Faris Yakob is a strategist, writer, public speaker, creative director and the founder of GeniusSteals, a planning and innovation consultancy. He has been named one of the top 50 creatives in the world by the Clios and his blog, Talent Imitates, Genius Steals, has been nominated as one of top ten ad blogs to follow by Campaign and Mashable.
Tell me a little about your background.
I've worked in advertising for almost 15 years. Before that I had been in management consulting and I wrote briefly for Maxim Magazine. My last few gigs have been working at agencies in and around digital. I was the global head of digital at Naked Communications, then the Chief Digital Officer at McCann Erickson New York. Then, as Chief Innovation Officer of MDC, I co-founded a creative technology agency called Spies&Assassins.
About a year ago I began a consultancy for innovation, strategy and ideas called Genius Steals based on the evolving thinking I’ve been doing in public for the last ten years or so.
I guess that would be the other part to it. I’ve been writing, and speaking, publishing, and thinking about how the advertising industry and technology have been co-evolving for a long time.
Explain the name of your self-founded company, “Genius Steals” and your award winning blog, “Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.”
Originality is a myth. Ideas are new combinations.
Once you’re aware of that framework, the best way to get to ideas is to have the broadest, most interesting and most relevant set of inspiration brought to the problem at the right time. Genius Steals is not about copying. Copying is morally bankrupt. It’s about building on brilliant stuff that’s come before and not starting from scratch every time.
What do you think it is about yourself that keeps these brands and agencies coming back to you for strategy and ideas?
I worked in a bunch of different agencies and with a variety of brands and we now work with both brands and agencies.
I hope that what my partner and I bring is objective advice and non-obvious sets of ideas and inspirations to solve problems. I hope that we are respectful and pleasant. I’ve always been very keen on the simple principle in life, in work and in social media: One should be nice, or one should leave.
I find that being nice is ideally helping people to solve their problems as though they were your own - you consider the primary issue without making your own bottom line more important than theirs. That's a good way to be a partner, either within an agency or as a consultant.
You have created an overwhelming amount of content; Everything from books, & lessons, & keynote speeches to your blog. What have you created that you’re most proud of?
I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been blogging for nearly a decade. The consistency is something that has been hard to maintain. Many generations of bloggers have come and gone since then.
There’s still a conceptual bias in me, despite the emergence of digital, to having a book published by a publisher. The book I co-wrote, the Digital State, I am proud of. The book that will hopefully be coming out afterwards that will be my own, I'm also proud of, so far.
Starting the company Genius Steals was something that I found challenging and frightening because I’d only ever been an employee so I’m very proud at having done that with my partner.
What would your advice be to the Scoopr Brand Ambassadors who are trying to separate their content for brands from the rest?
Internalizing the brief, strategy, the meaning and needs of the client and then providing a non-obvious creative solution.
You want to find something that’s both appropriate which fits, but that is the least obvious thing that fits. That, in my mind, is what constitutes the most creative.
For more from Faris, follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, 'Strands of Genius.'
