Felipe Câmara — Creative Strategist, SuperHeroes Amsterdam
Felipe talks to TheNextGag about what he envisions as the future of the industry, how they are creating a culture of innovation, what he reads about on Reddit … and Viagra.
Felipe Câmara is the Head of Innovation and also a Creative Strategist at SuperHeroes Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
SuperHeroes Amsterdam has shown its technical and creative abilities in recent projects such as “Steady Feathers” for LG or “Sneakers Would” for Converse.
THENEXTGAG: HOW DID YOU END UP AT THE SUPERHEROES ?
Felipe Câmara: I used to be an Account Manager, but I couldn’t last in that position for more than a year. After that, I became a Strategist and I fortunately achieved success with it. But at some point, I wanted a change, so I took a sabbatical year to study. I went to Hyper Island in Stockholm, a brilliant digital school, which set the foundation for the skills that I’m using today. It also made me think about staying in Europe for a year or so, thinking I’d go back to Brazil right after. I had all things figured out and thought I knew exactly what I want to do. But then I befriended some Dutch people and I thought I’d ask them about local growing companies in The Netherlands. I’ve always had this entrepreneur side, so I’ve always wanted to be in a small place and help it grow. Long story short, here I am, at SuperHeroes. We were a good match right from the start. It’s great to be in a place where I wasn’t put in a box, where I actually have the freedom to develop what I want to be and how I want to work. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two years, helping to shape the industry on a small scale. But, you know, you nail and then you scale.
TNG: HOW BIG WAS THE AGENCY WHEN YOU ARRIVED ?
FC: When I started, I think we were ten people. That was two years ago and now we’re twenty in this office. We have our developers in another office down the road. We’ve just launched our first big campaign from our New York office. It’s just starting, but we’ve got plans to extend our office in Asia as well.
TNG: WHAT DO YOU DO HERE ?
FC: I started as a Strategist, but I see more and more space to do things as an innovator. Or what strategy will be in the future. Hence I am now Head of Innovation at SuperHeroes, while also leading the strategy department. We’ve got some people joining the team soon and I’m going to lead them as long as I need to and then see how they can work by themselves, I’ll give them some more room to build the innovation department. It’s a really valuable department to have in an agency nowadays.
TNG: YOU SAID IN A TALK THAT AGENCIES SHOULD CREATE CREATIVE LABS. IT SEEMS THAT A LOT OF AGENCIES ARE COMING UP TO THIS ALSO. WHAT IS YOUR WAY OF DOING IT ?
FC: I think our way of doing it comes from the understanding that traditional agencies — they call them integrated agencies now — have been trying to keep up with digital agencies, so they are digitalising themselves. They can’t be digital from a native perspective, so they have to digitalise.
But as a digital agency, what’s your role in this world? You have to understand that digital is constantly evolving and that innovation is, in a way, our way to cope with the process of evolution. It’s a spiral and our approach is to actually develop a process that kind of nurtures a culture. Create a culture of innovation. In a biological sense, let’s say, creating a process that grows into the company and the people. You don’t have to be Head of Innovation, you can just be someone who is nurturing that thing within people.
Our scope is to make this as tangible as possible for our clients, to aggregate different perspectives that they haven’t thought of before. And this might come from a strategic and innovation background.
TNG: IS IT MORE LIKE A START-UP IN THE AGENCY ?
FC: Kind of. That’s part of what we do, so we have that as well. Actually, one of the branches of the innovation side is just that. Developing new products, services and better user experience for our clients and the world in general. Superpowering the world as we usually say. We have something that we call Freaky Friday, which we have once a week. We join different groups of people — sometimes we open for people with an interest in science, sometimes we just involve people who simply want to gather and brainstorm with us around a process that we’re working on.
We try to find real life problems, such as — looking around the room — people forgetting empty glasses in meeting rooms. Problems bring challenges and challengers are problem-solvers that work with new ideas. How can you solve our problem? Perhaps we need a cup that starts screaming “I’M HERE!” if it’s left here for more than ten minutes. This is what we do; we create that product or service.
TNG: A LOT OF WHAT I SEE IN THIS FIELD ARE CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST IN AGENCY WORKING WITH GADGETS SUCH AS LEAP MOTION, OCULUS RIFT OR RASPBERRY PI. IT CAN SEEM SOMETIMES LIKE THEY ARE PLAYING AND HOPING TO FIND SOMETHING USEFUL IN THE PROCESS.
FC: Yes, this is some kind of experimenting. That’s what attracts me in leading an innovation department. It’s the joy that people have in their eyes. You create time to play. You are still working and you’re also learning a lot. How much do you learn in that process? Well, how much does a kid learn when they play hide and seek? They learn about winning and losing, about hiding, so about strategy; you learn a lot during playing. And that’s the innovation culture, you need to have time to play.
Now we have something called Innovation Hour once a week. We get together and we just play. We share insights and sometimes just talk about our day. And from that talk, when someone talks about their day, we try to innovate. What could have been done better for that person that day? How can we add value to that? And that’s when we come up with an idea that can be pushed forward or not.
TNG: AS AD AGENCIES USUALLY WORK ON CAMPAIGNS FOR CLIENTS, DO YOU THINK THAT THEY ARE THE BEST SUITED TO DEVELOP INNOVATION FOR CLIENTS AS IT SEEMS TO BE MORE OF A LONG-TERM COMMITMENT THAN JUST A CAMPAIGN ?
FC: You’re asking if innovation creates a relationship with a client that is more long-term than a campaign? I don’t know if there is an answer to that. There are various ways of creating a long-term relationship with a client. Big agencies have been quite successful with that. The innovation department is always thinking about bringing solutions for problems that don’t exist yet or that have not been created yet. That’s the key part of innovation towards clients — it’s being proactive. Let’s say I notice that my client has a problem with delivering his product. I sit down and have a brainstorm and build a better service, come up with a better idea to do it. And this becomes a product or a service that I present to the client. This proactivity generates a long-term relationship of trust. The client trusts me to always be thinking about improving their business, as opposed to simply reacting to briefs.
TNG: ISN’T IT THE JOB OF THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT AT THE CLIENT SIDE TO DO THAT ?
FC: R&D is usually more focused on the product development. What we do is more towards the business, the selling of the product in a different channel perhaps. This can come out of the innovation department; it can be something that the client has never thought of. However, the R&D people are the perfect people to bring in the brainstorm, to mingle with. Because that’s when you get something brilliant and unique.
TNG: AND IS RELEVANT TO THE CLIENT.
FC: Of course.
TNG: DO YOU HAVE CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF THINGS THAT YOU EXPERIMENTED FOR A CLIENT ?
FC: I think the project that we did with Converse for Cannes 2013 is a great example. They were launching their Google+ page and they organised a project called “Hack-a-Chuck”. The idea itself was to hack a Chuck Taylor All Star sneaker and have fun with it, create something out of it. They invited lots of agencies to present their project. We did well so we’re now their innovative agency in some markets. We didn’t win the competition and our project wasn’t chosen as being the best. But we made a really cool drone that would follow people during festivals. If you wear our specially designed Chuck Taylor and you’re lost somewhere at a festival or concert, you tap on your shoe and then a drone comes, with a Google+ pin, over your head, making it easy for friends to come and locate you. It was a really fun project, lots of learning about how to play with digital location systems and sensors. That’s one of the concrete examples. We have a few other projects that we’re working on.
The innovation department is ongoing, we’re developing it. We’re also working on fun projects such as one we did with Tinder. We came up with the idea during a brainstorm over a month ago. It’s something that we call the Thunderpants. They’re underpants that you actually put on, and when you get close to someone that you matched with on Tinder, your underpants give you a vibration. And then of course, you can talk to her or him. It’s fun stuff. SuperHeroes, as a brand, has this pop culture approach. Create things that people will talk about. That’s something we take into account in our innovation department.
TNG: WHAT KIND OF DEVICES DO YOU PLAY WITH ? BECAUSE YOU MENTIONED DRONES AND SENSORS. WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE ? RFIDS ?
FC: Being a digital born agency, we have a passion for experimenting with technology. We are now playing with Arduino and other open source platforms to control our “physical” world. There is a project we’ve worked on and it’s just been launched. We’ve worked with a ‘tech instrument maker’ and a musician to produce a music video by experimenting with making music, while using Converse as instruments! We’ve put sensors inside them, which means they make a sound when you throw them in the air. It’s gyroscope sensors; depending on which direction you turn it, it makes a different sound. This is part of an initiative that we’ve sold to Converse. We’re learning new things, such as how to work with these sensors and all kinds of different stuff. It’s super fun.
TNG: I JUDGED THE EPICA AWARDS RECENTLY. WE HAD A CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY. BUT IT WAS REALLY DIFFICULT TO JUDGE THE CATEGORY BECAUSE IT IS HARD TO COMPARE THESE KINDS OF OPERATIONS BETWEEN VENDING MACHINES AND APPS AND DRONES.
FC: I understand what you mean and I do get your point; I also read a lot about the innovation awards, with Cannes Lions trying to bring this mindset to companies, to be more innovative and experiment more. But it’s difficult to judge, it’s difficult to have innovation as a category.
TNG: THIS SEEMS TO BE THE YEAR OF THE DRONES. THAT’S WHY I WANTED TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF THINGS YOU WERE PLAYING WITH. 3D PRINTERS ?
FC: We have a project running now with 3D printers. But we don’t have a 3D printer in the office. We’re actually looking for partners to work with. Maybe we can invest in 3D printers and play a little more with them.
TNG: HOW DO YOU JUSTIFY THE COST OF PLAYING ALL DAY AND NOT NECESSARILY ENDING UP WITH TANGIBLE IDEAS THAT YOU CAN SELL TO A CLIENT ?
FC: We actually always end up with ideas we can sell to clients. Most of the time, they fit the client strategy, but sometimes we just have a vision of what we want to achieve and it’s not feasible for the client to actually use. But we also like to experiment, like on the Freaky Fridays, where we experiment more freely with problems and finding solutions that could apply to different clients. It’s an innovative way to approach business. If we work from a problem-solving perspective, it can happen that we fail to come up with a solution. But if we have in mind that we’re learning by doing and by failing, then we always learn and we never lose. We learn something we can apply in our next work for that same client. You have formal learning and informal learning. It’s an investment. Some of the times it’s difficult to make it tangible. Even if it’s just about making a presentation of the learnings, of what we found. Or, if we can’t present, then we show the prototype, and that’s even more learning, it shows what we’ve done.
You can compare this with scientific learning. How do we learn about cure for diseases? It’s about combining and trying. And then you learn what the best medicine is.
TNG: BUT ACTUALLY I THINK THAT THAT’S HOW THEY CREATED THE VIAGRA. I THINK THEY WERE TRYING TO CREATE A MEDICINE FOR YOUR HEAD AND THE SIDE EFFECT WAS THAT IT MADE YOUR DICK HARD.
FC: Yeah, the veins dilate a lot and you get a bit hard. Harder than expected.
That’s a side effect of a trial, but a good one. Innovation is about trying and experimenting as well. And because of that you have more failures than you would have in a project where you simply do it by the brief.
TNG: YOU WERE SAYING EARLIER THAT YOU READ A LOT ABOUT INNOVATION. DO YOU READ ABOUT AD AGENCIES OR DO YOU READ ABOUT STARTUPS AND SUCH ?
FC: I read various things. I read about the industry, I want to know what’s going on and what people are doing. That’s something ongoing. But I read a lot about other things, and Reddit is a good source for aggregating all that content. I read a lot about futurism and futurology. People curating information from subjects like science magazines. I also harvest things like the next 3D printed ears, and how that works. I’m interested in this kind of innovation as well, and even if it’s in a field that I can’t really talk about, I enjoy reading about it as it sparks new things within me.
So innovation, for me, is about diversity, reading and being interested by different things. It’s also about bringing people with different passions together. And from that diverse environment you bring the best solution. At SuperHeroes, for example, we’re a mix of cultures. I’m Brazilian, but we have British, Norwegian, French, Dutch, American, Surinamese, Swede, Mexican. It’s this crazy mix that works great.
TNG: TO FINISH, YOU SAID THAT YOU LOOK A LOT ABOUT WHAT THE INDUSTRY IS DOING. IS THERE A PARTICULAR AGENCY THAT IS DOING GOOD IN TERMS OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY ?
FC: I like startups. Kickstarter is a good source of inspiration. The small festivals are also a good source to find things. Here in The Netherlands, they have Dutch Digital Week, where there are lots of entrepreneurs coming with ideas. I think universities are the perfect spot to learn from.
But if we’re talking about companies, I would highlight the work from Berg London, BreakFast NY and Questto Nó.
Felipe Câmara
Creative Strategist
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