Doug Jaeger

Innovation Director, TAXI

Claim To Fame: Formerly Founder/CEO of thehappycorp/LVHRD.

Jaeger is the Innovation Director at TAXI in New York. He was founder, CEO and Creative Director of thehappycorp global and is an emerging creative business leader in New York City. He is also the Director of lvhrd, an event series created to fuel interaction between creative professionals through digital media. He is a featured industry speaker on the trends in the creative space and maintains regular contact with cultural leaders and creative talent around the world. He has been an acting board member of the Art Directors Club for five years and also sits on the Marketing Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art.

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Are big ideas relevant anymore?

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In my experience working in advertising, there’s always been someone old who walks into the room and says, "so what’s the big idea?" And I think it’s always kind of resolved itself in terms of a thematic ad of some sort. But as I’ve been more involved in today’s advertising and marketing space, there’s really been more of a strategic focus on where the ideas come from and they all have to tie together back into that strategic platform—even if it’s just communicated in an ad. But the big idea seems to be an insider term in old-school advertising. I really think the big idea is falling more to the background and the executions and the individual nuggets become more important.

What role does technology play in the future? Does the future belong to specialists or generalists?
I really see the advertiser or the advertising creative person more so as a conductor of an orchestra of specialists. And I think that the best generalists are ones that observe and recognize the strengths of those talented people and let their skills shine.

Is the recession feeding creativity?
People in the marketing/advertising space are actually being forced to figure out new and more efficient ways of getting the same or better results—which is what I think is innovation. In a sense, creativity is being starved because when you look at the production budgets of television commercials, websites and all these marketing programs, those budgets are drying up, making it much more difficult to achieve the production values and the things we’ve come to enjoy in this space. And we’re really looking to new spaces to find the results we’ve come accustom to in the past.

Do award shows matter any more, and who is qualified to judge work?
Anyone that creates work is looking for feedback and looking for ways to improve their own craft. And I think award shows are one way of doing that. It’s also a great way for talent and agencies to find each other. Once work is celebrated and elevated in the way award shows do, it becomes easier for creative talent to find places where the work they want to do can get made. If I was to start an awards show today, I would start an awards show where the mothers of the people that work in this business judge the work. I would get Ty Montague’s mother. I would get Lee Clow’s mother—and maybe children. People in the business, I think, are oftentimes the worst people to judge the work. I think one of the exciting things about what you guys are doing at the ANDY Awards is that you’re taking influencers from outside of advertising and giving them the opportunity to be part of it.

What keeps you up at night?
No answer has been provided

Doug Jaeger

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