There is a specter in the ad industry. It is the ghost of something undefined. Its name is Creative Technology and its current state haunts our digital efforts. It is a clustered unrealized husk that hampers innovation on a daily basis.

There seems to still be industry-wide confusion about Creative Technology. At least once a year someone wraps a new definition around this difficult beast. People in traditional advertising think it’s the friendly term for anyone in technology. Digital agencies often use it as a tool to push digital work that can only be properly expressed through code. The folks over in Silicon Valley have never heard of it or find it confusing because they’re inherently creative and to give the designer/copywriter model the kind of authority they’ve enjoyed for years would be absurd.

The term is mostly a catch-all for anything from deep engineering efforts to user experience design. This itself is part of the problem. We’ve seen different types of Creative Technologists emerge across multiple disciplines. The highly vaunted in the ad world have settled on the definition of it being advertising’s version of creative coding. Extreme technical chops and the ability to express creatively through code. So what’s the problem? Don’t we want Creative Tech contributing to our creative process? We do, but the contributions they can make are being limited.

In order to understand why Creative Technology is at an apex while opportunities have simultaneously hit a glass ceiling, we need to understand a bit of the history. And while the history of Creative Technology is short, it is a cousin, if not a smaller part of the computer art movement which has been growing exponentially larger and established since the 1950s. That history itself is worthy of a deeper dive at a later date. Suffice it to say, right now the important thing to understand is the development of technology and artistic coding have been concurrent. In the 1970s with the advent of the PC, artists began teaching themselves to code making them less reliant on engineers. Fast forward a few decades to the late 90s and the digital advertising world has begun to take off with the popularization of the Internet. By the late 2000s it became clear that there was a gap between the engineers making things and the creatives imagining them. We arrived at a place where the output of an idea is no longer static.

The ideas were becoming bigger than the existing delivery channels and somewhere in this murky time the Creative Technologist appeared. This person could use code to generate ideas that came from a different perspective and help bridge the creative and technical gap. More often than not, this was the Creative Technologist’s idea. Igor Clark’s now infamous article on Creative Technology explains the history like this:

Their (tech teams) work wasn’t purely science or technology; though grounded in both, it was far from the simple application of formulae or solving of equations. Developers knew that you couldn’t take a creative brief as a set of instructions and just “translate” it into software. You have to interpret it, and that takes an extra spark. A creative spark. They saw this was a fundamental part of the overall interactive creative process, and yet a parallel, creative process of its own. The naming perpetuated the misunderstanding, and so it had to change.. At the same time, people across agencies were recognizing that their existing creative model just wasn’t working out for “interactive”. Crews outside the fortress walls were doing innovative and engaging work.. namely, the technology was the creative.

These ‘crews’ were in many cases the groups of computer artists who had been evolving for decades. For an overview on Creative Technology I highly recommend looking at Sermad’s latest SlideShare.

This is how it has been since, Creative Technologists and Creative Tech departments emerged to help the digital / traditional creative teams and directors bring their campaigns to life. And as the various platforms change so will the types of work we will output for each platform. But by only following the existing platforms instead of building or innovating on them, we discover that traditional ad creativity has a limited palette. Creative tech as a discipline exists in subservience to the traditional hierarchy. And here is where we hit the road block. If we must have digital creative directors at the helm, they need to have some coding ability and be able to understand what their projects are comprised of. It is likely (but not necessary) that these people will come from a Creative Tech background.

Now, more and more of the ways we innovate, and transform businesses happen through the lens of technology. The type of campaign advertising we have been making has less relevance than ever. It’s not that we should stop advertising or adopting new platforms for the ever-blurring digital landscape or that we should stop creative coding. We should continue to play, experiment, twist, morph and explore whatever we dream up. The truth is, that Creative Tech is really just an alpha level experiment for the beginning of a new advertising model. But it’s not a model just about experiments, fun and games. Unfortunately, we’ve seen most agency labs produce nothing more than a money pit to put PR towards. The real opportunity is in invention & brand innovation. Currently, production companies and tech start-ups are moving to re-imagine and augment client businesses more than agencies ever have. And those clients are realizing more often that their marketing money is better spent internally & on production companies.

The new genre of creative is business transformation. People like saying this word along with innovation. But this cannot simply be accomplished by a new logo, look, or brand message. These aspects cannot be overlooked, but more is needed. Contemporary brand transformation is created by taking the new core competencies of the agency such as technology or entertainment and infusing that brand message/design into ideas that augment the client business model. The Nike FuelBand and Nike + ecosystem are an often contentious subject within the ad world. We’ve heard it all before. But the R/GA case study about them is a reality to strive for. By creating products and destinations that work in conjunction physically, technologically and emotionally they have created a brand loyalty that is closer to the heart of the consumer. But they aren’t alone, production companies are working on medical devices, Citibank created a NYC commuter bike service platform powered by great tech and Control Group has built their own ad platform / help kiosk for the MTA. There are more of these examples and they stretch far beyond Google’s idea ofArt/Copy/Code. They augment more than merely entertain. They have at the least the potential to make our lives better and elevate brands into multifaceted functions that continue to ring true to their primary purpose. When utility and storytelling come together and use technology as the glue to affect a brand, the end result is compelling.

We cannot get closer to these ideas without people who can build the possibilities or are at the minimum very close to understanding them. In the field of architecture, you cannot even become a full architect without being trained with the eye of an artist and the principles of an engineer. Building the next generation of business transforming advertising is going to be the same. Strategy, creative, design, copy and UX all need deep coding knowledge to innovate in a world that is being re-defined every day by technology. There is a reason that we are trying to teach all children to program. Creative Technology as a distinct discipline should die off so that Creative Technologists can eventually evolve into leaders who can envision these transformations. This may seem insane if the Creative Techs you know can’t code, aren’t creative or are merely talking heads. In that, I am aligned with Igor Clark’s standpoint about true creative coders.

Historically, our concept of storytelling has evolved. Technology is not a canvas, it is the palette with which we paint the stories of the future. And we cannot make a great painting without intimately knowing our palette; learning to crush the pigment ourselves and make the vehicles of our choosing.

Some agencies have begun to head this way, others have not. It is worth noting that some production companies have picked up Creative Technologists as digital directors, some agencies have ECDs that were tech directors and a few have been industry sanctioned such as Aaron Koblin over at Google. We’re likely to have subpar results in innovation without truly knowing code. Imagination must be tapered, but also enhanced by intimate knowledge of the rapidly evolving technological realities around us.

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” – Sol LeWitt

Originally published at castellano.co on October 14, 2014.