Point of View: Executive Creative Director, Daniel Liss

Fake Love creates multi-sensory, holistic branded experiences for their clients, driven by emergent new media, data and design. They strategize, imagine and craft ambitious projects from front to back that are highly innovative and often scalable, for real life or virtual environments. Most recently, they partnered with parent company, The New York Times and BMW to produce an immersive augmented reality (AR) experience on the David Bowie’s Visual Legacy project (BMW is an official sponsor of ‘David Bowie is’—the first AR experience from an advertiser to live inside the NYT app for Android.)

 

Daniel Liss joined Fake Love in 2017 as Senior Creative Director and was promoted to Executive Creative Director this year. Daniel works on a variety of projects throughout the company including Nokia Bell Labs and Equinox.

Prior to joining Fake Love, Daniel was VP Creative Director at Arnold Worldwide, bringing innovative technology-based storytelling solutions across the agency’s client roster. In 2013, Daniel founded S+7, an interactive and emerging technologies practice focusing on physical, web, mobile and filmmaking platforms. With Daniel at the helm, S+7 created content for clients such as Jacob Burns Film Center, the Tenement Museum, and Aperture Foundation. Before that, he was the Creative Director at New York-based media design firm, Local Projects, leading creative for BMW Guggenheim Lab, New York Botanical Garden. He was also Senior Interaction Designer for Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment and Creative Director at Yoxi, a social-innovation initiative.

As Director of Photography, he shot film and video around the world for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, MTV, and PBS, several small features, and did hundreds of interviews for Steven Spielberg¹s Survivors for the Shoah Foundation.


Describe your job to us:

I’m the Executive Creative Director at Fake Love. I help give us a creative voice, keep teams inspired and cohesive, and keep eyes on everything that comes through the door.

Tell us about working in a creative position, what are the perks/challenges?

The perks are myriad. There are certainly days that feel like you’re getting paid to play with thought, with experience, with puzzles. Challenges are the ones you’d expect on the flip side of that: you don’t have the more binary-type day-to-day of jobs that are more clinical—you need to be on your toes and ready to throw ideas at all times.

I think the bigger challenges, though, have to do with staying open to new ideas in a way that feels true to each client. Like in the rest of your life, you’re immersed in an enormous swirl of activity, and when you’re on top of your game, you can pluck out a really clear and precise response to a stated need. That can describe just about anything you do, but I feel like that’s the real game here: wade through the churn and find the core. Then, speaking more specifically, find just the right amount of technology to tell that core story. Sometimes that amount is something as simple as a postcard. Sometimes it’s an entire city block of holograms.

What did you do before and what led you to be on the creative side?

I come from filmmaking. Years as a lighting cameraman/director of photography. And before that, music. I don’t know a time when I wasn’t on the creative side. So, it feels like it chose *me*—and super early on. I also, and it goes beyond your question maybe, feel like this background in music plus visuals helped form all kinds of references, contexts, and inspirations for my current work.

How does the culture in your office impact the work you put out?

I went to a graduate program that was a sort of collaborative mosh pit of ideas and execution. Fake Love is the closest commercial approximation I know to that. It’s full of smart, curious people. And that curiosity coupled with the spirit of collaboration across disciplines is at the heart of what we do. Having a staff like this lets you percolate from many perspectives, and lets you build a sort of super collider of ideas and innovations. Smash your people together with alacrity.

If I’m entering the industry and I want to move into the creative side, what steps should I take?

This will sound insanely pollyanna, I’m sure, but chase down what you love. When we had our first child, I took some time off and made the kind of work that I wanted to see out in the world. That work got a bit of attention, and in very direct ways, that period—and the work that came out of it—led to everything I’ve done since. Pay attention to what you love.

Do you have a dream account or brand you’d like to work on but haven’t yet? Which one?

Please have the Svalbard Global Seed Vault call me as soon as they’ve got a minute.

Is there a piece of work you’re most proud of? What is it?

We’ve been in a very close relationship with Nokia Bell Labs. Over the years, Bell Labs have been involved in inventing much of the technology at play in our lives. To be tasked with finding the ways to parse and tell some of those stories through immersive experiences has been an honor and an endlessly inspiring creative challenge.