What happens when you take 16 talented digital designers skilled in industrial, graphic, UX and product design, and immerse them in a bootcamp on Adobe’s latest creative and collaboration tools?
Can you imagine the outcome when they are then plunged into an intensive 3-hour challenge that requires innovation, teamwork and rapid adoption of a new toolset?
In parallel, what’s the result when you gather luminaries from the local creative community to give short talks about their personal design process, inspiration and mission to an assembly of their peers and colleagues?
Adobe’s Creative Cloud for enterprise team partnered with Pop, a premiere digital design and marketing firm in Seattle, to answer these questions by conducting a Creative Jam experience for Pop’s employees and staff in March 2017.
The strategic partnership between Adobe and Pop encompasses multiple projects, disciplines and lines of business, but Pop’s recent implementation of Adobe’s Creative Cloud for enterprise and Adobe Stock for enterprise served as a catalyst for Adobe’s Sebastian Shaw, Principal Business Development Manager, and Jerry Silverman, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, to discuss hosting an experiential learning activity that could supercharge the agency’s user base with first-hand knowledge of the latest and greatest tools, and inspire agency employees with a higher-level message about creativity, innovation and design thinking.
With only a month to plan and execute, Adobe approached Pop’s Tom Moran, Executive Creative Director and David Hayes, Client Partner with the concept of hosting this custom event – and they were off to the races immediately!
A month later, the Jam kicked off in Pop’s downtown Seattle offices with an inspirational message from Tom Moran describing the rapidly evolving models of engagement between brands and their customers. He outlined the explosion of new touch points that require marketers to constantly reinvent content strategy, and the urgent need for user-centric innovation driving brands to co-create exceptional experiences in partnership with their customers.
Geoff Mroz, Senior Creative Strategist at Adobe, then illuminated the key innovations Adobe provides for designers, marketers and communicators to achieve the highest possible productivity, efficiency and content velocity — including Creative Cloud Libraries, Adobe Spark, Typekit, and more.
After the training, Pop’s core designers broke up into teams of 4 and received a design challenge:
- Create a user experience journey that reinvents the interaction model between a real-world retailer and their customers.
- Map a journey illustrating seamless engagement across multiple digital platforms (AR, VR, MR, IoT, Home Automation, Mobile, In-store).
- Deliver a 10-frame storyboard that leverages the key Adobe innovations highlighted in the training.
During the 3-hour challenge, fellow employees at Pop were invited to enjoy rapid-fire talks from creative luminaries in the Seattle design community.
- Surya Vanka, CEO/Founder of Authentic, addressed how design-led innovation is helping solve the world’s most critical social and environmental problems, and is catching on across industries and geographies,
- Duffy DeArmas, Founder of Electric Coffin, highlighted his company’s multi-disciplinary ethos, the evolution of their unique storytelling approach to industrial design, and their philosophy of blending high concept with high craftsmanship,
- Daniel Zetterstrom, fashion & lifestyle photographer from Sweden, provided a 360º journey of his multi-storied career that led into the world of fashion, product, lifestyle and more.
When the challenge was completed, each team was invited before the assembled audience to deliver a 2-minute defense of their User Journey. The audience then voted via their mobile devices for which team told the most compelling story while applying the required criteria.
Celebrity judges, including Pop’s CEO, Bill Predmore and VP of Business Development, Shanthi Barton, got in on the action, delivering a Judges’ Choice winner as well. All winners received deluxe trophies and a 1-year personal subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud!
Pop is truly proud of our partnership with Adobe, and the Creative Jam program exemplifies Adobe’s brand, its reputation in the market as creative visionaries, and the amazing people that make up the organization. #unicorns. — David Hayes, Client Partner @ Pop
The workshop revved us up-to-speed with the latest and greatest offerings of the Creative Cloud and created a low-risk high-reward brainstorm session that challenged, championed and celebrated the creativity of our agency. It was truly a caffeinated double shot of awesome for all of us. — Tom Moran, Executive Creative Director @ Pop