5 Minutes with... Eva Neveau

Adobe Firefly is a proud supporter of LBB. As part of the sponsorship of the ‘5 Minutes with…’ channel, we spend time with some of the most innovative and creative minds in the industry.

For today’s edition, we chatted to Eva Neveau, global CCO at eg+ Worldwide, the content and production arm of Omnicom. Growing up the daughter of a musician in Austin, Texas, Eva’s childhood was littered with no end of interesting characters and artistic venues. This exposure to the creative process of her father’s band taught her about “an ethos of constant learning” and the love that comes with dedication to one’s craft - lessons that have served her into adulthood and her own creative career.

Before joining eg+ in March 2022 to lead its creative direction and help unite its three brands, eg+, Mother Tongue and Designory, Eva was an executive creative director at Accenture Song in LA and before that, a creative director at Razorfish in Chicago and GSD&M in her hometown, Austin.

Describing her current role as a mix of all her previous experiences, she speaks to LBB’s Ben Conway about producing work without compromise, excelling with virtual production and other emerging technologies, and becoming a student of TikTok.

LBB> What creative content inspired or interested you most when you were growing up?

Eva> I didn’t realise it then, but my dad’s band’s musical process taught me about collaboration and being vulnerable and open to other people’s ideas. Being with them showed me what it really means to be dedicated to one’s craft and have an ethos of constant learning. These guys have been at it for 50 or more years. That’s love.

Recently I was with my dad and his buddy, sitting around shooting the shit and telling old stories. Next thing I knew, they were setting dates to practise because they had ‘good work to do’ and ‘so much more to learn’. Imagine feeling that way well into your 70s! That spirit inspired me when I was a kid and it inspires me to this day.

Oh, and I really loved The Muppets (Miss Piggy is the best ever) for their lessons and dry humour. And I still love the simplicity of Wendy’s ‘Where’s the beef?’ spot.

LBB> What’s the most important piece of advice you received early on in your career? How does it influence you and your work today?

Eva> Early in my career, I worked at Organic under Colleen DeCourcy [Snap Inc. CCO, previously Wieden + Kennedy]. The advice she gave me, which I use to this day, was handed down in actions, not words.

Colleen was scrambling to find someone to art direct a shoot for the launch of the Dodge Charger at the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas. I had never been on location and had never shot a car, but I somehow worked up the gumption to write her the meekest email ever raising my hand for the project… then immediately felt like an idiot for sending it. Later that day she walked by my desk and said, “Eva, you’re going to Las Vegas.” She believed in me before I really believed in myself. 

She taught me to raise my hand, especially when it’s a stretch. I’ve built a career out of looking for ways to raise my hand and put myself in situations where I’m uncomfortable. More often than not, it’s worked out. Today, I interpret her advice in a different way. Instead of ‘raise your hand’, it’s: ‘find ways to believe in people and help them see themselves’.  So, I look for ways to do what Colleen did for me, for others.

LBB> You’re almost two years into your role as global CCO at eg+ - what goals have you already achieved? And what experiences and lessons have you brought from your time at Accenture Song, Razorfish and elsewhere?

Eva> The work we are doing here feels like a natural mash-up of the work I’ve done in past lives, but on steroids. Across Designory, eg+ and Mother Tongue, there are all the tools needed to build real value for consumers and impact for brands by marrying data and tech with creative excellence and global relevance. I’m able to take what worked for me in the past, like storytelling and a systematic approach to design and couple it with production automation to slingshot our work with personalisation and scale. The work I was doing just a few years ago almost always had some level of compromise. Either the creative was great but couldn’t scale, or it was tech-led but the message was muddy.

Our model relies on the connectedness of our talent across offices and the fluidity with which we staff. The work is varied and we’re almost never solving the same exact problem twice, which keeps it interesting and means learning from each other is a necessity. 

LBB> How are you bringing eg+ closer together with Designory and Mother Tongue? And to extend that - the wider Omnicom family?

Eva> I like to think about the Designory, eg+ and Mother Tongue businesses as a spectrum. Designory has been the agency for brands looking to dive deep into their products and services with content marketing for over 50 years. On the other side of the spectrum is eg+, a global production company that offers content development, primary production, post-production, localisation and deployment services. Underpinning the spectrum is Mother Tongue, who we are able to bring in for hyper-local transcreation and translation through thousands of in-market writers.  

What we do is unique - no one can really offer the depth, breadth and scale of our three companies. We’re able to help marketers solve for the long tail of the brand experience, where content creates engagement, and show up in all the channels consumers expect them to be in. The content we make, focused on product storytelling and scale, is a complement to campaign work. No one is really focused on the content experience like eg+ Worldwide companies. 

We are taking the best of what’s needed to be successful in each business and applying it to the other. This is where we benefit from the fluidity of casting… the conceptual work gets more efficient and focused without getting less creative, and the production work gets more crafted without losing speed or scale. 

LBB> eg+ prides itself on innovating production solutions on a global scale - which are the key areas of improvement that the wider industry is focused on right now, in terms of production?

Eva> The nature of our client’s business and the fact we are a curious group of people means we are constantly looking for what’s next in production. We’ve really been excelling in virtual production, partially because of the pandemic, but it intensified when our clients started to have shortages that meant the products were impossible to get. So, we turned to our 3D and CGI capabilities to bring traditional production to virtual production sets, where we brought products to life through a mix of live-action and real-time 3D technology. It’s also really handy when a vehicle is embargoed. 

The spotlight on generative AI (GenAI) makes it feel like it’s [come] out of the blue, but there’s been evolution. In some form or another, AI has been part of the way we work for years. Now, we are chasing how to harness GenAI as part of the continuous evolution of the way we work, adding it to our existing global production network, proprietary automation technology and dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) workflows. Platforms like Google and Meta have announced plans to automate ad content production and optimisation with GenAI. But it’s going to take the orchestration of tools to produce domain-specific final deliverables with the fidelity of image, copy, sounds and video the industry has come to expect. 

But, let’s be real. Everything could change in the next 3-6 months. The trick is to be comfortable riding the wave of not knowing exactly what’s next. 

LBB> So how has eg+ been harnessing GenAI and other emerging tech for clients?

Eva> An example is the world-class CG practice we’ve built across our global team over the past five-plus years. We started by delivering still assets for automotive clients, really honing the craft of making the materials and environment look real. Then we moved on to 3D animations for our tech clients, really getting inside their products. Now our team is working on real-time rendering, coupling it with personalisation and performance engines built with Creative Intelligence using AI and grounded in partnerships with Unity, Unreal Engine, and Nvidia. We’re building AR, VR, real-time experiences and real-time enabled DCO, all within our team. 

And we’ve been doing a lot when it comes to GenAI. Parts of our business are helping to train a conversational generative AI chatbot alternative to ChatGPT for one of our biggest clients. Our content strategists and data scientists have deep experience working with AI models. With the recent advancements in generative image and text models, they have been applying data engineering techniques to build proof-of-concept custom model prototypes to solve complex problems, such as automating technical writing for highly specialised industries, like pharma.

Like most creative and production teams across the industry, we’re using AI to help vet our ideas, rapidly pre-visualise, and explore creative options too. Studio teams have created workflows using tried and true processes, like action scripts, and are combining them with Adobe generative fill for light retouching, image resizing and image extension. And we’re delivering localisation and amplification with synthetic voice. 

One of the big reasons I came to eg+ Worldwide was because I was impressed with how the group was innovating, not for innovation’s sake, but to deliver real value for clients. It’s measured and pragmatic. It doesn’t mean we don’t take risks; it means we aren’t flippant about what’s at stake. We deliver. It’s core to who we are. 

LBB> Who or what in the industry inspires you at the moment? How are you continuing to develop your creative mind?

Eva> Right now, it’s creators. I spend an embarrassing amount of time on TikTok. It gives me access to communities as fast as it takes to search, and I use it to learn about the world from other people’s perspectives. The more mundane the thing they are doing, the more I feel like I learn. It was fascinating this summer to see the differences and commonalities between Taylor Swift fans and Beyoncé fans getting ready to go to the concerts, then experiencing them in such different but connected ways… It’s very voyeuristic. Like every-day-person reality TV. Their lives shape my view of the world. Changing the way I think. Which of course, works itself into the work.

In the little time that I am not on TikTok… I’ve recently stumbled on the Stanford d.school and been really taken by their ideas on radical collaboration and their eight core abilities that shape the best work. My favourite is ‘Moving between Abstract and Concrete’ which is how everything is interconnected - and context is everything. If you get a chance, I encourage everyone to dig into these.

LBB> What was the project or piece of work that you felt really changed your career? 

Eva> While I was at Razorfish, one of my clients was Children’s Hospital Colorado. We originally pitched to redesign their site, as you would expect Razorfish to do. But, through the process, we came to a thought that really summed up the essence of the organisation. It started as a last-minute hail-mary name and manifesto for the site concept we liked best. We called it: ‘It’s different here’. While I was presenting, Charlotte Isoline, the VP of marketing, leaned over to her colleague Nicole Hebert, the director of brand, and said, “That’s us. That’s the big idea.” We ended up winning the pitch for the site and inspired by the manifesto, Charlotte asked us what we would do with the entire brand.

I pulled together concept teams and we got to work, ultimately changing the language from ‘It’s different here’ to the more ownable and memorable, ‘Here, it’s different’. Building on the beautiful and vulnerable writing of Cara Suglich, we created some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever been involved with. During the pitch for the brand, we were in literal tears as we looked over the work that showcased what a children’s hospital means for families and the love that goes into saving children’s lives. 

We went on to be named AOR for Children’s Hospital Colorado, a first for Razorfish. We redesigned the brand, and made television, print, radio, OOH and of course, everything needed for digital channels. It was a turning point for me. Winning that work boosted my confidence, reinforced trusting my instinct, and partnering with Charlotte and Nicole showed me how to build deeper relationships with clients.

LBB> What recent projects or partnerships are you proudest of? Tell us a bit about them and how they’re shaping the future of eg+!

Eva> I am really excited about the real-time rendering work we are doing with our partners Unity, Unreal Engine, and Nvidia. The promise of digital has always been that one day, marketers would be able to deliver 1:1 content experiences. And, while we are seeing more of it, it’s not scaled across industries. Unlocking real-time rendering gets us one step closer to seeing 1:1 come to fruition across the journey, no matter how complex the product. 

I’m also excited for the work we are doing with Adobe, partnering to solve for what’s next in both the conceptual side of our business and in production. We’re in the midst of rolling out pilots now, so all I can say is that we’ll be working through how we might push the edges of current capabilities to help each other innovate in new spaces.