Marty Senn
Chief Creative Officer
Carmichael Lynch

 

 

 

What’s the most relevant business and/or creative lesson you learned in 2023 and how will you apply it to 2024?

It’s not a new lesson, but 2023 doubled-down on a simple observation for us: our best work works best. It sounds trivial, but the work we love the most as an agency is always the work that work’s best out in the world, too. Sometimes we try to outsmart our intuition (and it’s certainly worthwhile to validate that intuition in any number of ways) but leaning hard into emotion and real connection always works best for us and our clients. Letting the fun we’re having and the passion we feel show up in the work we’re making keeps proving to move the needle for our clients more than anything else. That’s where we’ve found our biggest wins, and how we’re setting up for even more of them next year.

While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for 2024? 

The crystal ball says the same thing as the writing on the wall: things will get a little weird in 2024. Good weird. Marketers, the smart ones at least, will wake up to the fact that their consumers (which is another word for people) are way weirder and more interesting than they’ve historically acknowledged. When “Everything Everywhere All At Once” wins the Oscar, Barbenheimer is a genuine double-feature, and Liquid Death continues its ascent, the only real way forward is creating work that’s just as individual and layered and nuanced as the people we’re all trying to connect with. It’d be weird not to.

Are you involved in virtual production or experimenting with AI, AR or other emerging disciplines or new technologies? Have you engaged in any real-world projects on these fronts? If so, relative to experimental and/or actual projects, briefly tell us about the work and what you’ve taken away from the experience. If the work is complete and you’d like to share a link to it, please include. 

We’re experimenting with everything, and everything’s an experiment right now. That’s true of our “real-world” work, too. The act of experimenting with new technologies has also brought a renewed sense of experimenting with existing technologies, too. It feels like nothing has to be accepted as-is right now and people are always bringing forward a new what-if at any point in the process. Certain things will start to stick over the next year, but regardless of what those are, the opportunity to reinvent and reimagine what we collectively do is a little more available to everyone who has an idea or a wild idea they want to try.

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