Less talk. More rock.
AdAge: AdBlock Podcast
Firstborn’s Dave Snyder on skateboarding, gnarly scars and learning a skill while goofing around. The chief creative officer explains the allure of skating as an adult and becoming a skater dad on this episode of the 'Ad Block' podcast.
99u: Art is Not Design
“Design in the most classic sense is a potent business strategy,” says Firstborn executive creative director Dave Snyder. Here's how he and his team help brands like Mountain Dew, and Jet.com reposition themselves....
Mentoring at the Cannes Lions School.
2018 Mentor, Young Marketers Academy, Cannes Lions School
I had the privilege of being one of a handful of mentors to teach a group of rising star marketers from around the world on the power of experience-led transformation. "Experience-led transformation is fundamentally about people. It’s about how brands interact with people across an interconnected system in a meaningful way.”
RA*W at The Dutch Embassy for Creativity.
In 2019, I had the opportunity to have a candid conversation about the state of the creative industry with students of RA*W at the Dutch Embassy for Creativity on the beach in Cannes. The audience was a group of young marketers and agency professionals probing at the many facets of the agency / client relationship and model but from a US perspective.
Campaign US, 40 over Forty
In 2018 I was featured as one of Campaign US’s, Digital 40 over Forty. A diverse mix of marketers, creatives, technologists, PR pros and account mavens who prove that the future of digital belongs to everyone
Martech Today
Influencer marketing and ad tech collide: ‘It’s hard to make people programmatic’ Thanks to technology’s growing role in influencer marketing, managing an influencer campaign may never have required more of a human touch.
Creative Bloq: Grids.
Dave Snyder of Firstborn explains how to redraw your layouts to accommodate different viewports while maintaining a strong design aesthetic. Everything is in flux: content, viewports, the screen – all changing, all the time. Now what.
Dear Jr Creative…Earn Your Place. You’ll Be Better For It.
May, 2013
You Should Have Gone to Business School.
I was asked to upload the speech I gave at the 2016 Awwwards Conference in NYC. Here she is. The first half of this speech is about me and my journey. Feel free to skip…I won’t mind. Really.
Noteworthy, The Journal Blog: “Don't let the quants win.”
May, 2018
There is too much focus on the quantifiable past as a precursor to the future. It's boring. It leads to the status quo in design, marketing and in life.
It all but ignores the cognitive and behavioral abnormalities (those amazing quirks that can't be neatly quantified) that create something we actually care to remember.
All of the quantifiable, biological data in the world wouldn't point to my "healthy" 39-year-old wife having a heart attack on a mild spring afternoon this past Monday.
It's the edge cases we remember. The sideshow. The part of a vacation that went off-script. You remember getting stuck in the mud. Not the 500 mile stretch of smooth road that lead you to that moment.
The quants want everything to be commoditized: measurable, safe, repeatable—cheap. Fine for an assembly line. Not for creativity. Nobody falls in love with a commodity. And this perpetual race to the bottom is a losing proposition for us all.
I'm not saying ignore data. I'm not that basic. But beware of its role as a procedural crutch. A stall. A bureaucrat's tool for scripting fiction. Data as savior is the red herring that will destroy the Creative as a thing. The quants never liked us in the first place.
Leave us to our folly. And we'll leave you to yours. I'm pretty sure I know who we'll all remember.
Now please, go break something.