The Source: Mark Pytlik

Despite his digital credentials, Mark Pytlik, CEO & founder, Stinkdigital, isn’t immune to the time-sucking black holes of Twitter and email. When he manages to escape those, he sips the ‘perfect brew’ served up by blog Kottke.org and dreams of being in Radiohead, but realises he’s got more chance of being Charlie Brown

What is the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen in the last few months?

It’s slim pickings, I’m afraid. The last thing I made a point of watching more than once was Nike’s Unlimited You, directed by The Daniels for Wieden+Kennedy Portland, but there hasn’t been much else.

I don’t know if it counts as advertising, but The New York Times’ interactive department turned out some really memorable work for the Olympics. The pieces in their recent interactive series, The Fine Line, were all impeccably judged; the visual recreations of each Olympic swimming event were perfect examples of how it’s possible to make smart social media content without getting too shouty or clever-clever.

Who’s your favourite photographer?

I love Gregory Crewdson, Vivian Maier and Andreas Gursky, but my favourite is Todd Hido. His house anthologies remind me of growing up in suburban Ontario.

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

Best Of Enemies. It’s a documentary about a string of nationally televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions, and it’s one of the most captivating things I’ve ever seen. Vidal and Buckley despised each other. Even though there are a few moments where things nearly get physical, what makes this so compelling is how each of them subscribed to the vehicle of reasoned debate as a means to a higher truth. That whole idea seems very foreign to America in 2016.

What’s your favourite website?

Kottke.org forever. Jason Kottke is a New York-based blogger and graphic designer who’s been compiling the internet’s most interesting sea drift since forever. Even though a billion content aggregators have come and gone since Kottke.org launched in 1998, I still visit every day, because no recommendation or personalisation engine can match the perfect brew of long reads, trivial ephemera, movie trailers, internet news and cultural observations that you get from Kottke. This week’s sample posts: dissecting Gone Girl’s screenwriting techniques, Jesse Jackson reading a poem on a 1971 episode of Sesame Street, Ian Bogost’s ruminations on the importance of limits to the creative process, and why No Man’s Sky is like reading.

What website do you use most regularly?

The time I spend on Twitter probably eclipses the time I spend on websites two through ten combined, not that that’s a good thing. The key to Twitter is not to overstay your session. If you’re not careful, you can easily lose hours to undercurrents of pointless tangents.

I like that Twitter is essentially a writer’s medium that rewards brevity, but sometimes I worry that it’s easier to be succinct and cynical than it is to be succinct and constructive. The pull-to-refresh UX pattern is my Everest.

What track/artist would you listen to for inspiration?

Because I’m not a psychopath, I prefer to listen to instrumental music that’s minimal and unobtrusive while I work. Composers like Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds are good for that – both make moody, expansive music that’s evocative without being overpowering.

Drone and ambient music are also good to think to – Keith Fullerton Whitman and Stars Of The Lid are two of my go-tos.

What product could you not live without?

1Password keeps track of passwords for various websites and services while also making the whole process of logging in and out of any site as frictionless and as automatic as it could possibly be. All my passwords are different, secure, encrypted, and, most importantly, totally unknown to me. 1Password has made my life simpler and more secure. This is not a paid advertisement – it’s just really good.

What product hasn’t been invented yet that would make your life/job better?

Something that fixes email. I spend at least half of my work life trying and failing to stay on top of my emails. Email owns me. It’s my Daddy. I’m not proud. There was a time when I thought that Slack might be a helpful ally, but the net net of incorporating it into our workflow at Stinkdigital has been nominally positive at best. It hasn’t done anything to reduce our signal-to-noise ratios. Iain Tait [ECD, W+K London] once said it should cost money to send an email. Wouldn’t that be great? Or am I just suggesting that we all work out of our LinkedIn profiles?

If you could live in one city, where would it be?

Tokyo. It doesn’t make sense that a place so governed by order and simplicity should also account for such enormous bursts of sensory overload, but it somehow does both incredibly convincingly, and I suspect design has everything to do with that. Design informs and improves everything in Tokyo, from civic infrastructure and public parks to dining experiences and hotel rooms, to the structures and inhabitants of wards like Shibuya and Akihabara, which are visual feasts at a level that put Times Square and its drunk Elmos to shame.

Mac or PC?

Mac, although it saddens me that Apple’s desktop operating system has regressed into another iteration of iOS. It also sucks that Apple’s idea of innovation seems to involve deploying watered-down versions of their OS across an increasing array of screens and then celebrating every time any one of those OS/screen combinations gets a feature, regardless of whether it’s actually interesting or useful or not. Siri was introduced to the iPhone five years ago; the fact that Apple will soon introduce Siri on the desktop is, well, extremely Apple.

What fictitious character do you most relate to?

Charlie Brown, whenever his teachers are talking.

If you could have been in any band, what band would you choose?

This is such a boring answer, but I can’t not say Radiohead. No band has been that good for that long while staying totally intact and not losing any members to drugs or alcohol or internecine squabbles. That they’re still so singular and so good is mind-blowing to me. I’d donate a kidney to work with them.