Gareth Kay of Modernista!

PSFK sat down with Gareth Kay, the head planner at Boston’s hip advertising agency Modernista! to find out what he’s been up to recently and where he draws his inspiration from.

1. So what are you up to right now?

At the moment I’m busy focusing on trying to help evolve the work on a couple of our clients and getting ready to launch a new brand in the fall (which I wish I could tell you about as I’m very excited about the work but I can’t). I’m also spending a lot of time trying to find good planners to work at M! as we grow. And I’m continually trying to find new and better ways for planning to help make the work better which is really about continually trying to do things differently and see what works when.

2. Tell us about this or the last creative project you were personally proud of.

I guess two things come to mind. The first, a little older in time, is the Napster work we did which picked up a gong at the planning awards. I still think this was a good project for a number of reasons – we picked a cultural competitor (music ownership) not simply a category competitor, we briefed it in an interesting way (through a music fanzine) and it was the first time we really got our heads at the beginning of the process around the importance of behavior and making sure how the communication appeared was as important as what it said. The second is our latest HUMMER H3 work which took a potentially dry, rational subject – the real rational truth about the H3 – and turned it into what I think is an interesting, funny campaign that makes the H3 feel much more approachable. There was a real risk that we could have done work for this that was totally right but not wrapped in a way that made it something you want to spend time with (and therefore ineffective).

3. What did you draw upon to inspire you for this project – (could be anything).

Taking them in turn:

The inspiration for Napster came from a couple of sources. The first was the re-emergence of mixtape culture as captured on sites like tinymixtape and Thurston Moore’s book. This made us re-think what it was about music that made it something we love and such a big part of personal and social culture and why ownership is really a false god – at the end of day music is an experience not something you own. The second was a lot of articles appearing in the news at the time about how insurgents operate. This felt like a model we should appropriate for a brand that’s always been a rebel and pirate, particularly when iPod has such cultural dominance.

For HUMMER inspiration came from talking to people in research about truck culture and their lives, and perhaps most importantly youtube. Not only is there a lot of stuff on there about HUMMER and truck culture, but it’s also where we stumbled upon Daniel Chesterfield. As soon as we saw this, we knew it just felt right.

4. Why did you use these inspirations? What human emotions do they play upon that you felt necessary for this project?

For Napster, we just wanted to understand the role music really played in our lives. At Modernista! there are a lot of music obsessives so we wanted to understand why we loved music so much from a number of angles – the neuroscience of music, its cultural role, etc. And insurgency just felt right for the brand. What was interesting was understanding some of the rules that insurgents use and translating these into communications behavior.

For HUMMER, I think it’s one of the few brands where ‘traditional’ research is really useful. There’s so much out there about the brand at the polar extremes, it’s important to get in touch with how real owners and real prospects (both pro and anti the brand) feel about it; to ground all these strong emotions in reality. Youtube is becoming increasingly important to me to get a sense of what people find interesting, what things are getting watched and passed around, etc. It’s arguably the future of better, more realistic advertising pre-testing (put stuff on there before you launch a campaign to get a sense of how it’s going to do) and the death knell of the ridiculous fact that I work in probably the only industry where 90% of the costs today are for distribution.

5. In your day to day work – how often do you feel inspired? Is it important to be inspired?

I hopefully feel inspired most of the time (I use inspired here as meaning finding something new, a different way at looking at things, an unexpected connection). If I don’t I just try and stop what I’m doing and give myself a new task or stimuli. There’s too much stuff out there not to be inspired and/or interested. And it’s vitally important I believe to be inspired. If you’re not, how are you going to help make stuff that is interesting to people out there in the real world? In fact I think that’s perhaps the big problem with the industry today – there’s not enough people inspired in their jobs to make stuff that’s interesting. Which is why 90% of the stuff the industry produces is OK and fosters indifference.

6. How do you kick start your off-days: How do you find inspiration?

People watching on the bus or train. Crunch through my set of RSS feeds (the personalized Google homepage has been the biggest help for my inspiration in the last few years). Have some conversations, preferably at a tangent to what I’m working on that day. And read a lot. I’ve tried to stop reading all the usual marketing books (Godin, Eating The Big Fish, etc.) as it’s what every other planner reads so there’s no competitive advantage. I’m currently trying to be eclectic in my book consumption – a little fiction; a lot of behavioral economics and neuroscience.

Three good suggestions for anyone interested are Daniel Lewis’ ‘A General Theory of Love’ (the natural history of our deepest feelings and how humans are really social animals), Daniel Gilbert’s ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ (at its core it’s about the shortcomings of our imagination) and Grant McCraken’s ‘Flock and Flow’ (coping with complexity). And if you have to read one marketing book go and read John Grant’s ‘The Brand Innovation Manifesto’ – it’s great at explaining how brands and their communication need to change and it’s full of useful tools.

Thank you

Modernista!

Gareth’s blog, Brand New