Spotlight: Creative Technologist: Rui Ferreira

Tell us about yourself

I started as a Copywriter but soon enough I realized that none of my taglines were making people laugh or emotional. I shifted into Marketing, then Experience Design and, after a couple of years spent in academic research, I came back to Advertising, this time for a role in Strategy.

I've always enjoyed experimenting and playing around with new gear and software so, the discovery stage is definitely what gets me going. Music was the entry point though. One musician that I like, Daedelus, wrote: “There are no formulas or technique secrets, just atypical paths to compare”; I think I did all my work by that principle.

I never decided to become a Creative Technologist. I just spent many years trying to use tech in creative ways as an extra mile to my strategy work, and when the opportunity came, the extra mile became the job itself. And I’m very glad; I cannot picture myself playing any different role in the industry today.

How do you define the role of a creative technologist?

The title ends up meaning many different things depending on the company/industry.

My first reference to a creative technologist came from film and production, as someone who uses existing tech to build special effects and new production techniques, which naturally includes a very broad set of tasks and requires many different skills.

That’s not that different from what we do today in Advertising. All in all, I think a Technologist brings an angle, like every other creative type. Their craft is picking the most promising tech and applying it in creative problem-solving.

Can you describe one of your recent projects in detail?

There’s one recent project we did in partnership with Vimeo. In short, we pilot a semi-autonomous email machine that writes personalized on-brand copy and wraps it into adaptive email templates, generated using the brand's design system components. Superside presented this case at Figma*Config this year; watch Phillip Maggs talking about it on stage.

What I think is particularly interesting about this project is that, innovation emerged from looking backwards and reflect on how we build brands; and start wondering what will be the necessary requirements for a brand, in a future where LLMs and agents will be at the core of any user interaction.

What we came up with was a fundamentally different way of representing brand and design data, in a manner that language or diffusion models can easily access and retrieve from.

Knowledge graphs are sort of an ancient concept in the tech world, but they regained significance in the advent of AI because of their unique ability to store unstructured data (like brand voice, personality and other conceptual elements) together with value-based data (such as layout rules, for example). The combination of the two, brings more nuance and character to generative outputs. I believe that this will remain true for while, at least.

In the end of the day, it all comes down to how well curated the dataset is. Once we have that optimized structure, we start building the agent ecosystem around it and on that front I think a whole range of possibilities remain to be discovered.

What are the essential skills and tools that every creative technologist should have?

The skill set of a technologist is as messy as the role itself. But the one skill that I think everybody agrees on is the ability to consume vast amounts of information, distil it, and learn quickly how to use it in a very specific context or purpose.

The core skills that a technologist brings to the table, actually depend on their background. For instance, my strategy and academic work made me a bit of a compulsive researcher, and that's something that helps me a lot in my current job.

The project mentioned in the previous question is an example of classic CT’s approach: pick two existing technologies and combine them in a novel way, to achieve something really specific.

I wouldn’t be able to contribute to this project in the same way, if it wasn’t for my strategy and copywriting experience, combined with (a little of) generative AI understanding.

How do you see the future of creative technology evolving?

It’s really tricky to guess. My perception of the future has been kind of changing every 6 months. But there’s one particular area im interested in; the concept of the “LLM OS”.

The premise is having an LLM acting as your operating system, to which you can make a request and it actually goes out, build all the necessary requirements and perform the actions needed to deliver on the end goal.

Picture a scenario where people do not need to use apps or off-the-shelf digital products, they can instead create a piece of software on the fly, tailored to their unique need. Experience will truly become 1:1. It's overwhelming to think about the creative possibilities such technology will bring along. I'm very much looking forward to that.