Creativebrief: As Head of Strategy at Beyond what is your primary focus?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: My primary focus is twofold: 1) to make sure our thinking, as an agency, is as sharp as possible in terms of understanding the impact technology is having on people’s lives, and 2) to use data and insight to help our teams design better experiences around people’s needs. Our stated mission is to work to remove friction from the customer journey. Digital technologies are having a massive impact in simplifying people’s lives, but technology alone is never a panacea. Technology depends on design for it to truly to be useful, but that design needs to be rooted in a deep understanding of users’ needs and behaviours – which is why data and insight is the starting point for everything we do.

Creativebrief: Please share a para on your career to date – specifically talking us through the high points.

Nils Mork-Ulnes: I started my career in Silicon Valley and worked through the first dot com boom and bust, as well as the start of the current boom. I was in management consulting at the time the web first emerged with the launch of Mosaic. I also worked with several telco, banking and software companies to develop opportunities in the then emerging connected world we now take for granted. Some of the most interesting work was with Microsoft, trying to understand what sort of threat Netscape and the web were presenting, and with Ericsson to think through what the world might look like with ubiquitous 3G; that all seems like ancient history now. Then, I was part of starting two tech ventures – one middleware play and one platform play. It was an amazing experience even though in the end the dot com bust wiped out 98% of all the start-ups in San Francisco by 2002 – including ours. After returning to strategy consulting for a while, I got the opportunity to run a media analysis business owned by NextFifteen (Context Analytics), which was in need of a turnaround. It was at the time blogs were starting to become popular, so we turned the business into a social media analytics specialist. This business became one of the founding stones that we used to launch Beyond five years ago, combining the analytics business with a digital agency. We’ve since brought on clients like Virgin, Google, and Facebook – to name a few highlights.

Creativebrief: What’s unique about your agency / business? Why did you join Beyond?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: We were founded with the idea that data needs to sit at the heart of all we do and drive our experience design work, which is a key reason why I think we are unique. So many people in the agency business talk about the importance of data, but too often it’s at the periphery of the work that actually gets done. Our analytics and strategy team comprise almost 20% of our total headcount, which I believe is quite unique in the industry. We work very collaboratively using our Applied Creativity process with our UX, product design, technology, and content teams. This means our data and insight work is highly integrated into how we develop and refine solutions for clients. It also allows us to be more iterative and nimble, which gets you a better end product.

Creativebrief: Who are the people new to you (either within your business or externally) who have particularly impressed you in the last twelve months?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: I’d have to say my colleagues, as one of the things I appreciate most about our company is how closely we collaborate. This means I get a much better understanding of the craft of people from other disciplines – be it UX, design, front or back end development – and learn a lot from them.

Also, we have a partnership with the school Hyper Island, and I have had the opportunity to lecture at a few of their campuses the past three years. The students they produce tend to impress me with the creativity and digital savvy they bring, and they do make excellent hires.

Creativebrief: What has been your agency’s best work in the last year?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: There are a lot of exciting things we have been working on that I can’t talk about publicly, from redesigning the apartment building to designing the mobile financial services of the future. We’re also doing some interesting online/offline experience design in the retail space for a few clients.

Other good things we have done this year include rebranding Google’s DoubleClick and its website, as well as the work we did with the NSPCC to create Netaware – a tool for helping parents understand the social networks their kids use, and any risks they pose. Working for charities is always one of the most gratifying things to be able to do when you’re agency-side.

Creativebrief: Industry wide, what work has excited you most this year?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: I love the work UsTwo does and in particular that they develop products for themselves that are genuinely great – such as the ticketing app Dice and the game Monument Valley. They have shown that agencies can also build successful businesses and have pushed the boundaries of what an agency can do.

Creativebrief: Who or what inspires you?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: I try to read as much as I can from outside of the typical marketing publications and books. New ideas very often come from “stealing” existing ideas from very different disciplines; research done in economics and psychology has been a huge influence in marketing. But I also like to ingest what I can from popular culture (I love Stack, the indie magazine curators who send you new titles every month) through to food culture and politics.

Creativebrief: How do you stay in-touch with the industry’s best work and culturally relevant news?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: When I have the time, Twitter, but when I don’t Nuzzel does a good job of surfacing what I’ve missed. And newsletters like Only Dead Fish and Benedict Evans’ are invaluable for finding some real gems. 

Creativebrief: What work or agency from outside the UK do you think is particularly influential?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: IDEO has of course been a huge influence for decades and much of what they have been preaching is now becoming mainstream in how experiences are designed.

Creativebrief: What do you think are going to be the main challenges for agencies in the next two years?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: So much digital work is becoming mission critical for businesses, so they will become less inclined to outsource work over time as they acquire the right skills in-house. For agencies that means becoming a different kind of partner – one that helps bring spark and new ideas, but then partners closely with the client to help them bring those ideas into fruition. That means new business models such as embedding teams or designing more ambiguous client/agency divisions of roles.

Creativebrief: How do you see the media landscape unfolding in the next five years?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: Digital will, of course, continue to reshape media, but it will become quite different to what we are used to today. We are moving away from digital mimicking the look and feel of traditional media to formats that are much more native to the devices we use today – in particular smartphones and other mobile devices. That means media is becoming far more immersive and visual and that interfaces are becoming invisible as we interact directly with the content. Content will become atomised so that it can be transmitted and consumed on virtually any device or surface, as they will be all connected and controlled by our smartphones. For media owners, this will continue to be a very difficult transition because the unbundling of the traditional value chain is letting new actors come in and offer better solutions. Just witness Apple and Netflix’s ability to rapidly change people’s behaviours when it comes to consuming music and TV. Expect much more of that. 

Creativebrief: What’s your attitude to the ‘traditional’ pitch? Do you think there is a better/more modern way?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: Aside from the lopsided economics of having agencies bear all the risk in a pitch situation, the biggest problem with pitches is that ideas are developed in a vacuum. The best solution to a client problem is usually born out of a close understanding of a client’s strengths and weaknesses as well as close collaboration between brand and agency. As such, I think the traditional pitch never gets optimal results, though they do put agencies to the test when it comes to doing their homework. If pitches were more about agencies demonstrating their grasp of the issues than coming up with the silver bullet or great reveal, I think it would be more productive for both parties.

Creativebrief: What’s the best pitch you’ve been involved in?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: I think it might be the pitch we won to reimagine Virgin.com, the home of Richard Branson and the overall Virgin brand. It is an amazing brand with an incredible story, but its digital presence didn’t reflect this. We had a lot of insight to work with, as we had performed a 360 degree analysis of the brand using behavioural and social data to understand the state of the brand in digital and the gaps it could potentially fill. Using this, we reimagined their corporate site as a purpose-driven brand platform that could digitally revitalise the brand, with a technology core designed to deliver the right content at the right time to an audience of both new and old fans of the brand. It was just a good example of a truly data-driven pitch where all the pieces from UX through to design, content and technology came together into a cohesive whole that ended up serving the brand well (it netted a Webby nomination, for one thing).

Creativebrief: In what ways do you think the industry can change for the better?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: There is too much digital landfill being created, and I think that’s because the industry often fails to ask the basic question of whether whatever they create actually is useful to people.

Creativebrief: What’s the next big thing for Beyond?

Nils Mork-Ulnes: Never thought I’d say it, but there is some really cool stuff coming from us in the financial and pharma spaces. These are such heavily regulated markets that it’s often hard to do interesting, cutting edge work, but at the same time the industries work on things that have such a big impact on people’s lives. Many players in this space are now taking real steps to using digital as a tool to make their customers’ lives better and their products easier to use.