Mickey Hioe, Art Director, Y&R Brands

My perfect working day:  It’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit and I have a shower and a cup of coffee – that would be great!  Otherwise, I’m pretty much a simple guy, so I can work anytime, anywhere.  I don’t need to block my ears with my headphones – I can work in any environment, with noise or anything.  So to me there’s no perfect working day – every day’s perfect!

My muse best comes when:  I commute every day by train and there’s an hour between stations.  Usually I’m having a snooze and that’s when my muse comes!

My favorite brand experience:  Ford Escape - that’s the first project where interactive campaign led the creative.  Usually,  the print and television spots lead the creative direction, but in this campaign, all the creative followed our direction.  It’s pretty well done and I’m really happy with it.

 The theme of the campaign is “Find Your Escape,” and the creative shows a Ford Escape hidden in the landscape.  It’s like a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ game – you have to find the Escape in the landscape.  It’s an expandable ad – you have to scroll and click objects and when you click different objects, it shows features of the Escape – like, if you click the danger sign, it may show the Escape’s 4WD feature.  So we’re trying to make the banner ad more fun – with a message from the advertiser.

What needs to change/improve for advanced interactive campaigns to become the norm?  There’s no universal standard at the moment.  Say you design an ad for a big publisher like Yahoo or MSN.  If we go through Eyeblaster, it’s kind of easy, because you only need Eyeblaster code – but otherwise, it has to be done manually, using click tags.  A simple click tag can give you a big headache.  So I think there needs to be a universal standard.

What will be the next technical or creative innovation that moves the industry forward?  I think it will be interesting if you can customize contextual methods, depending on where you are or what you’re doing.  So let’s say, you are browsing CNN.  You are from Canada.  The ad gets the information: CNN, Politics, Canada – you must be male, 30-40, so it presents a specific ad with a certain message.  The ad is dynamically generated, with XML-driven creative.

And video as well.  Right now, I think there are still limitations in terms of video.  Video is our big thing right now.  In the future, with high-speed connections, there will be no distinction between seeing movies on TV or on the internet – so I think these things will be the next big thing in online advertising.