Tech Special: Nik Roope

The old rules may have gone up in flames, but Poke co-founder Nik Roope relishes the chance to play with fire. He sees our swipe-driven world as offering an opportunity to explore previously hidden freedoms, he tells Tim Cumming. His fine art background gives him the creative confidence to unravel the complex web of new digital surfaces, experiences and relationships that are changing culture

Going native in digital means walking a narrow path bestrewn with obstacles ahead and precipices either side – landslides of indifference, rockfalls of irrelevance, blanketing fogs of unnecessary content that just won’t lift. For Nik Roope, co-founder of one of the original digital shops, Poke, creativity is still playing catch-up with the relentless advance of technology and the new content spaces created.

“The big change is that we are the content,” he says, “rather than jumping in between the content. The formats keep shifting and the old rules don’t always apply.” Ah, the old rules. What do we do with them when they are no longer fit for purpose? Put them in a museum? “Brands didn’t have to think before about what was resonant to a millennial consumer at 11.30am. Now they do and it’s a very different creative challenge to solve.”

You can’t put social back in the box

The biggest driver of change remains the little rectangular touchscreen that goes with us everywhere, generating data for us and about us as we negotiate and interact with swipe-driven culture. “Smartphones are still driving change,” says Roope. “Digital started framed in a desktop, then the desktops started talking to each other and now it’s everywhere. Digital is more than just stuff – it’s the net impact of digital on society, the way we think and the way our brains are wired. Smartphones have tipped us into that ubiquity. It’s profoundly different to a computer – it’s location-aware, habit-aware, it’s with you all the time. It’s your window to the world and the world’s window to you. That’s a massive shift. And with it comes a huge shift in complexity in terms of managing those surfaces and experiences and making them make sense to people, making them intuitive, rewarding, useful, entertaining.”

In concert with the hand hovering over the smartphone is the social media revolution, starting with Myspace and Friends Reunited in the early 2000s when Poke began, now via Facebook and Twitter and, in the future, who knows? “Social was the proper revolution,” says Roope. “And now it’s the dominant discourse in the world. Social brands themselves may come and go but there’ll always be another one that will come along and pick away at something else no one has discovered yet. We’re not going to jump back in our box and stop using that space where we share and consume and participate.”

Going back is impossible, because every technological advance means a systemic change in human relationships, and it’s relationships that fuel the changes in how brands communicate with people. “What is the bedrock of culture and society?” asks Roope. “Human relationships. It’s human beings that are interacting. Digital is the enabling structure that shapes relationships in a new way, and as it does so it changes culture.”

Roope points to a phenomenon like Tinder. “Why is it such a reference point in culture? It has become a shorthand for the degrading quality of relationships caused by digital, the swipe. Though of course those desires are nothing new. Tinder doesn’t make people feel new feelings. It’s responding to what is there.”

With the buzz around AI, the internet of things and mixed reality, it’s easy to forget how long we’ve actually been in the digital-human space, and how deeply it has shaped our world. “Everything from the Arab Spring to Daesh propaganda has been driven by digital. It’s not digital’s fault, but it’s enabling new freedoms that were hitherto hidden and weren’t exercised. Which is wonderfully liberating on one side, and fucking terrifying on the other.”

Opening up a new kind of space

When it comes to digital brand engagement, Roope has a clear philosophy. “We talk about living ideas – ideas designed to be flexible, malleable, sustainable. A bedrock and basis on which you can bend, flex and respond, and that you can use again and again, building equity into the idea.”

This ethos has roots in one of Poke’s earliest successes, The Warholiser, created to launch an exhibition at London’s Tate Modern. People uploaded a picture of themselves, then Poke would ‘Warholise’ it and put it on the Tate site for 15 minutes. “It wasn’t an ad. It was Warhol’s art as a completely scaleable experience that you could participate in, or enjoy as some nice images to look at.” Thousands uploaded images and hundreds of thousands visited the site. “That was amazing, and rammed home that there was this new space opening up, an appetite for a new kind of proposition and experience.”

Pulling stuff out of the air

Roope has a theory about why so few digital campaigns, even today, get it right. “It’s not a discrete culture apart but it does have its own feeling, reference points and language. What works in that environment is not consistent with what works in films. Most brands still feel weird on digital. They’re either unwelcome or insensitive and unresponsive, and blind when they access that environment. They don’t have the right concept. There’s no recognition that digital is a place with its own culture. Generally speaking, it’s done pretty terribly.”

An example of doing it successfully is Poke’s work for EE, The Wembley Cup, a 10-part YouTube series following the build-up to a match between two footie mega-vloggers and their hand-picked, star-studded teams. “It changed perceptions on the ground with 81 per cent of the demographic, which is an incredible impact,” says Roope. “It’s a juggernaut of attention you couldn’t achieve through other media. People were choosing to see that stuff. It was genuine organic engagement.”

Roope’s background in the 1990s art boom (he graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a sculpture BA in 1994) is a big influence on how he approaches his work. “Contemporary art is such a good training for all sorts of stuff – I still use it every day. Honing and developing those skills gives you a real power in the worlds in which we operate – walking that line between risk and uncertainty.

Creativity, when it is any good, is always taking you somewhere new.” For Roope, these somewheres have included the art collective Antirom, which he co-founded in the 90s, and the low-energy lighting company Plumen, whose beautiful bulbs are in the permanent collections of MOMA in New York and the V&A in London.

Not that creativity is always an easy journey, even for Roope. “You find a lot of fine artists in this business,” he says. “But a lot of people aren’t comfortable being creative.” He recalls rainy midweek mornings in his art studio, wondering what the hell he was going to make next. “It’s terrifying, but if you go through it enough, that gives you confidence. You can’t guarantee outcomes, but you can train yourself to be as productive as you can be. A large part of that is pulling stuff out of the air with confidence.”