THE POWER OF REAL-TIME CREATIVITY

Welcome to Urgent Genius, a collection of found and created content from around the globe. If it's trending we're on to it. At iris we've been tracking the trend of real-time creativity and Newsjacking since 2010. We call it Urgent Genius.

Every day our Editors trawl the planet for the best examples out there. And we're constantly creating new work of our own. The content that we have discovered or have conceived on this site demonstrate the principles of an Urgent Genius mindset. Urgent – Do it swiftly. Genius – create powerful social ideas. If you've created or stumbled across any Urgent Genius work then send it to us at urgentgenius@gmail.com

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The Editors

Grant Hunter
Grant is the Regional Creative Director,
APAC for iris Worldwide. He co-created Urgent Genius in 2010 with Jon Burkhart and spoke at SXSW interactive 2011 and 2012 on the subject. He set up urgentgenius.com and co-authored the Urgent Genius Book with Jon. Grant is responsible for iris’ creative output across India, China, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. He blogs for Campaign Asia and contributes to industry titles such as Contagious, Marketing and Campaign Brief. He has work published in the books Guerrilla Advertising and Advertising is Dead, Long Live Advertising.

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Jon Burkhart
Jon is a Social Media Creative Consultan
t and Innovation Director. He coined the term "Urgent Genius" and co-created the social media HQ of the same name in 2010 with Grant Hunter. The pair also spoke at SXSW interactive 2011 and 2012 on the subject. He is now co-authoring the Urgent Genius book with Grant. He helps global clients like Sony Ericsson, Philips and adidas create shareable content and find ways to have a voice in the hot-topic conversations going on right now online. His work has featured on and offline in places like The Guardian, The Telegraph, Campaign and Rolling Stone. He also works with BBC Comedy as a social TV consultant. He tweets at @albinoriotman usually while commuting to work on his Kickped, the world’s fastest adults-only push-scooter.

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Sean Reynolds
Sean Reynolds is the Global Creative Dir
ector of iris. As one of the founding partners from 1999, Sean has been responsible for the iris creative vision, it’s creative model and build of all the iris creative departments across the globe. Sean has been based in New York since 2007, where he has built another three creative offices in the region. In his role as Global CD he has also developed the creative product in other regions such as India, China, Singapore, Australia and Latin America. Sean studied at Central St. Martins, graduating in 1995 and has won a wide range of global awards across all disciplines. Sean’s opinion is regularly sought and he has talked at numerous events and seminars within the industry and he also sits on a number of adjudication panels for creative awards.

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Esty Gorman
Esty is Head of Planning at iris Worldwi
de NY, working on clients such as NOS, Coty, and a host of brands under Reckitt Benkiser. Prior to joining iris, Esty was VP, Associate Planning Director at BBDO for leading global clients, including Mars, P&G and Johnson & Johnson. Through her insightful understanding of audience attitudes and behaviors, Esty led the integrated strategic development for numerous iconic brands including M&M's, Milky Way, Venus, J&J Baby, Campbell's Soup, and Autism Speaks. When she's not at work you can find her mentoring aspiring planners as well as capturing moments with her camera all over NYC. You can chat more with her and see what peaks her interests @Esty501on Twitter.

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Olympics Top 2

Our favourite two bits of Urgent Genius during the Olympics were entirely different in tone and spirit. One celebrates THE hero of the Olympics Mo Farah (I’m based in London so I am very biased) and the other is a branded example that capitalises on an embarrassing mistake from the Olympics organisers.

As a huge Team GB fan (let’s forget that I’m American for a moment) I’m going to start positive, Mo Farah’s double gold-winning performance was perfectly captured in the Mo Farah Running Away From ThingsTumblr blog.

Our second favorite was from Specsavers. They took out advertisements in national newspapers capitalising on the PR disaster created when the South Korean flag was mistakenly displayed while North Korea’s women’s soccer team walked out on to the pitch in Glasgow the night before. Of course, this was a perfect example of their existing campaign which highlights vision mistakes with the endline “Should have gone to SpecSavers.”

Both of these examples were very timely, launching when the online buzz was still huge for both incidents. The SpecSavers one was an easy win as it fit perfectly in their campaign. The Tumblr meme for Mo was quick off the mark and offers endless creative solutions so we hope that Mo fever will grow and grow as a result.  What’s your favourite Olympics-related bit of Urgent Genius?

SpecSaver Source: The Atlantic Times

Mo Farah Source: The Wall Blog

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YOUR RATING
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Genius
Rating: 6.5/10 (1 vote cast)
6.5
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Genius6.0
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User's Score
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Urgent0.0
Genius0.0

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