About a week ago, Phil Hawksworth's feet (Technical Director, R/GA London) were walking on Romanian soil towards Marriott Hotel, where he was going to be a speaker for JSCamp Romania, conference organised for front-end developers and engineers, web designers and web entrepreneurs. Phil holds a degree in Computer Science and Business and has more than 10 years experience in building things for the web. It's been three years since he works for R/GA London. As I've never had the opportunity to talk to a Technical Director, especially one that has worked for brands such as Beats by Dre or Nike+, I've asked Phil some questions about the workflow at R/GA London, about how you can make sure that the digital part is in line with the other components of a campaign, about trends in web development.
IQads: Hello Phil! So, you’re a Technical Director at R/GA. What exactly is that and how does one get such a job? Do you often have to repair technical stuff?
Phil Hawksworth: Being a Technical Director is quite different to working in Information Systems or technical support. It basically means that I’m involved in leading a team of developers on projects. I used to be a developer and still think of myself as someone who writes code, but at work I tend to lean on the skills of an amazing team of developers. I spend more time planning the technical architecture for a project and working with clients to ensure that we can build something for them which satisfies their needs while being achievable in the budget and time. It’s a job which involves a lot of creativity and invention but also coordinating teams of people.
IQads: What is one of the most complex projects you’ve worked for at R/GA?
Phil Hawksworth: One good example of a challenging project would be the work we did for Beats By Dre to build brand awareness around the Colors headphones in 2012. That involved designing and building a website which gathered photos from users and allowed them to customize them to be a part of the Colors advertising campaign. The best of those were chosen to go to LA to be part of the TV advertising campaign which we produced for Beats. We also had places around the world for people to go to take photos and contribute them to the campaign. Making that happen in places like Times Square in New York was pretty wild. People would use the photo-booths in the square that we had built over night, and their pictures would be fed up to the huge screens around times Square. Great fun and incredibly challenging both creatively and technically. There was a lot of celebrating after that one!
IQads: I know that R/GA London has its own in-house production studio. Would you advise every agency out there to create such a studio? What are the advantages and the disadvantages?
Phil Hawksworth: I’m not sure that it is a must-have for every agency. There all sorts of agencies out there, but one thing that I would say is that having this capability at R/GA is a huge benefit to us. We tackle all kinds of different work and our Digital Studios add a really powerful capability. It enables us to produce 360 degree campaigns for clients. There are times when we also work with external production houses if there is a specific requirement. The more agencies who are involved, the more effort there is in coordinating all of the parties and keeping true to the vision. That’s one reason that we are lucky at R/GA that we can service so may aspects of a campaign or product development project.
It’s not always realistic to find every single capability in a single place though. Especially in the cases where we are being very ambitious with a project, it can be beneficial to take on the services of industry leading experts. But whether it is internal or external, we work really hard to devise and realize our creative vision.
IQads: How do budgets limit projects, especially when we’re talking about projects that involve lots of technology?
Phil Hawksworth: A large budget is a huge enabler, but there is a lot of satisfaction to be found in designing incredibly efficient solutions to seemingly complex problems. Of course we have lots of occasions where the ambition of a client is not backed up by the budget to execute. Those are the situations where we have to work really hard to find more realistic solutions and protect clients from embarking on a project which they can’t realistically see through.
IQads: Did you get the opportunity to work with the people from R/GA Romania?
Phil Hawksworth: Yes. Very often. We treat all the offices of R/GA as extensions of each other. I’ve been lucky enough to work with several teams in the Bucharest office on a number of projects. They are a very talented group and they are only getting stronger with each project. It seems like an exciting time in Romania for technology and web development in particular. I’ve been excited to see the community growing in size and capabilities and R/GA is lucky to be a part of that.
IQads: Do you think there is any difference between Eastern and Western European digital projects?
Phil Hawksworth: I’m not sure about that. We mostly tend to work on things for global brands. That said, we have worked on large projects with clients in Turkey and Russia which has been fascinating for me on a cultural level. With regards to the technical approach on these, I don’t think that there are huge differences. It seems to be more a matter of technical tastes. Not everywhere has reached the same conclusions about best practices at the same time… but most seem to be heading in the same direction.
IQads: What are some of the trends in digital projects, websites and app developing? I read a blog post about how you find parallax sites problematic. Any other such objections regarding web/app development trends?
Phil Hawksworth: Ha! Yes, I’ve been quite vocal about sites which have gimmicks and flashy looking effects getting in the way of good performance or good web principles. I walk a difficult line between wanting to produce eye-catching and engaging experiences, and also taking care of site performance, accessibility and good web fundamentals. I see this as a differentiator.
There are many studies which demonstrate the importance of good performance and accessibility on the web and yet advertising agencies often ignore this in lieu of making something which looks cool might get nominated for awards. The best find a way to balance both, but it is a difficult art which takes great care and dedication to that principle.
It feels like more of the industry is waking up to this. Building web sites and experiences which perform brilliantly on mobile devices, desktop devices, in the browser of a Tesla, a fridge, an e-book, a watch, and goodness knows what other places might have web browsers in the coming years is getting to be seen as a critical skill. Building things which are truly engaging and serve the user more than the ego of an agency is what I’m interested in, and what serves clients best.
