AKQA: A Meeting of Minds

AKQA’s Ben Jones and James Hilton talk to Danny Edwards about the successful melding of creativity and technology – the secret is... you shouldn’t be able to see the join.

When someone opens their Twitter app on their iPhone to take a photo of their lunch; when they log on to Facebook to look at pictures of cats in fancy dress; when they turn on their Xbox Kinect to use Nike+ Training for the first time in far longer than was originally planned, does that person think about the creative capabilities of these products or the technological programming behind them? The answer, of course, is that I do neither. And it’s probably the same for almost everyone else.

A marvelous magic wrangler

Technology has become such a part of life that it is consumed without thought. But technology and creativity exist in tandem and always have done. While most people don’t – and don’t need to – consider this, it is the job of AKQA’s James Hilton and Ben Jones to do exactly that. As co-founder/chief creative officer and chief technology officer respectively, Hilton and Jones are at the head of the marriage on which AKQA as a company is founded. Partnering a great creative concept to an innovative technological design is AKQA’s raison d’etre and Hilton and Jones have been working together since Jones started at the company nine years ago and have built a relationship which has been hugely rewarding for both AKQA and its clients.

The job of chief technology officer is one that seems to have taken on new significance in recent years. The role has existed for a long time but in an age when technology moves so fast, having someone at the centre of your organisation who understand both it and its potential creative applications is paramount. “[Ben] speaks fluent magic and fluent creative,” says Hilton. “Ben is like a magic wrangler who gathers all these little bits of magic from everywhere. And then he describes what the magic does in ways that we can use. It’s magic,” he deadpans, “because I don’t understand it.”

Jones joined AKQA after a successful but creatively unfulfilling role at financial consultancy behemoth KPMG. After leaving there and spending some time travelling, he then almost joined another similar firm before the recruitment agency reminded him about an interview at AKQA. “Initially I told them that, ‘it’s OK, I think I’ve got this other consultancy job’,” says Jones. “I didn’t have a clue who AKQA were to be honest, but I went along to the interview anyway and was totally blown away by the company and the people who worked there. Don’t get me wrong, KPMG is a phenomenal company but you really want to see your work come to life, to have a level of emotional engagement with it. Luckily I got the AKQA job and that was that.” Jones describes his role as “finding new technology, proving new technology [and] being integrated into spaces and communities that we can bring to the creative conversation”. To hugely simplify his role, it seems Jones provides technological possibilities.

‘New media’ – fashionable for 10 minutes

Those possibilities, with the proliferation of accessible technology, seem endless. Has that made Jones’ job harder? “Yeah,” Jones replies, “the essence of my job has got harder because technology has grown faster than ever before. But you’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with so you have to understand those particular [technological] niches and identify the specialists within them.” Hilton agrees and states that it’s the new technologies that are the lifeblood of the company. “When we started out,” Hilton explains, “we were called AKQA New Media Ltd for the 10 minutes that ‘new media’ was a fashionable term. But that’s still true, we are about new media, that’s what we thrive upon, what we’ve grown upon and having a chief technology officer isn’t just a job that’s important, it’s a strand of our DNA. It’s about how we can push the [technology] we have got to its limits and then when we’ve almost started breaking the stuff, something else comes out that makes the job, suddenly, really easy. So then you find the next thing to push, and the next, and the next.”

In the years that the pair has worked together campaigns for clients including Nike, Audi, Xbox and Fiat have pushed boundaries in exactly the way Hilton explains [see box out opposite], and it’s a key point to emphasise that they work together; the creative is never bolted onto a great technological innovation any more than a particular technology is crowbarred into a creative concept. “It’s a very holistic approach,” states Hilton. “You should never be able to see where the idea came from, whether it came from design, or creative, or planning, or technology. You should never be able to see that. The different elements need one another to survive. It needs to be very…” “Symbiotic,” finishes Jones, verbally proving the point.

Even technologists are humans

AKQA doesn’t have departments as such, rather what they refer to as cells. Within each cell – which is made up of a varied amount of people but rarely more than 15 – are the different elements of the business; strategists, creatives, planners and, of course, technologists. Do the creatives need to have a certain amount of technological savvy to make this work though? “They need to have enough information to be dangerous,” says Jones. “From a creative point of view they need to know enough to be inspired, to be interested enough to ask the right questions and to know what might be possible. It’s then us as technologists bringing even more to the party in terms of highlighting things they may not have seen or areas they may not have thought about.” And what about the other way round, how much of a creative sensibility do the technologists need to do their job well?

“Well,” continues Jones, “what they need is a perfectionist attitude and the other thing is that, you know, they’re humans at the end of the day. Technologists and tech-focussed people can be seen in many different guises, the geeks in the corner or something, but they’re human and at AKQA those technologists have an understanding of what other humans really desire, and I think that they understand the consumer a bit more than the traditional IT guy.” “It’s an intelligent collaboration really, isn’t it?” Hilton says to Jones. “If we come to you and say we want to, I don’t know, put penguins on skis, you might say well, we can’t do penguins on skis because that technology doesn’t exist, but have you thought about penguins on roller skates?”

Jones smiles and nods his head in agreement and then, warming to the theme of technologists not being a different species from everyone else, continues: “Techies drink beer just as much as creatives drink beer, they’re people and if you bring them together they start to have relationships, and if they have relationships they can trust each other, and if they trust each other they can start to say, well, it might be really bad to do this, or really good, and all of a sudden you start to have that kind of openness that allows your imagination to flow. [Those ideas] have got to be set on good insight, they’ve got to be based on good strategy but [it’s] why those cells are important and why it’s all about collaborating together from the outset.”

When asked whether there is always a creative technologist in an AKQA cell both Jones and Hilton bristle slightly. It seems that the term ‘creative technologist’ is not something they really approve of and they set about explaining why. “The answer is yes, but we wouldn’t call them creative technologists,” says Jones, “we’d just call them technologists, or, probably the best word to use is engineers. Creative technologists talk about how they want to be using the latest and greatest technology but that’s just engineers. That’s what an engineer does. When an engineer comes together [with a creative] is when you get creative technology. We would never go out and hire a creative technologist.”

Titles are something of a bugbear for Hilton anyway. His general thinking is that most titles are self-indulgent and pretty meaningless but the term ‘creative technologist’ is particularly annoying. “If you’re going to have a title, at least have something funny like ‘head of magic’. One of our co-founders used to introduce me to clients as ‘head of colouring-in’, and in turn I called him ‘head of typing things’, so it doesn’t matter what you’re called but I think… ‘creative technologist’, well if you can’t use technology in a creative way then you’ve got big problems.”

The future is a yellow fruit

If Hilton and Jones’ relationship is a microcosm of the relationship between creative and technology across the company then it’s easy to see why AKQA has been so successful at melding the two elements to get the best out of both for their clients. Over the course of the 90-minute interview they continually riff on existing ideas, joke about future technological advances and then, often, realise that the joke has some merit to it and could be something to explore, if only hypothetically. For example, Hilton is using an app to help him lead a more healthy lifestyle and eat a more balanced diet, and, as he peels a banana, and inputs its consumption into the app the conversation morphs into a discussion about how you should just be able to take a picture of the banana and input the image, then to Google Glass and how maybe it should recognise food automatically, which then becomes a discussion about the Nike+ Fuelband, which AKQA worked on, and how, says Hilton, “in version 20 or something, it could have a sensor that detects what the tension in your muscles is so it knows how heavy the thing is that your holding and can work out what it is and what the calorie intake is”.

“There you go,” laughs Jones, “that’s what we’re going to do next.” “Absolutely,” says Hilton, straight-faced, “banana-weighing. That’s what it’s all about, that’s the next version.” “Bananas,” states Jones, “they’re the future.”

You heard it here first.