On My Radar: Michael Olaye

What’s the best ad campaign you’ve seen recently?

The Audi R8 Spin advert [below]. No gimmicks, no words, just pure unadulterated visual and emotional stimulus. Makes you want to go and spend your hard earned savings on one.

What website(s) do you use most regularly and why?

I love the BBC’s website, it’s constantly being refined and it works so well. I’m a footy and F1 fan and the site is second-to-none for news and information.

For tech news, I visit Tech Crunch, FastCompany and Mashable a couple of times each day. LinkedIn is also great for debates and to find topics I can participate in.

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought and why?

I’m playing with the internet of things a lot at the moment, so I keep buying Arduino accessories to improve the connectivity of some prototype appliances at home. My latest purchases include a couple of Genuino MKR1000 and shield to connect these appliances through my own home intranet.

Facebook, Instagram or Twitter?

Twitter. All day. It’s great for multiple reasons. You can follow interesting people, keep up with live regional and world events and gain knowledge and identify topics of interest. The inclusion of moments to the platform is a great feature.

What’s your favourite app on your phone and why?

My Natwest app for sure; it’s a complete bank all in the palm of my hand. I can pretty much manage all my current and future finances through it, plus they’re always updating it with new features that push it on to the next place. This is closely followed by Twitter and Uber.

What’s your favourite TV show and why?

The Game of Thrones series. It’s a third eye view of the world we all live in, but from a more mystical and brutal angle. Complex characters, egos, introverts, extroverts, villains and heroes. Watching a villain become a hero and vice-versa shows a world of perception. It’s almost like ad-land on steroids.

What film do you think everyone should have seen?

12 Years a Slave; it will go straight to your bones. And for those with softer stomachs, Tarantino’s Django Unchained is also great.

Where were you when inspiration last struck?

Re-watching The Matrix Reloaded. There’s some great conceptual tech gems in that movie.

What’s the most significant change you’ve witnessed in the industry since you started working in it?

Seeing Quark designers move into digital in the early 2000s and making Photoshop the defacto program for web designers everywhere. The rise of the programmer working on visually pleasing applications that were not black and green GUI screens or HTML, because Macromedia’s Flash came on the scene.

In recent years, the most significant changes lie in seeing social platforms use data to own the future of digital experiences. No matter what anyone says, data use will continue to grow and shape how we create things for ourselves, consumers and brands. This is just the beginning, with deep learning, cognitive and AI getting better every day. I’m excited by the times we’re living in.

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be?

There’s currently too much following and not enough leading. Diversity of skillsets are needed to push the industry forward. We need to step outside of the bubble environment that currently exists.

The creative ad pioneers of the early 2000s understood this and helped push digital using technology forward to express their creativity, way before the current internet power houses came along.

What or who has most influenced your career and why?

Yannis Marcou and René Christoffer, the creative director and art director at Hyperlink-Interactive. Even though I was a developer, I sat under both their wings from 1999-2001.

These two taught and showed me that developers can use code to create sexy, interesting and useful experiences. I won my first ever Adobe Site of the Year project within one year of working with them. I always try to pass this learning on to people I work with.

In my early years, I also followed Joshua Davis and Yugo Nakamura of Yugop. These guys break convention and push software to their limits.

Joshua was a real innovator. He brought his creative and designs skills to the fore by learning how to code and producing unique stuff that was so far from the norm at the time, like creating print and painting work through code using Actionscript and maths – mental. Joshua now does all the Deadmau5 visual effects stuff. The guy is an inspiration.