A Creative Moment with...Carren O'Keefe, chief creative officer at Digitas
Welcome back listeners! A Creative Moment with... introduces Carren O'Keefe, chief creative officer at Digitas UK, with a career spanning much of the globe and working with some of the biggest brands on the planet.
We spoke with Carren about how she came to work at the intersection of creativity and technology and her thoughts on the challenges some brands face. We also pick her brains on AI, how to use it most effectively in real-world settings and its greatest danger.
Carren fell into a career with technology, although she has always had roles at the intersection of creativity and technology. Having grown up in a very small town in Pennsylvania, Carryn moved to Miami to attend the Miami Ad School as it sounded fun!
As a part of the programme, she went to Sao Paulo, Brazil and spent time at Ogilvy. She then came to London where she had an internship at Saatchi&Saatchi. Continuing with the journey around the globe, she moved to New York, had an internship at JWT and AKQA, and Crispin, Porter and Bogusky, then came into the job market right after the crash of 2008.
The two things she didn't want to do was to work in digital or move to New York, but she received an offer from AKQA to do digital in New York and said, “I will take it!”.
With Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley first starting to come together, Carren describes the environment as the Wild West; no rules and very exciting.
At the beginning, before the iPhone came out, Carren remembers being excited by a project she worked on for Sprite: an iframe in Facebook. How far we've come! She loved working in the unknown as the world started to figure this all out.
Carren then started working with Nike and loved that it was constantly at the cutting edge of culture and progress.
Having later opened the Berlin office for Analog Folk, Carren has many stories to share about the work she continued to do with Nike and how technology has fundamentally changed every facet of business life.
Carren also talks in more detail about clients Crocs and EE, being true to your audience and how, when working with AI, we must embrace it with optimism as there is such beauty in the unknown.
"AI isn't the enemy," she says. "Laziness is," and she cautions we should be worried about using it in the wrong way.