We’ve all been there. Chatting along with someone interesting when they suddenly leave and hastily thrust a business card in your hand. Thanks, you wave, before looking down and being confronted with a title that means absolutely nothing to you. You’re too polite to ask. We’re not. Here are five agency types who we think could well be the future of advertising. We asked them to discuss, in their own words, breaking new ground in how agencies create ideas, how they think about themselves, brands, media, consumers and their wider relation to culture.

Saneel Radia
Senior Vice President / Alchemist
Denuo Group

“I refer to it as a media sensible creative practice. Where it started was this weird idea of creatives not needing to know about media because the ‘media’ people handled that. I was a media director before I was a creative director, so it feels weird that people can concept this ethereal thing called a creative idea but not the environment that is the canvas upon which it lives.

“It’s a creative practice because it starts with ideas and we’re very good at separating that from manifestations; but manifestations are so important because we see the media as the building blocks to what the creative actually looks and feels like. So what we’ve done is take these weirdo hybrid guys and put them in charge, surrounded with people with more traditional creative titles like writer or technologist or designer.

“Half of our business comes from other agencies. We’ve done work for McGarry Bowen, we’ve worked with droga5, which are outside the group. There are two common ways we work with them. One is we literally get a brief, like any other creative team, to get some type of different idea.

“The second way we work is as an extension of [the agency’s creative] teams… the Alchemist at the centre surrounded by creative specialists. It’s a guy in the room who’s a creative at his core, but from a very different perspective. While you’re thinking about design, words or visual language, he’s thinking about the medium.

“The whole media agnostic thing is bullshit. Ideas need to transcend media when the client demands it, but I don’t know how to pitch an idea without immediately being able to tell you what media it belongs in.

“This role should be irrelevant because all creatives should have a fundamental media sensibility. Five years from now I can’t imagine there’ll be any client who will want to employ an agency that doesn’t understand media.”

Faris Yakob
Executive Vice President / Chief Technology Strategist
McCann Erikson

“Chief technology strategist is a strange thing for an ad agency to have. It would be farcical for me to say that dropping a digital person in will change [everything]. At the same time at least it’s accepting that something needs to change and there are new skill sets that are important.

“I have a four-way role. I sit on the executive committee as head of digital at McCann Erickson, New York. Part of my role there is to internally drive digital inspiration and education, to drive digital business through the machine. And to be in a position of thought leadership, to go out and establish a point of view on digital, and technology and marketing as it is now for McCann.

“Literally when they ask me whether I should be in creative or planning, I say I don’t think I should be in either. I function in between the two departments. The output’s not defined yet: it’s not like I’m writing creative briefs like an account planner or writing scripts like a creative would.

“I’m a resource. People can email me... Or they’ll say, we need to brief some creatives on teens because this sector seems relevant to what you know about tech. So, a traditional strategic planning or account planning function with a digital bent. There’s futurology: specific clients or account teams come to me for help understanding tech behaviors. Increasingly, that level of insight is crucial. I’m being asked by clients to be built into the scope: digital thought leadership, digital social media consultancy, digital strategy and so forth.

“Traditional creatives are artists and writers. With technology, the palette is different. When you’re concepting widgets, apps, augmented reality or visualization, the sensibility of creativity, the understanding of words and pictures is still really important, but it’s not the whole picture.

“Dougal Adams used to say, ‘Technology is the word that we use to describe things that don’t work properly yet.’ The goal must be to render myself obsolete by making sure that everyone here is as enamored of the future as I am.”

Chandler McWilliams
Resident Theorist
Barbarian Group

“I fall into the technical department, but offer greater insights into projects than that might imply. I’m on the faculty at UCLA, so I keep the company tapped into talent and new innovative ideas and add an academic point of view. And I ‘own’ several of the Barbarians’ commercial software products – being not just the lead developer, but the product manager as well.

“I was deeply involved with the Modelinia project [a website that follows models]. I was around from start to finish trying to figure out what they wanted to do. So many different ideas of what a 14-year-old girl would want, and no one [at Modelina] was a 14-year-old girl. Not even parents of one. I could bounce ideas off my students and analyze whether this was going to do what they wanted it to do. I was lead developer on the site, and the process guru, working on the user experience, information architecture with the head UX designer, and I built the entire backend. Just to think how to serve those goals.