Patrick Surace, Award-Winning  Flash Developer / Motion Designer

My role in the creative process:  I am an independent contractor for a number of successful creative agencies.  I think of myself primarily as an artist, though my role changes from project to project – I am an Art Director who also provides a lot of Flash programming for rich media ads.  I work on major media campaigns for the music and movie industry.

My favorite brand experience:   I worked on the Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney campaigns, which stick out because both of them won awards.  And Nirvana was great because they’ve been so influential in my generation.

But more recently, I created the campaign for Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.  I worked closely with Dave Silva, who art directed the campaign.  I provided all the Flash programming, video, 3D, data capture and Eyeblaster integration.  The campaign came out beautifully.  That was probably one of my cooler experiences. 

Future of Interactive Advertising:  I think that’s pretty much the wave of the future – get good content out.  All the mortgage ads and the “shoot the beaver” ads – those are the distractions.  Online advertising doesn’t have to be a distraction.  When ad creative doesn’t fit in w/page content, there’s a disconnect.  When it does, you feel it.  You’re drawn to it. 

One of the best examples of creative executions is on the gaming sites.  Games are colorful, games have photorealistic imagery, they’re the best of animation – the ads on those sites are designed in that same style.  When you have great creative on the right sites, I think advertising is a wonderful world.

Will Tunstall – Creative Director @ New Media Maze

Your idea about the perfect working day:  “Relatively smooth from a client point of view.  No amends if possible and maybe a quick pint…”

Your muse best comes when:  “The moments when you wish you weren’t thinking about it.  On the way home – when you are doing something else not work related.  And of course with the team.”

Favorite Brand Experience:  “Cloverfield Campaign.  We do a lot of international work and it often goes off to other agencies to get localized.  We had a brief to create a suite of advertising formats.  The client wanted some kind of key art/hard-hitting advertising with video, expanding formats, but also needed more obscure formats to support viral advertising.   We created some fake news broadcasts – and used  bits of the trailer to suggest that they were ‘real’ news reports.  Halfway through the format it would break into the advertising.  The film took off due to the underground advertising that they did.  It ran really well on sites like MSN – because it looks like the news box within the page.  The campaign was successful because the advertising was not ‘obvious’ – it was great to do some lateral thinking. ”

We’re all looking for that holy grail: the ability to grab users’ attention in an engaging, non-intrusive way.  Rich media these days is all about that fine balance: effective engagement with minimal intrusion.  That’s where Mouse Tracker comes in.

By visually responding to user movement, the user’s movements become part of the ad creative.  In this way, users are almost “automatically” engaged.  And, as Mouse Tracker stays within the confines of the ad real estate, it pulls users in without encroaching on page content.

In studying Mouse Tracker best practices, we’ve found some innovative and strategic uses.  Mouse Tracker wins the users attention in first tracking the mouse position.  Following up, moving “with” the user and avoiding the traditional looping – while adding a new, appealing visual interaction – is highly successful.

Here are a few of my favorite Mouse Tracker ads:

• The funky Virgin Virtually Vegas Campaign, by Lean Mean Fighting Machine, UK
• This very-meta NSPCC ad by Avenue A | Razorfish plays on self-referential computer jokes
• If you want more subtlety, sometimes just a slight gesture will do – like this ad by Profero UK for Channel 4.
• To implement some of these yourself, check out the Eyeblaster mouse tracker component.

Gefen Lamdan

Sr. Product Planning Manager | Creative Eyeblaster

gefen.lamdan@eyeblaster.com

Pete Collins, Interactive Designer, Tea Creative

Your perfect working day: “An unstressful journey into work would be high on the list.  Then to sit down and have a brainstorm on a new project that has come in – an exciting brief and if it was a Friday, then a few pints wouldn’t hurt in the sunshine at lunchtime, assuming there is sunshine …and a few games of pool on the office’s table.”

Your muse best comes when:  “I seem to have to take myself out of the work situation – it’s great to be with other people when you are talking about ideas.  But when I go to implement an idea, my own space is important – just to go out and walk around is when I am most creative. ”

What needs to be changed/improved in the industry?  “One thing that we would really like is global specifications -that would be really beneficial for me to build campaigns.  We basically built an international tool kit which gets sent out globally and different agencies adapt it to their territory.  If I build an ad, I have to come up with an idea that will work globally.  It is very difficult to gauge when there is no overall format size across all sites.”

Favorite Brand Experience:   “Spiderwick has been our best campaign to date on all levels.  We answered the brief above our own expectations and hopefully above the client’s expectations.  We thought it worked really well for the film and it gave the users an understanding of what the film was about – emphasizing the fantasy side.  Expandable banners are definitely my favorite format – you can create a micro-site within the formats.  The expandable banners really gave us an opportunity to show the different levels of the film – what we are trying to do with expandable ads is to constantly push the creativity. “