Interview with Maurizio Mazzanti, creative director and co-owner of E3

My muse best comes when: My muse comes either when we are brainstorming (preferably in the late afternoon when the phones ring less) or when I am not stressed about the brief. Usually the latter happens when I am really relaxed, so quite often I write notes on my smartphone before going to sleep or on Sunday afternoon at home.

But brainstorming is an important and useful work tool thanks to the “stream of consciousness” that comes from the group: just a suggestion from a copywriter, an art director or a project manager could give the inspiration for another idea or for a better idea.

When the ideas come is important, but imho the key point is where ideas come from! And ideas comes from contamination, from other a movie or a song but mostly from ‘that funny game we played when we were kids.’ People want to interact and anything that is connected with gaming, interaction, playing, helps to achive a good idea on the net.



Your idea about the perfect working day: Wake up before the clock alarm starts to ring, view good results of our works, either a high click through rate from advertising campaigns or user interaction with sites, receive positive feedback from customers about ongoing projects and sometimes receive a brief for a mass market product: I like to work on something that I can touch, see on supermarket shelf or at a retail store, and talk about with people.The perfect working day should finish with nothing remaining to be done the day after!

Your favorite interactive campaign:  Recently, we developed two great campaigns through Eyeblaster, one was a full home page customization on MSN for Fanta, which was impressive to see.  But my favorite interactive campaign, again on the MSN home page, was for Pringles.  In order to promote the Pringles’ soccer Dream Team we developed a penalty game playable from a box, where the user could set the power of the kick and the ball moved through an overlayer and lands in the leaderboard, where the goalkeeper was.