The best part of the working day in advertising is often spent on its most tedious tasks. Fitz Maro has therefore spent the past year building his own “second brain”, a system that takes over the repetitive part of the job and leaves him with what he cannot delegate to technology: thinking, decision-making and creating.
He will show what that system looks like in practice on 12 and 13 October in Portorož, where he is joining the programme of this year’s Golden Drum festival. His session is titled You Didn’t Join Advertising To Be A Machine: Build the second brain that handles everything but your craft, and it will not remain at the level of theory about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Maro will demonstrate on stage how he uses his second brain, which creative industry tools he connects it to and how other professionals can build a similar system.
Maro is Head of Design Technology for the Americas at the Brand Innovation Lab of Amazon Ads. It is a global team within Amazon that develops advertising projects created specifically for its ecosystem, often without an existing format that could simply be repeated. His team combines AI, new technologies, immersive experiences and creative storytelling to turn brand ideas into interactive campaigns and technology-powered activations.
Before joining Amazon, he was Global Creative Technology Lead at Pinterest, and previously led agency innovation teams. He holds a Master’s degree in Creative Technology from VCU Brandcenter and is a guest lecturer at universities, while he has spoken about the intersection of creativity and technology at Cannes Lions and SXSW. AdAge named him one of the global creatives to watch in its 2016 Cannes edition.
His appearance at Golden Drum shifts the conversation about AI from the question of whether technology will change creative work to a much more practical problem: how much time creatives currently spend on tasks that do not require their creativity. Maro’s answer is not another tool that produces ideas instead of people, but a system that removes the work that increasingly makes people operate like machines.
Golden Drum will take place at the Grand Hotel Bernardin in Portorož, and Fitz Maro joins this year’s speaker line-up, which also includes creative and strategic leaders from companies and agencies such as The Coca-Cola Company, LePub Network, Havas Media Network, Rethink and Design Bridge and Partners.
