We’re asking some of our industry’s leading figures to nominate their digital hero and to explain what’s so special about them.
Chris Kemp is founder and CEO of Ingenuity. Launched in 2005, the new business consultancy builds relationships between agencies, brands and tech businesses through seven new business services: lead generation, agency recommendations, content, PR, brand partnerships, new business events and insight.
Who is your digital hero?
Spotify’s Daniel Ek is a bit of a hero of mine, but he’s too obvious an answer! The team at Barclays that pioneered the Digital Eagles scheme are definitely my digital heroes.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
As the program began to grow, Barclays’ Digital Eagles connected with local communities and taught kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to code.
It was ahead of its time, a great example of proper digital for good. I really admire stuff like that.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
These days those sorts of programmes are common, the amazing power of digital skills of all kinds has long since been recognised, and there are increasing moves towards using all these amazing capabilities for social good as well as corporate gain.
Moving forward on both fronts will be key to successful for all of us in the future.
What the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Obviously, platforms will continue to evolve, becoming communities for people to meet and share ideas. The key challenge is to move this on to the next stage — enabling digital to realise its potential to solve serious, real-world problems.
That’s not about another platform, it’s about things like health, welfare, and social mobility can be transformed in a positive way by the power of digital. There are so many people working on these things, but the transformations that have taken place so far haven’t been universally positive.
It’ll take a real hero to make those happen.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
After 15 years of working with digital agencies I was fortunate enough to be able to launch Connect a few months ago – by far our biggest ever digital event.
We hosted 300 digital professionals from agency land and brands too. Creating an environment that brought together multi-nationals with tiny start-ups and everyone in between, in one networking environment felt great.
