Interview with Myles Peacock, CEO, CreativeDrive

Tell us a little bit about your role at CreativeDrive?

I steer CreativeDrive’s global executive team strategy, client service, performance offerings and growth strategy, overseeing a collective of world-class creators, makers and doers that include an international team of over 1,000+ filmmakers, motion graphic designers, photographers, app developers, composers, and software engineers. CreativeDrive is dedicated to our cutting-edge, proprietary cloud-based technology platform that connects the 150 studios that sit across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. I believe in continuous learning and refinement of our existing processes. I am continuously seeking ways to simplify the content creation cycle and reduce production costs, while also dedicated to producing creatives of the highest caliber.

What are the core tenets of CreativeDrive’s content creation?

Ultimately, CreativeDrive is a global, independent creative and content creation company with an interconnected, borderless team of best-in-class talent. We strongly position ourselves as a new model to the status quo and co-create content directly with brands at the scale to meet consumer demand, empower human connections and drive business and sales forward.

Our approach is best summed up in “the attainable square.” Traditionally, clients have had to choose two of these three: speed, quality and cost (the unattainable triangle). With CreativeDrive, clients really can have all three, plus one more important piece: the ability to future-proof their content for tomorrow’s consumer experience. That’s why we’re continuously reimagining, evolving and enhancing the content creation cycle from the creative process (ideation & planning); to content creation (solutions based on a company’s needs, budget and timeline); to execution (content management tools to organize, replicate, translate and optimize across channels.)

How does CreativeDrive enable personal engagement for brands?

By producing content at scale, CreativeDrive can help provide consumers with the exact content they’re looking for, whenever and wherever they’re searching for it, which is a major goal for retailers and brands. We’re also capitalizing on technological innovation and using CGI, AI/Machine learning, AR/VR, and localization to even further enable our clients to personalize content based on campaign, season, audience and other variables.

What is the one piece of advice you have for B2B marketers in 2018?

Clearly focus on the relevancy and adapt to the changing consumer habits, whilst finding new, unconventional ways of reaching them. Marketing automation is going to be a big part of this – understanding how and where consumers are engaging with your brand, how to fine-tune the delivery of the content they want and a way to meaningful meet them wherever they are on the path to purchase.

How do you see the B2B marketing landscape evolving, in the years to come?

I believe we will see a meaningful uplift in the enhanced nurtured content approach with improved interconnections with the other attributes of marketing. Machine learning playing a greater role in the way brands engage with customers that’s ultimately connected to better, more relevant content. Video will continue to perform as a strong content medium for customer engagement but will be augmented with technologies like AR/VR, CGI and other emerging technologies we have yet to discover and apply.  In order to stay competitive, businesses will need to be agile and adapt to using technology that will increase their speed to market and time to value.

Which sectors is CreativeDrive looking to target to expand its reach in 2018?

We work across many different client verticals such as Technology and CPG, but if you look at the industry, we are most dominant in the Fashion and Beauty categories. We work with most of the big beauty brands on a domestic and global level – but those aren’t our only two sectors. Content creation is our expertise and since any and every industry needs content, what we can provide is industry agnostic.

Currently, we are developing our own machine learning platform that will help clients identify content gaps for an even faster turnaround. We see machine learning as a huge opportunity that ultimately equates to better client service across industries.

We’re focusing on now and what’s next as we as we prepare our studios and our clients for the next wave of sweeping technological innovation.

What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

Bose recently announced a new AR acoustics prototype and a $50 million fund for AR audio startups that focus on the intersection of sound and vision. While Bose is not a startup, I applaud their leadership and this visionary move of investing in new technology to harness an elevated AR sensory experience while also investing in startup companies. CreativeDrive has an award-winning team of musicians and composers that are deeply integrated into our content production model. We are focused on every sensory experience at every touch point for the customer, so audio is just as much of a focus for us as video. I will be watching Bose, the companies they fund, and for emerging companies specializing in audio – while continuing to develop, refine and enhance our video capabilities.

What does CreativeDrive’s MarTech stack currently consist of?

Technology will continuously change the way we share, create and discover content. It is our mission to constantly challenge the status quo, create faster with greater efficiency and use the most innovative technologies, to meet consumers’ ever-growing demand for world-class content.

We operate on a proprietary cloud-based platform that enables us to plan, track and share content from pre-production, and throughout entire production to post-production process.

Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

We significantly enhanced content creation and execution lifecycles across all engagement channels through our partnership with Estee Lauder. The brand has dedicated content labs within our Downtown NY studio, which helped consolidate Estee Lauder’s content production process while integrating their internal division that was producing redundant, overlapping content, multiple times, for different channels. We helped increase sales conversion by over 240 percent through content optimization. It was a privilege and honor working with the iconic brand and winning the “supplier of the year award” across categories.

We’re also proud of our partnership with United Airlines. Specifically, a digital campaign we created to celebrate an aviation icon and the end of an era. United wanted to develop a social media campaign that would generate nostalgia, excitement and ticket sales for the final farewell of the last 747 in its fleet. Our team quickly developed a retro graphics look and feel for developing assets for the historic event, including an Inflight magazine cover as well as a series of social media videos blending historic and contemporary video with motion graphics to create an engaging, dynamic story. The first video post resulted in 162 views, 4,100 reactions and 1,573 shares on Facebook. Tickets were sold out in less than 24 hours of the post.

How do you prepare for an AI centric world as a business leader?

We are embracing the opportunity and investing as nearly a third our company is made up of solution developers, analysts and engineers and for a highly creative company, is much higher than the average investment in research and development and emerging technologies. At CreativeDrive, we’re always looking for the latest and greatest tech, including artificial intelligence and ways to apply these innovations to our and our clients’ businesses.

One word that best describes how you work.

Collaboratively

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

I will say iTunes, as I had my iTunes account hacked very recently and did not realize how not having it for a couple of days had an impact.

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Shorten meeting times, for example, don’t pre-set to 1-hour meetings, make them 45 minutes.

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

From a personal perspective, I am currently reading anything to do with sustainable heating and cooling (geothermal etc..) as I working on making my home as efficient as possible.

I generally consume information on the go, so mainly online in various forms.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Do something you are passionate about; do something you love.

Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

Act. Lots of people have great ideas, very few actually act on them.

Tag the one person, from the martech sector, whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Phil Darnell, HP

Thank you, Myles! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.