Hello and welcome back to another episode of the AIGA
Design Podcast. My name is Lee Sean Huang, Co
Executive Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for design.
This season on the show, we are exploring the theme of design
and performance, looking at the different nuances and meanings
of that intersection. And now for my Co host.
Hi everyone, I'm Julia Donatello, design Competitions
and Events Manager at AIGA. And our guest for this episode
is Helder Santo, based in New York City.
He's a partner at Unnamed. Helder, thank you so much for
joining us on the show. Now let's just get into things.
You've worked across a variety of creative agencies and later
Co founded your own business. So we'd love to learn more about
you and your career journey so far, maybe some of the
highlights, and then we'll learn more about you over the course
of this conversation. Yeah, sure.
No thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have this
opportunity to share my story and and it's very nice to meet
both of you. You know, I started, a big part
of my career was starting at Digitas, which at the time was
really focused on, you know, digital marketing and design,
you know, standard websites. And this is all before, this is
like early 2000. So it's before smartphones came
out, all those things. And what I love about that
moment in my career, looking back in it now, is no one really
knew what they were doing. Yeah.
It's like, it's like, it's like the beginning, the beginning of
the Internet essentially, right. And, and brands really embracing
what it means to sort of have this presence online.
And looking back on that, you know, the decisions we would
make and, and the sort of the appetite for experimentation and
doing new things was, was, was huge, you know, and we were
lucky enough at that time to partner with several brands that
matched that appetite that we had.
In fact, one of my highlights there that I always love talking
about is we did sounds kind of silly to talk about, you know,
it's so standard, especially given this format.
But we did like a live webcast for, for this in person events,
which had like celebrity entrepreneurs.
And there was like, you know, probably like 3000 people
audience and then we had like 10s of thousands watching the
webcast online. And for me, you know, we came up
with that idea to do it. But then it was also like, what
kind of value can we be adding in that moment webcast so it
doesn't just feel like you're watching a show on TV, like how
do you start adding more moments of interaction?
So we started having things like, you know, people, so many
questions online. We enabled people to chat with
each other online. And it sounds pretty standard
now, but this is this is all before like almost like 6 months
before YouTube launched. Wow, oh wow, So way before
Twitch and all of that sort of stuff.
Yeah, so, so it's but it, it was just like, and that was that's
always been my instinct and sort of experimenting with emerging
media and figuring out how we're going to sort of maximize these
things and not just try and duplicate what exists somewhere
else. That was like a big moment for
me. I mean, we did.
I remember staying up at 4:00 in the morning the night before,
pushing that thing live and getting that, that that sets of
adrenaline from from didn't toss that.
I went to the Gary Bowen, which then was, was widely known as a
traditional agency. They were great.
They were the first year I was here, they were ad age and ad
weak agents of the year. They, they brought me on to sort
of help build out their, their digital practice.
And it was interesting. I remember sitting in a room
with who is then the the chief digital officer and my account
title was like, you know, account managing director of
digital or whatever it was. And I remember saying in that
room I said, you know, well, hopefully we don't need to have
like these sort of descriptors after our names after a while
because everything is kind of digital.
And again, like this is people first.
Totally were digital in your job title was like, oh, this is
distinguishing you in some way, right, not like the.
Default, I know, I know it did, was I guess I kind of understood
the intent behind that because when new technologies emerging,
you need to sort of like identify the real experts in
those fields. But it also felt like at the
same time, it kind of like imposed this kind of like
artificial silos and it created more, you know, it created more
sort of territory discussions and roles and responsibility
discussions that maybe was necessary.
But they're one of the coolest things that happened for me was
I came up with an idea that leveraged this is like maybe
2010 that leverage sort of like Facebook's data and use that
data to create custom experiences on this bank's site
that we used to work with. And, and the highlight for me
there was specifically because the clients actually added my
name as an inventor on a patent application and which, which for
me was super cool because clients don't have to do that,
you know, for they don't have to list the inventors from the
agency. But that's when I started that
just like reinforced my kind of self guiding mission of like
experimenting with, with, with emerging media.
And then from there I went to RGA and that's when I got like a
master class and what it means to, to have a good design LED
company. I learned so much there.
And honestly, I felt like I just hopped on to like a rocket ship.
We, you know, I grew this piece of business which started from
like 5 people to 200 plus in the span of five years.
And, and we were doing, we were doing everything.
We were doing big campaigns. We were doing product
development for a technology company of concept doing how we
get flown out to Korea. I won't name the company, but
it's going to seem kind of obvious in a little bit a big
Korean tech company, you know, and I would, I would go out
there and, you know, I would meet with their product teams
and their researchers and we would share kind of, you know,
exciting ideas and prototypes that just kind of like really
brought everything together. And then from there I went to
Wonderman Thompson. That was, that was my first like
big holding company job was owned by WPP and the thing I
learned a lot there as well was it for about 5 years.
But the thing that I really appreciated about that
experience was looking back at my previous roles at Digitas,
Mcgary Bone and RGA. They all have an incredibly
strong culture. When I was at Digitas, Digitas
house was private, then it went public on its own, and then as I
was leaving, it got bought by publicist.
It does just to give you the context that like you felt like
you're working in a company had a clear vision and a clear
culture. Gary Bowen, Gordon Bowen and
John McGarry. We're still walking halls now.
So strong founder like culture. And then obviously our GA, we
had Bob Greenberg, who you know, was is a legend in his own
right. And and and I kind of started
feeling the absence of that when I went to like a bigger holding
company model. And that's, that's when I really
just started decided after five years there, I wanted to sort of
go back to a more nimble kind of structure and I decided to just
start my own thing before I eventually joined Unnamed.
Wow, what a journey. It's so.
It's so interesting to see like how things that were used.
It was so innovative back then. Before you 2 leave it.
Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it was cool. Yeah.
I mean, it's 20 plus years of messing around.
So it's, it's been, there's a lot, you do a lot of good damage
in that time. Yeah, very cool, very cool.
So you started mentioning that you're now a partner at Unnamed
and in your website you categorize yourself as a
regenerative design ecosystem. Can you elaborate a little bit
of what that means? Yeah, sure.
Regenerative design ecosystem, that's really just a way of
saying that it's all about creating momentum with the
clients and that we collaborate with, they come to us with a
brief, we knock out the brief. But then we really embrace those
relationships and those partnerships and oftentimes wind
up connecting them to other people that we've collaborated
in the past or currently collaborating with.
And so when we talk about regenerative design ecosystem,
it's something that our goal is to always create like this, this
ecosystem that's like sort of like self generating or
regenerating and ensuring that that the the clients that
collaborate with are getting like an exponential impact from
working with us, right? So it's not just about knocking
out the brief. It's also about thinking about
their business and connecting them to people with our network.
And that becomes incredibly helpful, particularly for the
venture side of the business, where a lot of these companies
are starting up and networking and meeting the right people
could literally be the difference between your business
surviving and not, right? Talent is still the most
important thing out there, regardless of what industry
you're in. So, and that that's what we mean
by that. We want, we want to think of
ourselves as more than just, you know, a design studio.
We want, we, we really want to position ourselves as true
partners that are willing to go the extra step to deliver that
exponential impact. Awesome.
Very cool. So Speaking of Speaking of
venture building, I wanted to hear more from you, your
understanding of nature, beauty in the context, in the context
of creative strategy agencies. So what are the unique
challenges that you might, yeah, you might encounter this in this
context and like merging entrepreneurship with design,
for instance. Yeah.
I mean, so our ventures program is is really exciting and I like
to talk about it in several different ways.
So one thing is we are intentionally designing a
portfolio of collaborators, clients that we feel give us the
right balance of work to create to keep us sharp, right.
And the interesting thing is we work with both, both like global
established brands and then startups that are trying to
become those things. And what we found is that client
prospects that we talked to, they love the idea that we have
the rigor to get past and through a big system for like a
top ten, a top 10 Fortune company, Fortune launcher
company, whatever it is. And then the the more
established brands love that we're working with startups
because that's where a lot of the innovation happens, right?
So having, having like that, that, that portfolio of clients
allows us to sort of like continue to hone our craft, but
then also it creates more opportunities to, to experiment
with these venture startups because a lot of them are
starting businesses or they're starting industries, right?
So that that's a completely different mindset than trying to
sell another smartphone or, you know, whatever it may be.
I think this is this is about where they're they're trying to
carve out a space in the world. It's not just for the company,
but they have a vision of how an industry should change or net
new industry. And that just really kind of
forces you to think about how to simplify what they're trying to
do right? Because a lot of these founders
have huge ambitions, but you kind of have to like walk the
market to the line. So they understand like what's
happening and what's so disruptive about about that
change. So we we love, we love that
component. So that's at a high level, it's
an intentional, it's an intentional portfolio mix that
keeps a sharp, keeps us on the cutting edge.
And then the, the second component that is, is I think as
a design LED company for far too long, like the value that we
deliver to businesses has been undervalued.
They take for granted great product design, they take for
granted brand identity systems. And, and I think the, the
ventures component is a way of us trying to recapture that
value that we generate for these businesses.
There's a lot of us have touched businesses that wind up becoming
unicorns. And when you look at the, and
when you look at the fee that we would capture associated with
the growth that we help generate for those companies, when they
become billion dollar plus companies, it kind of it kind of
hurts a little bit because you feel like, you feel like you
had, you had such a huge, huge role in building and helping to
build and create this, this brand in a way that helps drive
that growth. So we have two, we have one very
simple principle when especially with ventures one, we never do
anywhere for free. There's never like a straight up
equity, equity deal. What we often do is we find the
cash and equity deals because then we feel like we're standing
on our principle, you know, that we need to have some cash in the
door to keep the keep the business going and to show that
there's a mutual sense of respect.
And then the equity, you know that that's a beautiful, a
beautiful tool that we can implement because then we're now
investors in our clients business.
So their success would mean a lot to us considering we have a
stake in that company. There's like that aligned
incentives with that stake, right?
Exactly, exactly. And that's and that's early the
smarter companies, I think want people that are going to go
along for the ride and and I think it's just, it's a magic
like working with founders is probably one of my favorite
things. Also the toughest, not going to
lie, but but working with founders, you kind of live at
you. You find yourself, I'm guessing
it all the time. I'm guilty of falling in love
with my clients businesses. I just, I'm a nerd in a lot of
ways. And, you know, you get like
sucked into their world and you start seeing the world that they
see it and it could be very different from what you were
your starting point. And I and they just have like a
passion. You know, they talk about their
businesses like they talk about their kids, you know, so yeah,
it's, it's, it does a lot for just to try and recap all that.
Like it does a lot to, to keep a sharp balancing A portfolio.
You know, it's a way of recapturing the value that the
design community delivers to these businesses.
And then the, the, the third thing is just, you know, the,
the relationships you build with founders and you get a glimpse
into how they think about things as, as fascinating to me.
Totally. Yeah.
On that point of falling in love with your clients, companies,
their startups, it really does extend to this metaphor of
dating, I think this matching between like a, you know, an
agency, a studio with a client, right?
It's like not every agency is for every client and vice versa
in that sense and finding that out.
So you've shared a bit about your approach to things in terms
of like culture alignment with your clients.
There's one more thread that I wanted to explore in your
background and expertise, and then we'll kind of loop back to
the main theme of the the podcast, which is design and
performance. But first, just part of your
background. A, Prior to joining Unnamed as a
partner, you had founded a company.
Is it Ida X or ADA X? Ada X.
Ada X right and so it's it was an experience design company
that later merged with unnamed. You were creating the next
generation of experiences using generative AI.
Love to get your thoughts on the evolution of AI, which is like,
you know, by the time this comes out, they'll probably be some
new thing. But yeah, yeah.
What have you seen so far? Where do you think it's headed
and how to how to designers stay relevant in that space that is
changing so quickly? That's a loaded question.
I was look like I said I'm a total nerd when it comes to the
stuff and I literally lose sleep over just non-stop thinking.
Not anxiety or anything like that.
I just, I get excited about ideas and opportunities and I
had that moment a few years ago when when Chachi PT by that big
launch, it's really what set the whole world on fire, right when
it comes to Chennai. But you just have, there's a few
moments in our lives where we have this shit moment.
It just hits you like a ton of bricks and you just know that
nothing is gonna be the same after this.
And that was when I had that moment I look at, back at my
career and what I realized is that these moments when new
technology comes out, that's so profound.
These are huge growth opportunities for the creative
industry. So when I, and when I look back
at my career talked with like the big, there's like 3 big
waves, right? There's Internet, mobile and
social. Each of those, each of those
waves played a huge role. And if you look at revenue for
all the studios and agencies, creative services industries,
revenue would go was going through the roof at that point.
And that was that was for two reasons.
One is the, the brands that know knew they needed to take
advantage of these spaces. Either A, didn't have a skill
set in house or B, didn't have the capacity to take advantage
of it. And going back to my earlier
point is like when these things start, everyone is as a novice,
everyone is learning at the same time.
And I had the I had the benefit of that experience not being
intimidated by something like John AI.
Instead, I just embraced it with, with my lens of how I
think about brands and how I think about customers and brands
should interact with one another.
So I use that from like a business model perspective.
Like this could be a big growth opportunity for the industry.
Now, the interesting thing here is that AI, the big chatter that
happened at this moment was, Oh my God, a robot can write well.
And now we're about to starting to make machines are starting to
make pretty pictures and videos. We're all going to be out of
jobs soon. And I, I took the exact opposite
approach and might be you have to embrace this.
This is a new tool that we need to use and how can we use it to
change how brands and customers interact with one another?
Whereas even now that the majority of the use cases for
Jen AI tend to be what I refer to as I kind of like back office
activities. So if you're working in a studio
or an agency and you're a strategist, you're using it to
do research and get the sharper briefs faster.
If you're a logistics company, you're using it to manage your,
your supply chain. But everyone was avoiding, I
think cuz of the, the, I think cuz of the sort of the newness
of it and the sort of the how quickly can go the perception of
how AI can go off the rails and get unscripted and start
hallucinating like informations that we see within, within
today. I like the brands understandably
were hesitant. But over the year or two that we
started experimenting, we started developing models that
helped mitigate a lot of these things and started adding value
pretty quickly to the experience.
So, so that was sort of the, the meaning behind kind of that's
why I started the business from like a business opportunity
perspective. And then we want to, I want it
merging with Unnamed because you know, Virgilio and Manny, I know
them, I've worked with them at RGA years ago and, and they are
quite honestly, you know, the top .1% of design talent.
I thought that I have no doubt that we should properly join
forces. Like just giving us the
background and the story and like we like to kind of connect
all the threads of like, where are you coming from, right?
Like what is your creative lineage?
What are the things that you're thinking of?
And I think, you know, what you were talking about reminds me of
like, think of some viral post or meme going around within
design Twitter or design threads at that point around Jen AI and
someone saying like, yeah, Jen AI will completely replace
creatives when clients know exactly what they want, right?
And then there's still this kind of like relational layer between
like, you know, the business goals of a client, whether
they're a start up or a mega corporation.
And then what the creative executions are all of the the
touch points in an experience, right?
And that's, you know, that's something that is human
relationships, human experiences.
That's not something replicable by something that can spit out
text or images faster. Yeah, I think just just to build
in that point, like, I feel like the analogy the, the, the
example I always give is if you put a talented designer in front
of the journey and you have a complete 9 designer in front of
the journey and you ask them to make something, the output of
the from a designer is going to have a much higher fidelity and
a much higher because he, he or she just simply knows what's
prompt. There's a, there's a language,
you know, whereas, you know, and I think people miss that.
It's like, it's not, it's magical in a lot of ways.
And then there's also like the kind of more subjective layer
around just taste, you know, like you can't.
It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty.
So, so I always talk about in that context is like, that's why
embracing these tools regardless of your craft is is.
Is a must if you wanna continue to progress in your career.
We're not gonna be able to put that back in its box.
It's out. That's great.
I'm not surprised that you mentioned that you're not afraid
of AI and you have embraced it so easily because you seem to be
a visionary working on that, on things before they become live.
It's impressive. So very, very interesting, very
inspiring to hear some optimistic point of view on AI
because I think I've been listening more than the
pessimists. So it's it's good to have this
balance. Yeah, Thank you.
Yeah, I mean it's it's it's AI mean if you look back at every
kind of major revolution, there's always been a concern
about always been a concern about jobs.
This is very different, right? This is like game world changing
technology. A lot of people compare it to, I
talk about Internet, mobile and social as like previous sort of
waves and just like more of like a, a marketing brand design
lens. But like when you talk to people
in the AI industry and we work at the few startups now, the
analogy they make is this is like electricity.
You know, this is like when electricity was first launched,
introduced to the world that that's how significant of a
change it's going to be. But I, I, you know, I'm, I'm a
believer. And when you when you put, when
good people use amazing tools, good things come out of it.
So we have to, we just the good people have to outdo the bad
actors. It's kind of like the way I
think about it, you know? But anyway.
Yeah, that's a good take. So as Lisha mentioned, we are
currently working on design and performance as the topic of the
of the year and you have brought many examples of breakthrough
innovation projects that you've been involved.
And oftentimes when we're working with innovative
projects, we need to innovate from inside out.
So with within our teams and, and to our clients and products
and services. So what are ways in which you
have built new ways of working or innovative retools or
routines with your team and how they have performed?
And if you have an example with AI based tools that would be
great also to hear some examples.
Yeah, that's like a very that's a very active conversation we
have happening right now with unnamed We're we're about to
launch like a new way of of organizing ourselves internally.
And it really comes. I think it all centers around
our belief and not having layers and not not having layers and
having seen your hands on work like when you meet us, you're
meeting the team right away. There's no, there's no, I'm
going to go find like 20 other people to do this work.
And I'm going to like we, we, we take that very, very seriously.
And the, the challenge with that right now is like we're roughly
like 1515 full time folks and probably got up to like 30 or so
with like when we augment our support with specific skill
sets. But I think the, the, the
challenge in that model like no layers seen your hands on work
is that you kind of by default have to spread out the work a
little bit. So like, you know, we always
have at least have a partner driving the project, but each of
us as a partner has our own unique perspective and has our
own unique craft that we bring to the table.
And what we started realizing is that there's so many moments
where I could benefit from having like Anders, who's one of
our partners, or Virgilio involved in this project.
And instead of just wishing and hoping that it's going to happen
organically, we created like a really simple model where we
have like we call them round table sessions where each, each
discipline gets to see the brief that they come in, as they come
in. We give our point of view.
We see the first round strategy, we see the first round of
creative work at least. And then if there's any sort of
like big client or collaborator pivotal moments, that's when we,
we would bring ourselves together.
We've been doing it organically well enough, but we felt like we
needed to build like a little system in place.
So this way everyone gets to impact the work, bringing their
own unique perspective. And ultimately the clients
benefit from that, right? Because we're making sure that
everyone has seen the work. We're making sure that everyone
has been able to weigh in specifically.
So I'm excited to get like to formalize this and these round
table sessions because like even our teams, we get jealous of
others. People work sometimes like, Oh,
I wish I was working on that. And how can I, when can I, I see
this and I wanna just play around with it.
So, but this way we're building it into the system and we're
kind of feeding that curiosity, right.
So that's a model that we're putting in place now and we're
really excited. Yeah, I think on this topic of a
roundtable session and performance in this sense, you
know, we think about, I mean, obviously like doing this
podcast interview as a form of performance.
And so is like pitching a client something where there's these
different kinds of performances that are not necessarily just
like standing up on a stage talking about your design work.
So do you have an example of something that is performance in
your day-to-day life and work as a partner at Unnamed And yeah,
how do you think about that? Like how you show up as a as a
leader. Yeah.
I mean, I think for us is the number one thing thing that we
want to communicate as a team. And I think what what clients
and everyone wants to, because this is the thing that I always
remind myself of is when a client selects a partner, that's
a big deal for them. A lot of times if the decision
goes really bad, that that could be bad for their career, right?
And I think a lot of times on our side, we tend to take it for
granted. So I think for the first thing,
especially if there's an existing relationship, I think
the most important thing that we have to do is just build trust
right away, trust and confidence.
It's the dating process, the nation now.
Yeah, 100%. Right, that you're trustworthy,
you're worthy of more time and attention and all of that stuff.
Yeah. And that comes across in a lot
of different ways, right? So, so I think, I think just
just just from my perspective, I think our work speaks for
itself. We have like a really several
strong, dozens of strong case studies that represent a wide
range of, of industries. So while we let the work talk
for itself, like we need to, we need to, we need to solve that
intangible thing like the trust factor, you know, and it has to
be earned. It has to be earned every step
of the way. And I and I think that's,
that's, that's what we try and communicate.
Very cool, can you share the other side?
Like a project that probably was very chaotic that taught you
more than a successful one. I think like chaos and failure
like you, that's that's where you learn, you kind of learn
what not to do and what to do. I think for me, one of one of
the first projects, and actually this was like unnamed, we
developed like this really innovative experience.
I won't mention the brand because we're talking about
performance and things like that, but it was a simple idea.
And the idea was like, how can I brief a brand on who I am?
And then how can the brand reposition its products based on
who I am, but not in like, not like, but there was a lot of
detail in in the system. And then we're only able to do
it because we used Ji or in this case it was literally Chachi PT
where the, the the user would use a very simple interface.
We're talking like 5 sliders. I'm confident.
I'm a nurturer, I'm artistic, I'm whatever.
And depending. And we assigned a value to each
of those attributes. So you can go from zero to 10
across 5. And even that within itself
there was, if you took those scoring system literally, it
would give you something like 150,000 possible permutations in
the sense of creating like a persona profile.
And then from there when you create the profile, then every,
every product that that brand offered was now rewritten in
service of that profile. So when you add that layer, what
you wind up getting is you get a million plus permutations and
copy. So the interesting thing there
was just imagine like, imagine like a poor copywriter or
marketing manager approving 1,000,000 lines of copy.
Like it would take a year just to get that done.
So this is what I was talking about earlier.
Like brands have to let go a little bit of the sort of
prefabricated, prefabricated lines and assets and have a
little bit of use the word faith, but have a little, have a
structure in a way that sort of mitigates any risk.
And what we found was because we sort of control the input by
using that slider, you actually have really good control over
the output because we didn't allow the user to ask or give
open-ended questions or have open-ended responses.
It kind of like created the guard rails and what came out
was really interesting. And the other thing that we
always focus on is how do you start comparing?
How do you start pairing up like discipline needs and having them
collaborate together? And the best thing that we did
is we had like an engineer sitting with a copywriter.
The copywriter would write the structure, the engineer would
put the, the correct prompts in and, and tweak it.
And then there was like a back and forth.
And I love, I love like that one.
Like 2 disciplines that probably would have never met like 3
years ago are now like the key resources, the key craft people
to get this thing up and running out the door that that was.
So that worked. That was it did not hit its
sales targets. But what it did do was from
start to finish, I think it was over 50% of the people included
that experience, which is super high.
And then the the second thing that we all believe including
the clients is that if we instead of create, we created
like a standalone experience to just to get this thing up and
running to learn from it. But if we integrated that type
of experience into an optimized site, a site that's optimized to
drive sales for example, we have like a very high degree of
confidence that that it would, it would meet that that 2nd tier
of of objectives, which is like driving sales for the business.
Yeah, I got it. I wanted to follow up on that.
You were saying this project example didn't quite meet the
sales targets, but it was seen as like this example of this
learning experience. I'm curious if you've seen other
maybe new kinds of performance metrics that have arose from
this AI enabled work, right? Is that also changing the way
that we measure performance of a given campaign or activation or
whatever that might be, and how you think about that?
Yeah, there there's there's an idea we're starting to
experiment with now. To me, it all comes down to
what's the benefit of having Jet AI as part of an experience with
a brand and a customer. This could be like a product or
like an app or whatever. It could be, you know, a
marketing experience, it could be customer service, it could
be, it could be any of these things.
And for me, the most amazing thing that happens within Jet AI
is it gives you, especially when you're talking about large
language models, it gives you the context, right?
Doesn't just give you answers, it gives you the context so you
understand the answer, which is like what, what the best
teachers do, right? And what that context sort of
under what, what underlies underlines that context is, is,
is really empathy. I'm not just giving you the
answer, I'm trying to connect with you.
And I think that is the sweet spot for creating and designing
new experiences that leverage the capabilities of Jet AI.
It's really to sort of help bridge the gap between a brand
and a customer with empathy, showing that you understand what
they're trying to achieve, showing that you understand who
they are and showing and just giving them helpful information
and context as they make whatever decision needs to make
when, when they're, when they're interacting with the brand.
And, and the metric that we're playing around with now is, is,
is something that we just stole it from standard language in the
psychology business, which is the emotional quotient EQ,
right? You know, EQ, having a high EQ
is actually a really strong indicator towards someone's
success and in, in a lot of fields.
And we, what we're trying to do is say, Jenny, I, if it's
superpower could be creating empathetic experiences, how can
we start measuring experiences based on the perceived EQ of
that brand, right? Does that brand have a high
emotional quotient? Does that brand understand what
kind of help I need? Does that brand understand what
I'm trying to achieve as a person?
And then how is that brand then regenerating itself to to be
more bespoke to you and in a very empathetic and human way?
So I think it's, it's kind of a weird thing that, you know,
Jenny, I is allowing us to be more human at scale.
If you think that's like another silly way of thinking about it.
It's like it's, it's, it's a tremendous opportunity.
So that so we're. Yeah, I think that's really
helpful for both agencies and brands, right?
Thinking about this is like, OK, yes, there's like the bottom
line, but also this is also an opportunity to think about these
new metrics, right? And like, I think some of the
public social media kind of stuff around AI art, whereas
it's like, you know, individuals playing with it, you know, it
often is like at this very surface level of like whatever,
you know, the, the trendy cool thing is whether I mean, at the
time of recording this, we just had like a week of people
posting their like studio Studio Ghibli RIP offs or those like
starter kit things, right? And like these are just kind of
like trends or just people experimenting.
And like, it can be polarizing. But I think at this deeper level
for professional designers, for agencies who are doing this, it
really is involving like rethinking of what performance
means as well. Yeah, 100 percent, 100%.
Very cool. So what are your aspirations for
Unnamed for that coming years? Is there anything specific that
you're focused or you wish that new challenge, like what type of
new challenges or new clients you might be focusing on from
now on? Yeah, I'll tell you one thing.
It's great because we're we're a group of dreamers.
You know, we're in the most, in the most practical sense.
So I think we get get caught up in how ambitious we are
sometimes, which I think is a great is a great place to be.
And you know, there's one thing we have in the hopper that we
can't quite make public yet, but that's something that we're
really excited about, which hopefully is a stepping stone
for us to kind of reframe how the creative services industry
engages with clients and partners.
So I have to be a little cryptic, but I can't really talk
about it. But yeah, but that's like 111
ambition we have. And then, you know, in terms of
when we talk about this type of work that we do is product
design and identity design and then activation, right?
So that could be anything from like a campaign to like whatever
it may be. And I think for us, we want to
keep on building relationships with our collaborators in a way
that allows us to hit on all those 3 markers of deliverables,
you know, because I think that's when we're, we, we feel most
excited about the work that we're doing.
And I think that's when the clients are getting that
exponential impact from our, our relationship.
I think like in terms of the work that's getting us really
excited lately is really the connection between like hardware
and software and kind of like figuring out, especially from
our product design perspective, how these two worlds where we're
working with a bunch of company right now.
It's not quite launched, but to have a hardware software play,
it's a wearable and, and, and app companion.
Let's say we just got the identity approved to the brand
identity and we we parallel past doing the brand identity and the
product development and design so that so that everything feels
like it's coming from one system.
And even like the little micro interactions you get with with
an experience feels like it's different being defined by
brand. We often say like brand is
interface and it's, it's working an entirely new space.
It's like a first of its kind tech product.
And this, this goes back to actually I think Julia, you
asked around the regenerative design ecosystem.
We got to a point where the ideas that we were coming up
with was completely changing the brief.
It had significant influence on the product design, which is
great. Like, I don't know one agency
who wants to do that, doesn't want to be in.
That position, yeah, being able to like redefine your brief is
like, yeah, such a gold standard of being able to get to, right.
Otherwise you're just implementing somebody else's
ideas. Exactly.
So we started asking a question because, you know, they're a
start up and they're well funded and they're going to, you know,
they're going to have a very successful venture.
We started asking a question like, do you guys have the right
like technology skill set in house to bring this thing to
life and and the way it should be?
And they said no, no, like do you know anybody?
But Yep, we should. We sure do.
And it's not, and we're not trying to say this is like a
he's not like a a named employee.
That's, that's, you know, we're not trying to create a facade.
You just bring him in as a collaborator.
And he, he, he's part of our, he's now a part that we're now
all part of this like design ecosystem, right?
We did something that we think is going to make the product
much better. And we brought the right
technology resources to iron out the framework to be able to
create this experience in a, in a fluid way as possible.
So I think that's that, that's a way we're, you know, going back
to like all these things are starting to emerge, right?
What's Yeah, I mean, you've shared so much advice already
about your current practice and your approach to AI and to the
the agency business in general. But what is a piece of advice
that you would give to young designers today who want to get
into the kind of stuff that you're into?
I think honestly, it's, it's embrace change, it's going to
happen. It's going to happen every day
on every project, every year or so in your career.
It's just going to happen. And the people, the people who
succeed are the ones that are recognized as a challenge, but
get in, try and get into solutions mode and don't get
down on themselves too much. I wish I could mention some of
these brands to give you more context, but I feel like it's,
it might be inappropriate. It was what we had an A list
celebrity that we were shooting with in four days time and the
clients had it changed the like brief in a significant way.
The idea that we had was just gone, but we only had one day to
shoot with this actor and we had 3 1/2 days to figure out how
we're going to salvage the shoot.
And we came back with with an idea within 24 hours that saved
the shoot. We got everything that we needed
and the results for that particular business went through
the roof because of this campaign.
And I think that's, that's the mindset of like embracing
change. What clients are paying for are
problem solvers. Anyone could get something done
when everything goes like perfect.
The people who are going to continue to succeed are the ones
that embrace change, right? The one, the ones that just know
that this is this is a new way of living, a new way of working
is being, is being defined right now.
Totally. And you could be you could be
the person that helps define it. Totally, Yeah.
You know, and I think that's, I think that's.
Yeah, thank you. Very, very cool.
Very cool. Yes, I love it.
I'm getting fired myself. I also, I'm here like you
mentioned, so many new things that you've learned and that
you've embraced in terms of like change and tools and so on.
I'm curious if you're special, like if you're interested in
anything specific right now that could be professionally or
personally, Maybe a new habit of new type of activity or a topic.
Yeah, that's a good one. And I'm sorry, I think I'm going
to give you like the most cliched answer possible, but I
think becoming a dad is like, it just completely changes your
perspective on everything. You know, I have, I have two
kids. We have two kids in in a year.
So they're, they're 361 days apart and it's super.
Change. It's, it's super cute because
four days every year, they're the same exact age.
So just to give you a sense of how close they're and I think,
you know, I mean, kids are a gift in a lot of different ways.
And I get so much joy in watching them explore the world
and like see things for the first time like that.
Those are really special moments.
But I started thinking about it the other day.
It's like, I think the biggest sort of gift that they give you
is they, they force you to think about, think about things in
long, long term, right? They expand your time horizon.
This is a really practical example of that is, you know,
when my my kids will probably graduate high school 1415 years
from now, That puts things into perspective immediately.
If we were to all think about where we were 14 or 15 years ago
and we were trying, we were trying to put ourselves in that
mental state, what were we worrying about 14 or 15 years
ago? Do we still worry about it now?
We still worry about it now is done.
Yeah. And that's what I think about.
Like we all have stressors. We all have anxieties.
But like when I started thinking with that long term lens, like
it, it has a way of like making things feel smaller and more
surmountable. And, and yeah, like I, I think
that I think that's the thing. Once I graduate high school,
I'm, I'm, I'm fucked. I guess I don't know, because
then my timeline is going to go back to day-to-day.
But no, but all kidding aside, like they, they, that that to me
is like the biggest thing. It's, it's really freed my, my,
my way of thinking and, and sort of like allow gives me
permission to think about things in the long term and not stress
about the day-to-day stuff that happens in all our lives and all
our careers. Appreciate that perspective.
So as we're rounding out our time together, we'd like to ask
all of our guests for a recommendation.
It could be for a book, a show, a movie, any piece of media that
you'd like to recommend to your listeners or to our listeners
and to our viewers who are watching this on YouTube.
I mean, like, I'm going to give you another appreciate answer,
but I think it's genius in so many ways.
And everyone's going to say this.
I'm sorry, maybe it's not cool enough.
I'll say it anyway. It's Severance.
I think Severance is genius. I think I think it's genius.
I think the thing that what really like clicked with me
after a couple episodes is like, if you think about like all of
us in our, in our lives and work, professional and personal
careers, I would venture to say that like 90% of us had this
thought. Like, I wish I could just turn
off my personal life so I could focus on my professional life.
I wish I could turn off the professional life so I could
focus on my personal life and what, and no one really thought
about like if you literally made that wish come true, what that
life would be. And I didn't, you know, and
it's, I love that they took like a very kind of like implausible
idea. And they just, they just showed
you how messed up that would be and how we lead both, both parts
of those lives to sort of be aware of one another because I
have a whole life. And that's kind of like how I
it's, it comes from like a very human thought of just being able
to like silo ourselves for the right moments.
But if you took it literally, I love how far they took it.
And I think that's to me, like, I don't know, I only hear people
talking about that angle. So maybe everyone's gonna say
this most obvious thing ever. But like, for me, I was like,
that's it's super interesting. No, So I get a kick out of that.
That's awesome. I actually haven't seen the show
yet but I've heard so many good things so I need to.
You ever knew my Apple TV subscription?
I promise I did not ruin anything for you.
That's the premise of the show, not any.
Ads. No spoilers.
Not spoilers. Very cool.
All right, well, finally, to wrap us up, Helder, could you
tell our listeners, our viewers, give them a call to action
about, you know, where they can learn more about you, your work
at Unnamed? We'll post links to the show
notes and to the YouTube description, but it's helpful
for folks to hear it from you. Yeah, I mean, honestly, they can
just e-mail me Helder at unnamed dot XYZ.
You can follow me on LinkedIn, but I don't post very
frequently, although I'm trying to work on that.
I'm trying to get over that cringe status of posting too
much on LinkedIn. But but yeah, I think the best
thing, I always love interacting with people and sort of learning
where they're from and what skill sets they have and what
opportunities they want to discuss.
My e-mail address is the best way to get a hold of me and if
it and if you get on then you get my cell phone number and you
can text me anytime. Yeah, amazing.
Well, thank you so much for making yourself so available to
our. Listeners for.
Viewers and for yeah, spending the hour with us talking about
your work at Unnamed, your thoughts on working with clients
and brands and your approach towards technology and a whole
bunch of other things. So thanks again, Elder.
Yeah, I appreciate it. This was a lot of fun.
Thanks guys. All right, and thank you for
watching and listening. All right, see you at the next
episode. Bye.