Feb 12, 2020
Jim Haven’s career is rooted in advertising and design but at his core he is a storyteller and problem solver. His corporate clients, including Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Amazon, Nike and Bill Gates, come to him for help with branding and advertising, but end up on a journey to discover who they are as a company and ultimately as a brand. The results are ads so grounded in story and emotion that they are more cinema than a commercial. Jim started his career at the legendary firm Goodby, Silverstein in San Francisco and now lives in London and Seattle where he runs a creative consultancy, Applied Daydreams.
What you will learn:
- How Jim got his start in the ad industry.
- How Jim’s talent for storytelling helped him become a branding expert.
- Why Jim’s ads and branding videos feel more like cinema than a commercial.
- Why working with constraints like a limited budget can actually foster creativity, and large budgets can likewise hamper creativity.
- How Jim finds his clients’ story by immersing himself in their corporate culture while searching for "beautiful problems.”
- Why he left the preeminent San Francisco firm of Goodby Silverstein for a boutique firm in Amsterdam.
- How he turned his ad agency “Creature” from a boutique firm with 5 employees into an 85 employee international firm with offices in London and Seattle.
- What steps he took at Creature to cultivate and nurture creativity in his employees and why he thinks he took it too far.
- How he helped Bill Gates create a blog called “Gates Notes.”
- What approach Jim took when Bill Gates asked him to create a one-of-a-kind 50th birthday present for Bono.
- How Jim’s talent for finding universal human truths made him a natural fit to assist the opposition party in the 2012 Venezuelan election, attempting to overcome a voter suppression campaign by dictator Hugo Chavez.
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