By day, Tony Tung is the Executive Creative Director at Hook, a digital creative agency making work for leading advertising agencies and smart brands. By night – and probably a little on the weekends – he’s co-founder of Cloneless Media, a visual FX and post-production company with a patented platform for creating real-time dynamic video. Later this month, Tung will lead a forward-thinking session on design philosophies and the role of technology in the marketing industry. We caught up with Tung recently over email to get a little more on his session.
Q: Without giving too much away about the presentation, can you explain a bit about your topic and why you are speaking on it?
Tung: I’ll be giving a talk at MIMA and hosting a discussion on Design Perspectives: Ideas from Forward Thinkers. In it, I’ll present ideas from influencers and a handful of people I’ve interviewed who offer their ideas and philosophies around modern design, what’s next, and why people should pay attention to these things today. I chose this topic because I think it’s important to constantly evolve design approaches. To be honest, it’s the same discussion I like to have in small group dinners or happy hours—I’m just expanding it to a little larger scale. Design nowadays more than ever is driven by human-centered behavior and experiences. As humans, we change and evolve, therefore our needs change and evolve as well. Design must follow this.
Q: What do you hope individuals attending your event will take away from your presentation?
Tung: At the very least, I hope people take away some consideration on how they treat design within their department, company, personal spheres of influence—a consideration to stay vigilant and pay attention to rapidly shifting needs. Now that digital has enabled nearly real-time feedback, we need to adjust in nearly real-time if we can help it. There is no one right way or solve, but there are certainly concepts out there that I think we can all benefit from. Ideally, I hope we can begin a lively discussion after the talk and at the summit.
Q: Why is this topic important to marketing and advertising?
Tung: For a several reasons – forward-style thinking is important because as we all know, our industry changes almost daily. Moreso, marketing and advertising has a tremendous influence in everyday life experiences. Design has come into focus more recently than ever, and, and it’s acknowledged that we need to reassess design thinking throughout the process, keeping it iterative instead of one and done up front. I believe that’s true for any project, any initiative. As marketers and advertisers, we help craft the narrative around a product, as service… design, or really, problem-solving, is vital to the entire strategy.
Q: Who do you follow or where do you find your inspiration?
As for inspiration, who I follow is less important than where. I find the best inspiration all around me not only within our own industry, but in experiences I have in my everyday life. Interacting with apps on my phone, connecting with an old friend, on another continent, and getting to the coffee shop and picking up my prepared cafe americano. Some of the best designers in the world working right beside us, at companies you are connected to, at brands you are loyal to, and companies whose services you use. I’ll be highlighting ideas from many of these people during my talk in October.
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