Upwardly Mobile: Jury President Jay Morgan

While an invitation to sit on a Cannes Lions jury is, without doubt, an honour and a privilege, being stuck in a dark basement, headphones on, watching thousands of case studies – while the rest of adland frolics in the sunshine and necks rosé on the Croisette – isn’t, perhaps, such a joyful prospect.

But, as Jay Morgan, innovation director at The Monkeys Sydney points out, the Mobile category is a bit of an anomaly. For a start, it’s full of work you can physically interact with. You might even get to soak up some of that southern French sun. Last time Morgan sat on the Mobile jury, back in 2014, “we were in and out the whole time. There were a lot of activity trackers that required us to be moving, running up and down the stairs. One of the entries was a connected tennis racquet, so we were out there on the rooftop in the middle of the day, playing tennis. Security ended up dobbing us in!”

"A lot of what makes judging enjoyable is the group and the people: you want an open, honest, but also collaborative tone in the room.”

Canberra-born Morgan is no stranger to breaking rules: in fact, he’s spent most of his career occupying spaces “without asking for permission to go into them. I’ve just kind of done it.” As the son of an engineer, he grew up tinkering with mechanisms – pulling them apart, figuring out how they worked – which morphed into teaching himself how to code. “There was this sense of wonder and intrigue that had been built into me from an early age,” he says. “No one ever told me I had to learn a certain way. I just started exploring.” By high school, he was designing and building websites for friends. No wonder he found his degree in digital design less than challenging. “Most of my time was spent developing my sense of taste; I’d already taught myself everything from a functional perspective.”

Image produced by Google’s Deep Dream Generator – AI that employs a convolutional neural network to find patterns in images.

The veracity of oscillating underwear

After uni, Morgan got his foot in the adland door as a designer at Bold, a small Sydney boutique where he worked on iconic Australian brands like Qantas and NRMA Insurance, before starting up his own video production company with an editor from Bold. This was pre-YouTube, and “no one was really [making videos], but I thought it couldn’t be that hard,” he remembers. Despite being “five or six years ahead of its time”, the business was a success – in fact, it’s still operating today – but Morgan missed the creative side. At the height of the dotcom boom, spurred by the “incredible, experimental digital creative that was going on”, he joined the in-house team at Southern Cross Austereo, one of Australia’s largest media owners. There, he helped grow the team to 60, won a slew of awards, and caught the eyes of ECDs at Sydney’s biggest ad agencies. “Although we pissed some of them off too,” he admits. “They probably thought: ‘Who are these upstarts?” 

After a short stint at Razorfish, Morgan’s next move was to Havas, where he came up with the first of his career-defining campaigns, Durex Fundawear. The condom brand was known for its innovative products, but most were designed for close contact. An era of frequent travel and remote communication called for a long-distance solution. The answer? Vibrating his and hers underwear paired with a mobile app that remotely simulates a partner’s touch.

The pitch was a prime example of what Morgan calls his “70 per cent” approach to creative problem solving. “I always say, as long as I can understand 70 per cent of how something works, I’ll figure the rest out. We have a smartphone, we have the internet, and we have the ability to send signals over the internet. So we just needed to work out how to turn that into touch.” Turning “a lot of theory and high hopes” into a viable product was tough – “human haptic feedback is really hard in person, let alone over great distances” – but a dozen or so pairs of underwear were eventually developed, enough to run a test. The response was overwhelming: 80 million YouTube views of the campaign video (despite being banned in the first week), 50,000 requests to purchase and a silver Lion at Cannes.

Sadly, Fundawear never hit the mass market, but the production company who had helped to develop the haptic tech later parlayed it into a range of clothing that teaches yoga via targeted vibrations on the body. “A lot of these types of campaigns [product innovation] are very scammy,” says Morgan, “and agencies go just far enough to pull the wool over a jury’s eyes and convince them that an idea is real. But we really did figure out the technology, and the fact a company has gone on to use it in a whole range of products is proof of that.” 

Production innovation: the long game

At the other end of the spectrum was Peggy, a smart peg for OMO washing powder, which Morgan developed at JWT in 2016. The idea came from the insight that “there’s only so many times you can say, this detergent gets your clothes white. Whiter than white. The whitest it’s ever been!” explains Morgan. “So we had to look at what other value we could add.” As anyone who’s ever hung out a load to dry, only for the heavens to open five minutes later will tell you, knowing when’s best to do the washing is a major issue. The solution? A mini weather station complete with temperature, light and humidity sensors, which you could hang from a clothesline.

“We wanted to create something physical, and everyone knows what a peg is, it’s familiar, plus it’s something kids can enjoy [using] as well,” explains Morgan. “With the companion phone app you could plan in advance: it would tell you, for example, that Tuesday morning is the best time to do the laundry for the week, because it’ll be dry in three hours.” Like Fundawear, the product got to beta testing stage, and is still in R&D as far as Morgan knows (he left JWT in 2016). What both campaigns showed Morgan, he says, is how “incongruous” innovation work is with a brand’s typical advertising/marketing schedule: new products take years, not months, to develop.

A bridge to blue sky thinking

Getting closer to a client’s core business and products, while still indulging his passion for creative solutions is what eventually led Morgan to his new role as head of innovation at The Monkeys, following the agency’s acquisition by the design and innovation consultancy Accenture Interactive last year. “It felt like a really compelling offer, because you have a company [Accenture Interactive] that on the digital side builds products for clients and understands the business platform and infrastructure of companies, and operates on a different time horizon, with projects that last up to 10 years. That, to me, felt like a very good bridge between the creative blue sky space where we [agencies] come up with all these crazy ideas, and the other side where we actually make them happen,” he explains.

"If we [agencies] can change the brand perception and also influence the product and the experience for the consumer, that’s a killer solution."

Having spent his first year working on a “tonal re-imagining” of the buying experience – everything from through-the-line communications to retail experience and product design – for a client in the “high-value purchase bracket”, Morgan is excited about the opportunities that his new role is offering him. “Creative agencies are very good at getting people to feel differently about a brand. But that only gets them through the door. We [agencies] have never really been able to influence the product before. Now, if we can change the brand perception and also influence the product and the experience for the consumer, that’s a killer solution. I honestly believe that will be the opportunity moving forward: infuse our creative thinking with the core business system.”   

Translating the strengths on both sides of the business – creative and consultancy – and working out how they come together calls for skills which should come in handy when chairing the Mobile jury. “A lot of what makes judging enjoyable is the group and the people: you want an open, honest, but also collaborative tone in the room.”

As for predicting the work that might win, he’s going with an open mind. “What I love about judging, particularly in a category like Mobile, is that you think it’s quite hard to be surprised, especially if you pride yourself on knowing what’s out there and read the trade publications. But there might be a great campaign from South America, say, which you’ll never have seen before.” As well as mobile apps, he anticipates lots of connected products: previous years have seen everything from a bacon-scented alarm clock [below] to a flow-meter ‘toy’ allowing kids to monitor their asthma in a fun way. 

Yes we can, but should we?

Augmented reality has also gone mainstream on mobile thanks to the runaway success of 2016’s Pokémon Go, and Morgan reckons that it will be remaining big for 2018. And it won’t just be appearing in standalone apps, but will be shaking up social media campaigns too. “Up until 2014, the platforms were still being built,” points out Morgan, “but now we have Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube as established platforms. So now the questions are: how do you augment that platform, that channel, and do really interesting things with it? How do you subvert the format and use it in a surprising way? And I think AR is going to play a major part in answering these questions this year.” 

Add in voice-activated tech, AI and image recognition and Mobile looks to be an excitingly varied category. But just because the toolbox is overflowing with shiny new gadgets doesn’t mean we should be using them all, Morgan cautions. “I think that 2018 will be the year in which we finally realise: just because we can, it doesn’t mean that we should.”