Interview: Dan Weingrod
Dan Weingrod is Senior Vice-President, Innovation Strategies at Cronin & Co., an advertising agency based in Connecticut. I recently had a chat with him about the state of the industry and all things technology, so here goes:
To start with, please tell me a bit about Cronin and how you landed up there - a few years ago now, I imagine?
I moved up here 15 years ago from NYC with a tech background and was working for a Web development & online media firm that went under in the dotcom collapse. I knew a few of the folks here at Cronin and thought that they might be interested in bolstering their Web capabilities so I proposed the idea and eventually it worked out.
Nice. So what is your role now? What do you do on a day-to-day basis in the company - describe a typical day.
So about a year ago the agency management decided to move my role from day to day management of the Web department to a more strategic role dedicated to innovation and driving emerging media into the agency. So my role is more of an evangelist. I spend a lot of time looking at what is going on and trying to apply it to our work and our clients. About once a month I will do an agency wide seminar on a specific topic of new media.
So somewhat what Grant McCracken calls the Chief Culture Officer role, then?
It's between that and the "chief innovation officer" idea, although I'm partial to Grant only because my first degree was in Anthropology.
I studied Sociology so I know what you mean! What is the company's philosophy of advertising?
Hmmm, that is a tough one...I think that like many small and mid-sized agencies here our philosophy is evolving. We are trying to incorporate more digital and social in everything that we do. That's a lot of my role and while I sometimes get impatient we are slowly getting there. I think that one of the biggest challenges in this vein is incorporating more of an iterative, "always on", process into how we approach the work. This is a tough one as it is a challenge for clients as well as for us.
In your advertising career (pre-Cronin included), what project have you been most proud to be a part of and why do you still remember it?
Last summer I organized, along with @benkunz, the Connecticut Social Media Breakfast. This is an every six week gathering of social media professionals, students, agency types etc. to talk, share and present ideas about social media and where it is going. We're located between Boston and New York and people tend to look at both of them as the locations where all the expertise resides. We wanted to change that and demonstrate that there was a lot of good thinking going on here.
We've had three sessions so far, but my favorite session was one we called "Social Media Iron Chef" where we invited three social media marketers to receive a surprise brief from a local charity. The marketers then had 30 minutes to create a social media plan. While they were out we had Scott Henderson @scottyhendo, present on social media and cause marketing. When the 3 marketers returned they each presented their plan, the judges "voted" and we picked a winning chef.
The whole thing, (all 90 minutes of it), is up on YouTube:
What do you think of agencies like Victors & Spoils and co: which draw heavily on crowdsourcing principles?
I think that they are becoming a big part of the future of advertising. I'm very excited by what they are doing. I think that traditional agencies ignore them at their peril - crowdsourcing as a model.
Are you a Mac or PC person?
Actually I'm using both.
Me too! and do you use an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android - or something else?
iPhone, iPad and I am ANXIOUSLY awaiting my LunaTiK watchband so I can wear my iPod Nano on my wrist (shameless). I worry about getting too Apple-ified!
What's your favourite iPhone and iPad app?
Instagram on the iPhone - in my past life I taught photography. On the iPad its more the news apps - New York Times, Flipboard. I am absolutely fascinated by the relationship between the iPad and iPhone and its use cases.
Have you tried The Daily iPad newspaper yet?
Yes I downloaded the Daily. I have not looked at it in detail. Feel guilty about any sort of Fox News related product...
What's the most recent book you've read?
I'm reading the Stephen Johnson book on creativity, "Where Good Ideas Come From", and a book called "The Finkler Question" by a UK author, Howard Jacobson.
Name a fantasy project - a brand or service you'd like to build something for - which brand and what kind of project?
Eever since I got into the Web I have always believed that the role of new tech in advertising should be to build usable products...I am totally fascinated by data visualization so for me a fantasy product or service would be to take data viz and make it work with everyday activities to highlight a client activity or a good project. I recently saw a video on what Portland was doing with data viz for their public transport then saw the Google Creative Lab piece which created music from the NYC subway (http://mta.me). In a perfect world I'd love to mash those two up. So if you could provide great information on public transport schedules AND put it to music...how cool would that be.
I think that there is a huge opportunity to look at our daily lives, as long as we do it in a seamless way, and learn more about who we are and how we are connected. We are social beings and the more we can learn about how social we are the better we can enhance our experience. These kind of ideas would work well for clients and would also work well for social movements. charities etc. I also think that is a big reason why Instagram is so successful.
My first love with the Web was always the idea that websites should be useful products, so my initial contact with the advertising world was difficult. Utility was initially frowned upon. Probably the biggest change and inspiration for me was hearing Gareth Kay's "Ideas that Do" as well as "Don't make great advertising ideas, make great ideas worth advertising". That put it all together for me.
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Some interesting thoughts there. Thanks very much, Dan!