they created for real-world client product needs. In the case of Berghs, the students had the opportunity to pitch the ideas to client representatives and submit their work for national award shows.

One young team from Berghs even decided to show off a little and use the @ArnieBeer project to let us know how impressed they were with Arnold and what we had to offer.

Throughout the many rounds of interviews and case videos, students were consistently driving home the theme of collaboration. There isn’t a program we reviewed that doesn’t place this theme above all else. Interestingly enough, even students who had preconceived notions about what their “role” or “title” would be as they exited the program didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the idea that teams are leaning towards a flatter structure. They believe, and will most likely behave, as though their input is just as valid and valuable as the people to whom they will report, which makes perfect sense.

Arnold recognizes the change that’s happening across the academic landscape for these future marketers and advertisers, and it’s looking like this is going to be incredible fun.

Arnold UX Attends IxDA Conference

February 2, 12

Last week, Arnold ventured to Dublin for IxDA’s Interaction12 Conference. Over the course of four days, we crowded into Dublin’s gorgeous Convention Centre with hundreds of international peers, to inspire and challenge each other.

The idea of prototyping early and often was a constant thread throughout the lectures. We heard it from Dave Malouf as he unpacked the emotion and science behind what makes gestures and motion intuitive. We experimented with it in Rachel Hinman’s hands-on Mobile Prototyping workshop. Before jumping into prototyping software, she challenged us, start sketching in DIY mobile templates – snap a few photos with your smartphone and see how the experience feels in the context of the phone. The net takeaway: early prototyping is essential for gut-checking context, pace and emotion.

For us, the most exciting parts of Interaction12 were those that took us out of the brand/product mindset. Dr. Andrea Resmini’s lecture on restructuring Gothenburg, Sweden’s transportation system and Sami Niemelä’s talk on resolving Helsinki’s municipal communication breakdown both described cases that required triggering city wide physical and behavioral changes via cross-channel digital services. Each speaker addressed the difficulty in creating a system for an open ecology that, by its very nature, didn’t have one specific user to target. For Resmini, the answer was impacting collective transportation behavior by gamifying co-modal traveling. For Niemelä, it was “building an operating system for everyday life” in Helsinki with interactive urban displays that served as a hub for shared corporate and community communication.

Resmini’s and Niemelä’s projects both surfaced another compelling nugget from Interaction12: the role of technology as a silent partner. As rampant consumers of information, we’re almost always engaging with and responding to our devices. Calm technology – as speaker Amber Case described – represents the opposite of this phenomenon. Calm technology is invisible when you don’t need it, and there when you do. Ideally, if we can build systems smart enough to know when to surface, and with what information, we free the user to spend their time more efficiently.

Interaction12 was full of thought-provoking ideas and new perspectives, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for us at next year’s conference!