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Juror Spotlight
Ken Kraemer, Managing Partner, Rebellion Design Co.
Ken Kraemer is Managing Partner of Rebellion Design Co., the New York digital design studio, where he leads strategy, marketing and operations. Ken is known for his unique combination of creative, strategic and business expertise and has a track record of building cultures that inspire creative excellence. Ken’s ability to devise and implement innovative business models has resulted in significant value creation for both his clients and his agencies.
Prior to joining Rebellion, Ken was first CCO and then CEO of Deep Focus which, under his leadership, was named to Advertising Age’s A-List Ones to Watch and Digiday’s Social Media Agency of the Year—both twice. Ken was also CEO and founder of Moment Studio, the purpose-built social and mobile content agency named Digiday’s 2017 Best Content Agency. Ken has also held Creative Director posts at LBi IconNicholson and Atmosphere BBDO.
Ken’s work has been honored by the Emmys, the One Show, Cannes Lions, the Effies, the W3 Awards, the Davey Awards, The Communicator Awards, the Webbys and the Jay Chiatt Awards and he has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Creativity, AdAge, Communication Arts, AdWeek and others. He has spoken at SxSW, Creative Week, Advertising Week, Digiday Content Summit, and OMMA Social & Mobile, among others. In 2017, Ken was named to Campaign magazine’s 40 over 40 List.
What led you to your current work?
I have a somewhat unorthodox background for a creative leader, but it also has prepared me uniquely for what I do now. In fact, as someone who has hired hundreds of people in my career at this point, I now look for the weird, unexpected paths, because sometimes those folks have the most interesting and realistic points of view. I started my career at JPMorgan, helping to create some of the first digital research websites for clients and investors. When I say helping to create, I was doing UX, design, and front-end coding sometimes all in an afternoon. In that role, I got to introduce our products (and the internet) to very influential people, like heads of state and global CEOs. I learned first-hand about user empathy, and the power of understanding your audience, and this experience jump-started my career in user experience design. I found I could pursue that discipline with more focus on the agency side, where exposure to content marketing, advertising, and marketing strategy in general helped me develop as a marketer and a leader. This progression gave me a strong sense of how to balance creative value, business value and results in digital and marketing work.
What was your first job?
My first job was waiting tables at Red Lobster. I think everyone should wait tables at some point in their lives, maybe even as a prerequisite to graduating high school or college. It taught me a lot about working hard and earning a living, but even more about respect, human nature, how people treat each other, and what kind of person I wanted to be. And shellfish—it taught me a lot about shellfish.
How do you stay up-to-date in your industry?
As part of my work at Rebellion, I edit and manage our weekly industry publication, The Links. We conceived it specifically for this purpose: to help our clients, our people and our friends up to date on what’s important in design, tech, marketing and UX. At least from our point of view. The idea is to provide a pithy, 5-story digest of what’s going on in our space, rather than news focused on us or our work. So as a nice by-product, I am constantly reviewing, evaluating and curating interesting stories that chronical design and digital culture. You should subscribe! What is important here, though, is to make sure you read from a number of sources—not just the trades. There is a wealth of newsletters, podcasts and social channels by talented people out there that people can follow and craft their own media diet that helps them grow in a targeted way.
What’s one of the greatest challenges your industry is facing?
The greatest challenge to the industry might seem to be generative AI—smart, talented people are both fascinated by it and freaking out about it in roughly equal measures. But the real value we provide clients, at least at Rebellion Design, is above and beyond solid design and killer code. A lot of our time is spent helping clients navigate their own internal and external challenges, finding a message that works and stewarding a product that will work for them to market. AI is poorly suited for this kind of very human process (for now).
Instead, I think the biggest challenge to creative services is the evolution of decentralized working, especially post-pandemic. While it is awesome that people can work from anywhere, the hybrid workplace that is emerging is creating the risk that even more creative talent will become short-term hires. While freelance can be great, this sort of labor market will make it tough for creatives to find the security and livelihood to take creative risks, while it will become increasingly challenging for agencies to develop strong, repeatable creative strength. Further, an important effect of working together and collaborating in design studios is the strength of the relationships that develop there. Those relationships not only make collaboration more efficient and conflict resolution easier but set up the next generation of creative leadership. Will the digital, distributed working modes that have emerged be as effective in fostering these relationships? Only time will tell, but it is dubious. I think that is a challenge we all face right now.
How do you organize your mobile apps?
My organizing principle prioritizes frequency of use. The home screen has my most-frequently-used apps within one tap: generally, these are basic productivity apps like email, calendar and messaging, and then affinity apps like runkeeper, music, and my son’s baseball team apps, etc. The next tier of apps are grouped into categories on my second screen: things like Finance, Entertainment, Tools, News. But I access almost everything that’s not on the home screen by searching. The number and variety of apps just became too great.
What are you looking for in entries to the w3 Awards?
When I review entries, I am looking for work that weaves creative message, medium and strategy together in a way that is mutualistic. Great production and execution is important, but is never enough. I want creative messages that are both human and evocative, but also novel and clever enough to engage an audience. I look for use of medium that shows expert understanding of that medium. It doesn’t need to be super-innovative, just native to the medium in a way that allows the medium to amplify and augment that creative message. And finally, I look for strategic impact, asking “will it actually work?” There are tons of examples of marketing out there that checks all the boxes and is evocative as hell, but is completely unrealistic in its expectation of its audience to engage with it. For example, social media campaigns that no real person would engage with, or glorified advertising “content videos” that no one would sit through, let alone be persuaded by. I look for these three axes to come together and find a sweet spot that makes something truly award-worthy.