On My Radar: Ted Florea
PNYC's chief strategy officer gives a lesson in literature as he lifts the lid on his creative radar.
What’s the best ad campaign you’ve seen recently?
I prefer to think of “communication campaigns” rather than "ad campaigns” because of our old image of “ads” as discrete, bite-sized message delivery systems. Ads today should transcend easy-to-swallow, creativity-coated selling pills. If we think of culture as our creative palette, I’d put last year's The Lego Movie up there. Spending $60 million in production to make $500 million at the box office (when Chevy spends $4 billion in global marketing) is an amazing achievement. I think more brands should think about putting their brand out there in more long-form ways to clearly demonstrate their purpose by doing and creating, not advertising it by saying and selling.
What website(s) do you use most regularly and why?
At some point this question will look quaint. The ‘site’ that delivers the content I find most thrilling and engage with the longest is YouTube. Here you can watch multi-part explorations of the relationship between European oil painting and class structure (BBC’s 1972 Ways of Seeing by John Berger). Or attend 30+ hours of Stanford lectures by Robert Sapolsky on Human Behavioural Biology. Or watch more humour and creativity uploaded daily than in a year of Madison Avenue-funded gags.
What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought and why?
British composer Max Richter has just released an eight hour-long post-minimalist classical music composition called Sleep. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and the science of sleep, the composition is meant to be listened to in order to fall asleep and sleep better – “a lullaby for a frenetic world". I find this to be a beautiful piece of technology… one that I’ve yet to listen to in its entirety given its technical proficiency at putting me to sleep!
Facebook, Instagram or Twitter?
No more than necessary.
What’s your favorite app on your phone and why?
I’m still in love with one of the earliest apps - StarWalk. Point up at the sky and identify constellations, stars and planets. A great parlour trick, but also a piece of 21st Century technology that reconnects us to a greater world people 100 years ago knew intimately and most people today are totally disconnected from.
What’s your favourite TV show and why?
Really dug Mr. Robot this summer. Timely, clever, dark, Mr. Robot tapped into today's tech anxieties, addressing privacy and power in truly fresh ways.
What film do you think everyone should have seen?
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing about the unrepentant men behind the Indonesian genocide is incredibly painful to sit through. But it’s required viewing for anyone who wants to understand how human evil is born of petty human drives to belong, be famous and to rise above. It also shows that stupidity is the most dangerous human trait.
Where were you when inspiration last struck?
I get inspired reading. My mind was blown most recently reading The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Matthew Crawford writes: "Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that, for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy…. The much-discussed decline of the middle class in recent decades may have something to do with the ever more aggressive appropriations of the attentional commons that we have allowed to take place.”
Any wonder why we ask ourselves about the sites, apps, shows, movies, and ads we distract ourselves with as a proxy for who we are as individuals?
What’s the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the industry since you started working in it?
The finance logic of the 80s reduced everything to dollars. The tech logic of the 90s and 00s turned advertising into the aggregation of eyeballs, clicks, and engagement, all so they could be reduced to dollars.
This has created a Wall Street-Silicon Valley-Ad-Tech challenge to long-term brand building and true culture-changing creativity. By the end of this decade, we will either have had our digital delusions dispelled so we can get back to work, or this algorithmic-logic will have reduced our industry to irrelevance.
If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be?
The self-promotion verging on narcissism that celebrity culture and social media have unleashed has created the illusion that only noise and popularity matter. Whether it’s influencing award juries, journalists or voters, this is really just a form of expedient corruption at war with “reality-based” communities and professions. I’d like us to become more accountable to real outcomes so that the hype, noise, and bullshit don’t get all over everything.
What or who has most influenced your career and why?
I owe my career to strategy leaders who were actual mentors. Fitztharding, Murray, Thorpe, and Kay all had fun accents; Herrmann, only after a few drinks.
Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know…
I grew up in Communist Romania where I developed my carefree, optimistic take on human nature and the world.
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