Lame-ass phone in ugly-ass case

I am a Techie

In fairness to myself there is a history behind “londonstreetlife”. See originally I was just a kid screwing around online, flaming and win-nuking in the chat rooms, and I fancied myself as a bit of a hacker dabbling in some buffer overloading and shit. And at the time I was just “streetlife”, and as a nick back then it worked, everyone had handles like that. And to be honest I think I could still work with that name if I’d managed to hang onto it, shit streetlife alone would be way dope. But back then it was like $70 to buy a domain name and I didn’t even have money to get myself a snack, and that $70 was a reoccurring annual fee, and besides no one back then was thinking to buy their own friggin TLD. And as the years went by streetlife.com was snapped up, but I didn’t care I just threw a “london” on the front, that was cool I was living in Spain and that was a throwback to the streets where I was from. And it seemed to work and I just went with it, and I didn’t think about it again…

I am a Creative

But over the last year or so I’ve taken a journey to embracing my creative side. Really I always had my foot in the creative door but my mind was firmly stuck in the techie room. It took a lot of self reflection on my part to get here, and it wasn’t easy, but thanks to the respect and support of some great creative leadership at my agency, believing in my creative talents, I’ve finally landed. For a while there I was extremely confused, I didn’t know where I was at. I was promoted to ACTD (Associate Creative Technology Director) at work, and suddenly I felt somewhat ostracized from the Technology department but yet I didn’t feel like I was part of the Creative department either. It didn’t help that I now reported to both departments, and I ended up feeling like I didn’t belong to either, marooned somewhere in between. I saw the movie Tropic Thunder and there’s a line where Robert Downey Jr’s character says “I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude”, and at first I laughed cos it’s funny but then I realized that was sort of how I would describe myself and it was kind of depressing. But I ended up understanding that I am creative, and I am also technology, and the fact that I found myself so lost in identity was more the fault of the agency and the industry. See the future of web development is the merging of both those departments, and the agency has taken a great step towards reaching that goal by creating the first cross-over role, and it is now up to me to prove it works and let the rest of the agency catch up.

A dude playing a dude disguised as another dude

I am a Brand

So now that I finally embraced myself as a creative it was apparent that my brand wasn’t working, or even that I barely had one. See a techie is in the background, it doesn’t matter what your brand is, you don’t really get to have one. When you’re interviewing for a tech job none of it matters, they care about your expertise, coding skills, your work ethic and your ability to hit deadlines. None of that can be captured in a brand or a portfolio, therefore you have to produce code samples and references to look good and get hired. But when you’re a creative it’s entirely the opposite. A creative is in the spotlight, a creative represents the agency and the clients brand, a creative’s name goes on the awards and is talked about in the press releases. So if you aren’t able to brand yourself well then how can an agency trust you with a clients brand? If you don’t even know yourself well enough to define your own creative brief then how can you be be capable of capturing the essence of your clients? And if you don’t have the skill set or the drive to effectively execute and produce results when it comes to your own brand then how can you expect an agency to put their clients image in your hands?

But what brand am I?

So I’ve tasked myself with the challenge, and the project “my brand” is well under way, I’m energized and more excited about this than I have been about any project in a long time. Shit finally I get to find out who I am. Coming soon to a browser near you. Summer 2009. Watch this space!

Don’t you think that’s just a great little story? But more than that I think it is has a great message as far as Best Business Practices. I first heard that story many years ago when I was just a kid and I even think that when it was told to me it was just as an innocent joke. But that story’s stuck with me throughout my working life, I am always conscious of the moral of the story as if it were from the teachings of Confucius himself, and I’ve found myself telling that same story on various occasions at work.

Don’t advertise your mistakes
Maybe the first time I told the story was a few years ago when the company I was working for had just acquired another company and our CEO decided to start some ‘website wars’ where both companies would look for bugs and issues we could find in the each others websites and email what we’d found to everyone in both companies (tedious and demoralizing of course. I already said it was the idea of a CEO!). We started to fix many of the issues the other company had found straight away, little things that required no thought for the most part, but my boss couldn’t leave it at that and he started sending out an email to everyone in both companies to let everyone know we’d fixed a problem. And not just the one email with a list of the 20 items we had just fixed and rolled to production, but a separate email for each bug fix! I didn’t get it, how can you be so proud of your mistakes? So I emailed him the Rolls Royce story and I think he got the message because the emails stopped. And later that week when our CEO asked us if we’d fixed the bugs we were simply able to reply ‘What bugs?’.

Don’t let your incompetence compromise a projects success
Another time I told this story was when we were estimating hours for a fairly complex HTML interface. The design called for custom scrollbars and the person in charge of putting together the estimate decided to make the statement that we didn’t do custom scrollbars, that they weren’t part of our teams repertoire, and if we were going to do them it was going to cost a whole lot of money. The account guy shrugged and asked creative to remove them from the comp, and creative saw their whole design go up in smoke and came to me for a lifeline. I was shocked to say the least, how can a web team not have custom scrollbars as part of their arsenal in 2007? So I told him the Rolls Royce story, and I explained to him that if as a department we really don’t have the ability to do something this standard then we should keep that fact to ourselves and go off and learn the skill immediately. Needless to say I ended up implementing the custom scrollbars myself, along with the rest of the site, and in the end it went on to win a handful of awards. And I don’t think anyone involved doubts that we wouldn’t have one a single award had we allowed the integrity of the design been compromised.

Always look like you know what you’re doing
And even if the whole story is nothing more than a billing screw-up, nothing more than the Rolls Royce accounting department never raising the invoice, then let the moral be to joke it off and don’t let your incompetence come across to the client. If you’ve gone for 6 months without even being aware that you hadn’t been paid for a job, and you only know now because that client has brought it to your attention, then I think your company can afford to eat it. In the name of good business relationships it’s worth it, you will forever have at least one guy out there singing your praises, and you just can’t buy that kind of publicity!