Staying Adaptable in a Hyper-Connected World with Barney McCann

Barney McCann is a creative leader with a passion for blending art, technology, and culture. As the head of creative at Born Social, he leads a dynamic team in social-first campaigns that resonate with audiences and drive brand success for Smirnoff, Guinness, and Primark.

With a background in graphic design and moving image from Central Saint Martins, Barney's work spans various creative disciplines, including AI-generated art, photography, and visual storytelling.

Barney's work and commentary have been featured in prominent publications such as ICON Magazine, It's Nice That, and Campaign. He's also given talks at the Creative Circle, where he's highlighted the evolving digital landscape and what it now takes to be a creative in the social age.

Driven by a commitment to innovation, creative excellence, and purpose, Barney continues to push boundaries and inspire others in the creative industry with his involvement in Born Social's grassroots talent initiative, Born Ready.

Barney sat down with LBB to reflect on the lessons learnt whilst the world’s first AI Typeface, Obsolete and Filter, a live streaming audio platform to help people focus as well as making Guinness cool.

It’s a scorching day, you’re sitting at a wooden table on a beach looking out at the South China Sea, and your Vietnamese coffee has just arrived.

The only thing stopping this from being paradise is the pale, confused 26-year-old, hunched over a laptop he got for free at university seven years earlier, slowly overheating (both of them). That was the experience of hundreds of tourists to Hoi An for an entire year while I was first working on Obsolete, the world's first AI Typeface in 2017.

I can’t express enough how little I knew what I was doing.

Learning what AI is at the same time as making an AI project isn't something I would recommend. Eventually, the laptop died – I wasn't far behind it.

When Obsolete finally launched later that year, I couldn't have expected the incredible response it got. I committed to responding to every student who wanted to talk about it, every magazine that wanted to do a write-up and anyone who showed any interest in working with it.

It took ages.

I had gone from feeling like I was bluffing and working on a complicated-but-interesting project to feeling like I was bluffing and launching a complicated-but-interesting project. We used it for YACHT’s Chain Tripping album (one Grammy nomination and an Amazon Prime doc later), it was used for live visuals and experimental projects all over the world, it was discussed at the Google I/O conference, and I was still working out what it actually was for most of that time.

Fast forward nearly a decade, and we launched Filter– a live streaming audio platform to help people focus. I had no idea how to make it, or if it was even makeable, but I had an idea of what it could be and the gap between Christmas and New Year to work it out.

It’s been live now for about six months, and although it has hundreds of daily users globally, I get a lot of appreciative messages about it. I know it's good… but I’m still not totally sure what it is.

The ten years between those two examples are filled with many weird, hard-to-explain and sometimes interesting projects - ones that went somewhere and some that just didn't.

From a hoover that paints to a 3D printed bottle opener, via augmented reality paintings and VR music videos. In my own time, these projects serve as less of a revenue stream and more of a difficult-to-justify hobby that takes a lot of time to explain at weddings.

But the mentality that these things take is the same mentality that I use in my day job; starting with what we’d like to achieve and working back from there, worrying less about the challenges, adapting to the responses – working it out as we go.

Admittedly, I have guardrails during the working day (thankfully), people to explain my thinking to who have a financial incentive to question me, and make sure they make sense. But ultimately the best ideas come from a ‘I wonder if we could…’ or ‘what would it be like if...’; a north star for us to work towards.

For better or worse, most people's experiences of work, whether it's campaigns, projects or brands, will be online. This iterative, testing and responding process is baked into the internet: a connected tissue of hyperlinked communities and individuals, constantly in motion. A single change in nuance, additional context or a comment on TikTok can totally change the way a project is received.

Understanding how internet culture works and how things spread across social media is understanding how ideas move in the modern world.

When I joined Born Social, our ambition was to make Guinness cool, and honestly, it seemed like a reach. The important thing was that our ambition was set, we knew what we wanted to achieve, and now we just had to work out how.

Luckily, being a social-first creative agency, we have the insights and opinions of our audiences immediately to hand. We are able to respond to our communities, both directly (e.g. in the comments of a post) or less-directly, by baking and responding to consumer insights in real-time; keeping Guinness genuinely culturally relevant (e.g. taking tilt-testing from a tradition on the West Coast of Ireland to billboards globally).

We focused on celebrating and reflecting our uniquely creative audience, and that audience increased, continuing the cycle. We went from commissioning hand-knit Guinness 0.0 vests (worn by Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip!) to product launches with JW Anderson. From events with rising local artists to The Streets and Disclosure in small pubs in Dublin.

With Ford, we used the same principles – collaborating with a network of creators and platforms across the internet to tease the launch of the Ford Capri with Eric Cantona, dropping hints and breadcrumbs of the launch before the full advert was released.

This considered, responsive and iterative process meant that by the time the advert itself was live, we had stoked the flames of our audience enough to reach one billion people, making it Ford’s most-seen EV reveal of all time.

A flexible mentality while keeping an eye on the ambition and end result is essential. Social media is built on surprise and the tension of what will come next in a user's feed.

Increasingly, we are seeing the chaotic dissonance of people's Instagram experiences- scrolling between OOTDs, news of war crimes and then back to an engagement update from someone you went to school with.

This swirling mass of information overload contextualises the things before and after it. Social platforms are where people spend their time and where communities are formed, and they are constantly growing, morphing, changing and adapting. We have to do that too.

The biggest lesson of my career has been: be adaptable. Be responsive, flexible and don't take your eye off your fixed ambition. On client projects, we can make the best work for that moment – and then we can adapt and respond to how our audience reacts to it.

In a hyper-connected world where everything feels like it’s constantly changing, don't push against it, but instead use the momentum to steer you in a direction you want to be heading. Embrace the pace, broaden your inputs and consider everyone’s perspectives; you won't be able to predict the way the world responds, but you can have an idea of how they might feel.

When I was invited to OpenAI in San Francisco a few weeks before the launch of ChatGPT, my mind was blown. I immediately realised how far behind Obsolete now was (and always had been). And that's ok, because it wasn’t about creating cutting-edge technology, it was about creating something new from a ‘what if’ and adapting along the way – the same approach I take to every project to this day.