Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.
Thas Naseemuddeen is CEO of Omelet, an indie creative agency based in Los Angeles. She’s also held roles at BBH and Deutsch.
Favorite project you’ve worked on? I will always be so proud of the work we get to make with Google and YouTube. Google is a pivotal brand for me—it’s been a huge part of my career over the course of the past 12 years on and off and has been a big part of the last six years with Omelet. There are countless pieces of work that I love, but one of my favorites is a really fun YouTube Premium campaign where we got to highlight the thing we all hate—interruptions when you’re watching your favorite content—in a really tongue-in-cheek way. I still snort-laugh at the whales.
The other work that I love is work that isn’t an ad at all. A few years back, there was this little emerging tech…AI (ha!) that we got really curious about playing with at Omelet. We began building a tool that was meant to help strategists be better strategists called Smartstarts.AI. We built an early, private large language model (LLM) and learned about the ins and outs of developing AI from the inside out, which was an incredible experience. Did we make a billion dollars? Sadly no. But we learned so much about a technology that is now in the middle of most every conversation.
What’s your favorite ad campaign? John Lewis’s epic holiday campaigns. Year after year they’re amazing, but my absolute favorite was “Golden Slumber” from a few years ago. A classic formula of having an incredible track and an epic storyline that somehow weaves imagination, childhood, and gifting of the holiday season. There isn’t enough whimsy in work these days, and I adore seeing that come to life.
Get marketing news you’ll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
Something you don’t talk about on Linkedin? I really love the Muppets. This fact often finds its way into my writing. I love the art of puppetry (I am on the board of directors for The Bob Baker Marionette Theater), but even more so, I love the symbolism of creativity and the fun we can have as creative people when we let ourselves imagine. It’s truly a dream come true to be able to work really closely with deeply passionate people.
What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Creativity will always win. I hate that it’s a trend nowadays. We’ve spent so long talking about everything but the reason why we’re all here: creativity. The industry loves dramatics and a good media holdco story, but at least for me, I’m here for the magic of what we can do. When we have a really special solution for a client that lights up their audiences, when we can bring just a little bit of joy—that’s it. That’s why we’re here.
The trend I’ll be happy to say goodbye to is the negativity our industry can hold that leads to animosity. We seem to want to follow the news cycles versus trying to carve out a space for creativity to be queen (or king).
What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I won’t lie, I’m not a huge marketing podcast listener, but I really enjoy Rei Inamoto’s podcast The Creative Mindset. Great guests, great questions, excellent provocations.
Read the full article here
