Iain Tait: “A Lot of Stuff Needs Figuring Out”

Iain> Technically, I think we've been a company for over a year now. But we've been using that time to find our feet, figure out what it is that we like doing, figure out what the market needs. Nick [Farnhill], Richard [Turley] and I spent about a year before that in a WhatsApp group, just going "And another thing" and "Wouldn't it be brilliant if we did this!?" I archived it at one point. It's a 380-page PDF of tightly spaced rantings by people just really enthusiastic and hungry to do something different.

What's been really interesting over the last year is almost all of the same themes keep coming round and round again. We've spent a bit of time getting to know each other, getting away from all the trappings of being a big agency, working out what matters and what's important to us. I think we know what we're doing now. We know some of the traps that we could have fallen into. 

Playing around in the dark has been really healthy for us rather than having to come out and go, "We are FOOD and this is what we stand for.” Had we done that a year ago, we probably would have been more bullish on web3, metaverse, a bunch of things that we'd have probably nailed to the front door. By not over-defining ourselves it means that people come to us with, "Could you help us with this?". We talk about it and find out. Whereas I think if we'd said, “We're a branding agency that focuses on how brands show up on the eve of web3 and the metaverse…” We're getting some of those projects, but we can also do the autumn and winter campaign as a magazine for Mulberry. When you're at the scale that we're quite happy being at the moment, being able to pick and choose and not have to go running around chasing pitches has allowed us to just focus on work, who we're collaborating with, and figuring out how we like to do things.

Part of it is not coming down fully on one side or the other. I think it is quite nuanced at the moment. This is not necessarily something I would recommend everyone get into in a certain way. So if we had a 'web3 evangelists' sign flashing above the door, it would feel weird to people who come to us who we tell should wait for a bit. And that would be my advice to quite a few people. Start immersing yourselves in this, start doing some warm ups with certain things, but don't suddenly try and switch your web2 organisation into a web3 mode of presentation when all the fundamentals of the business don't live up to it. Which I've seen a few times.

Iain> I don't know if any of it needs to exist. I think we've been at a really interesting point in mainstream culture, in advertising, in the creative industries, for a while now. Lots of things are still up in the air and haven't fully shaken out. We're still midway through a very long and gradual digital transformation that’s taking audiences and talent away from things that we used to know and love. It's a redistribution and redeployment of creative energy. The tools that people use are changing so rapidly. 

Richard and I have been messing around with a lot of machine learning and looking at how you can integrate that into a creative practice, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing – all of those questions. We've got a really close relationship with Epic. Virtual production and what that means for our world is huge. 

This seems like a really weird thing to say, but I think why we want FOOD to exist is that a lot of stuff needs figuring out. A lot of unknowns and a lot of things to experiment and to play with to find new ways forward.

Iain> That's part of it! Food's brilliant because it's so universal. And I love the fact that when you tell people it's called Food, everyone tries to unpack it. They'll go, "Oh, like food for thought" or "because food is essential, right?" And you're like, "Yeah, I guess." And the URL was available. And it's got two Os in the middle of which is nice. 

I like the fact that it is universal, it's relatively unfussy. Food can be basic and straightforward. It can also be really pretentious if you want it to be. 

Iain> From the very early days of Poke, Nick and I have always been very keen to ask, “What does this stuff mean?", “How does it show up for brands?” and “How does it show up in the world of real people?” People need to understand what this technology is good for and why it's important. 

I think the parallels [between the time of Poke and FOOD’s founding] are that to get to know something, it's about getting to know a community – people and practitioners – and immersing yourself in that world. Not seeing it as something that's happening over there. Not having an idea over here and then taking it to those people who can then produce the thing for you. When a technology or field is emerging, you want to be around practitioners, bouncing off them.

Whether you believe that web3, crypto and all these things are the be all and end all, the people who are getting smart about it are the people who are out there making things, doing things, playing with it, experimenting. At worst, they're going to discover that it's not all it's cracked up to be sooner than everyone else. So being there for brands and partners who are up for exploring how they should show up in the modern world. That's basically what we're trying to help people figure out.

 

Having worked in places which had a very tight integration with production people and places that were a bit more hands off with it, I've always valued having a good grasp of what practitioners are actually making. Especially as the speed of iteration now is so fast. If you're too removed from people who are doing it, you're in danger of missing out quite significantly on all the interesting stuff. You've got to be getting your sleeves rolled up and playing around with it to really understand. Otherwise you're talking in abstractions.

It’s so easy now to get lost in a debate around whether AI art is legitimately art. That's never going to end. You could spend the next two years on Twitter duking that one out. I've learned more from sitting up late at night wrangling weird prompts on different diffusion models to realise I don't understand this technology deeply but I have seen some things in this that are really interesting. I would use it for this and I wouldn't use it for that, and this is worrying and this doesn't worry me. None of those personal revelations have come from reading other people's pieces on it. It's come through experience.

Iain> Lots of stuff spawns on WhatsApp in our relationship, because Richard's in New York and we're in London. A few months ago we were talking about something in a slightly exasperated way and Richard said, "I just want to give away everything I know. I want to be a shit knowledge philanthropist." I love that. 

That's sort of it. We've hit this point in our careers, we've been very fortunate, been in good companies, seen how they work. And the thing that we enjoy most is creating spaces for brilliant people to make work. When you've been at ECD level in big organisations, that's effectively what you're doing a lot of the time. Creating a space that is safe and fun for people to bring interesting work to the table. We've talked a lot about how we make a place that's brilliant for people who are either at the 'shit knowledge philanthropist' stage in their careers, or people who are fresh, who are like sponges, desperate to learn. Unfortunately the downside of those big ECD jobs is you're just in meetings all day and getting ferried around. You're not actually working with brilliant young talent. All of us have a real desire to try and build this organisation so it's got a rung of experience and wisdom who are tasked with almost getting out of the way as much as possible. But creating a safe, trusted space and room for young people with tons of potential to live up to that and feel supported and protected. I think all of us would look at the interesting things that we've done and say that's not really that secret a formula. And actually, it's the most rewarding part of the job as well.

Iain> We’re trying to keep the business roughly half and half. Gun-for-hire creative consultancy – that's half of what we do. The other half is either wholly owned or co-owned IP with partners. We have a couple of projects like that.

We have a really interesting project with an organisation called RockCorps, who do volunteering in the community using music as a hook. Nick and I helped them launch in this country with Orange 15 years ago and we're now helping them to figure out what a global, digital kind-of-metaverse version of their volunteering programme could look like, which is super interesting. And we're in a joint venture with them at the moment.

We have another project that's a partnership with Epic Games where we're trying to bring young creators, who wouldn't normally get the chance to shape the metaverse, into imagining what it could be. Because at the moment the metaverse has been designed in labs in Silicon Valley by neckbeards, pretty much. If the metaverse is going to have a chance of being interesting, diverse and progressive, we need some new voices imagining what this thing is. So in that same way that we want to make space for interesting young brains to come into FOOD, we're trying to feed some of that into the creation and imagination around the inception of the metaverse too. 

Iain> We've been looking into if there is an interesting way as a creative company to be more open source. If you look at the way that technology develops using GitHub as a central platform, people understand that they can take something that someone else has started, build on top of it, modify it and get kudos – there's a well understood economy of collaboration. Whereas the creative industries have this massive obsession with originality and things not being derivative of other things. I think there's a reason why the software and technology industry has advanced at an alarming rate and eaten everything else in its path. Whereas we're still arguing about whether this thing is derivative of something else that happened 20 years ago. Should that matter? Is there a way as a company to say, if you work with us, there is a repository of part-formed ideas that we will always draw from, but equally by participating in this there are things that we generate during that process that get put into the repository.

I look at the amount of time that gets wasted in lots of creative companies around who owns an idea. The amount of politics, ego and bad feeling that ends up in places because they put 12 teams on a thing and it's a fight to the death to see who comes out alive. It's really brutal, not particularly helping people to listen to each other's ideas. They're constantly set on: "How is my idea going to be the last one standing, so I get to stay on this nice job and don't get put back in the work pool, or however it is the agency works that week."

The other thing is we've got a nice spot by the canal in Islington. Made by Many – a digital products consultancy who we've known for years – have been in this building for a long time. We've now moved in as co-lead tenants with them and we're also subletting to some other companies in this space. We've got a virtual production set up with some mocap stuff and a green screen because we're sharing with PIXOMONDON who have done things like the Star Trek series and House of the Dragon. Having them in the office is amazing. Then another company, Ntropic, who just did the big WhatsApp 3D billboards. Having neighbourly companies like those in the studio means we've got a really nice community of  adjacent people and businesses forming around us. Being isolated and shut off from what's going on around you when things are developing feels totally wrong.

Iain> I think clients sort of fall into two camps: those who know what they want to do and have come to us because they think we can help them figure it out. The other half will be slightly more nervous, like "We need to show up in this space. What are we going to do?" Those projects can be quite long and drawn out because we're at a stage where, especially around things like web3 and crypto, everyone has an opinion but very few people have any experience. For example, you could use NFTs to create a membership programme. And someone on the table goes, "I think NFTs are a scam." I have some sympathy with some of that. There's a person over there that doesn't think that. But until an organisation has figured out what its point of view is on a technology like that, there's quite a lot of work to do to get everyone to the same place. We've got caught up in that a few times with different clients. So a big learning is to go into that knowing that you need to achieve consensus around how that organisation relates to that technology. And have that defined first before you go in to start creating solutions or ideas for them.

Iain> The biggest project that we haven't done yet that I'm really excited about is getting much more engaged with world building. Working with brands that might use a technology like Unreal Engine to create a world made out of a bunch of assets. Rather than thinking you have an output which is a piece of film, thinking you have an output which is a world that can then be used to generate a myriad of other assets, whether it's a game, an experience, a film, some out of home, a product. 

There are some really interesting examples of how people are using things like Unreal to produce content. You can look at things like the McDonald's stuff that PIXOMONDO here did. That's really useful for us to show to clients – a really clever thing that means people don't have to fly around the world and close down McDonald's restaurants to be filmed in a McDonald's restaurant. But what very few people have done is build models for all of these things, which would allow them to then extend that out very efficiently. There's all this value being left on the table. Let's build a world using one of these technologies, and then deploy it really smartly across all the channels that we can possibly think of. Smart brands are going to start doing that more and more.

Iain> Thinking about that makes me half die inside and half really excited. I'm really excited about what happens when all of the models of things that we scan to put in a shoot are now available in, for example, the Fortnite engine, so you can go and start to repurpose them. So it's not just control and micromanaging attention, which some brands are going to be really keen on, but on the flip side of that. What happens if you take all of those assets and use them to create utter chaos in a different way?