Dentsu Creative UK's Plug and Play event at Somerset House
Last week Dentsu Creative UK’s CEO Jessica Tamsedge, CCO Caroline Pay, and CSO Theo Izzard-Brown hosted over 100 clients and partners at their inaugural Dentsu Creative Plug and Play event at Somerset House. A chance to connect and inspire, the teams talked about Telly, Tech and Talent, creativity and innovation, and discussed how we build brands for what’s next.
Head commissioners from Channel 4, Global and LADbible joined Alex Gardner for a fascinating talk about the New Entertainment Economy, covering the dynamic market, tech and audience trends that are shaping the evolution of the sector. He discussed developments including personalised product placement and Shazam for telly - so you can buy that Villanelle suit straight from your screen. We learnt how commissioners make decisions about content across audio, visual and digital, and predicted what audiences are interested in and how they want to work with brands.
CEO Jess Tamsedge spoke in a fireside chat with Baroness Gail Rebuck, Chair of Somerset House Trust, member of the House of Lords and the Creative Industries Taskforce, former chair and CEO of Random House, and founder of World Book Day. The two discussed what it is to establish a creative culture, the need to ‘nurture the fragile idea’ and to trust your instincts…including spotting what became the mega-hit Fifty Shades of Grey.
Our Dentsu Tokyo Labs team showed the best of our creativity in solving real world problems. The presentation included Technology that allows those with degenerative diseases like ALS to move and make music through neural signal detection. The pair shared how haptic response technologies allow those who cannot see to move freely and independently. Other highlights included an AI Invisibility clothing line to protect privacy and identity and bunny ears that respond to your emotions.
Head of Innovation, Alex Hamilton took the conversation on AI to another level, showing clients what’s coming and how to practically engage with it, unveiling the cutting-edge projects we’re developing. The projects will will transform the way we develop work and interact with customers – from AI powered insight, inserting brands into real-time trends, to branded customer assistants. Microsoft, Faculty AI, and Dentsu’s Head of Human Rights, Daisy Johnson, also dug into ethics, best practice and blew everyone’s mind with the parting thought that gut instinct is, in fact, a lifetime of assimilated data.
From Telly, to Tech, onto Talent – Managing Director Julie Chadwick and Managing Partner Balpreet Mangat were joined by Tik Tok, Butterfly 3ffect and Carat for a hugely insightful discussion around creator marketing as community partnership, the importance of representation and how talent is rewriting the rules of marketing. We showed our smarts in this space, pointing to creating a new ecosystem for brands that combines paid, owned and earned.
The day was closed with Somerset House director, Jonathan Reekie in conversation with artist Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose work examines our fraught relationships with nature and technology, and creative, curator and academic Harris Elliot, whose Japanese and Anglo-Jamaican cultural output, has seen him consult for the likes of LVMH and Vivienne Westwood, and design for Gorillaz and Blur. Together they discussed pushing creative boundaries and collaboration, including how brands can responsibly, sustainably and authentically create mutually beneficial partnerships with artists.
Finally, guests were treated to unique curated tours of The Missing Thread exhibition, which explores the stories of Black British fashion from 1970s to present day; the Makerversity: Designing For The Real World exhibition, showcasing the work of the pioneering community based at Somerset House, working at the intersection of design, engineering and digital practice, to develop ground breaking solutions for the world’s biggest challenges; and a trip to the workspaces of Grime artist Gaika and quantum-physicist and interactive artist Libbey Heaney.
A huge thanks to all of our contributors to the day Elfried Samba, Josh Muncke, Anastasia Evans, Karl Warner, Vicky Etchells, Jody Smith, Nozomi Koseki, Adrian Cutler, Julie Chadwick, Balpreet Mangat, Alex Gardner, Alex Hamilton, Daisy Johnson, Sean Healey, Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Harris Elliot, and Jonathan Reekie.
It was great to bring such a creative and forward-thinking group of people together into one space – stay tuned for the next one.
