Wesley Ter Haar
For Wesley Ter Haar, Founder of MediaMonks, nowadays creativity, technology and media are all part of the way to achieve success in communications, so today’s generation of creatives must learn to work with these tools in a more integrated way. “Today’s creatives must learn more about the new technologies in order to maximize their potential. More than becoming an expert in coding or some other technology, they must simply make the effort to understand them well” Ter Haar said. For Ter Haar, technology is a tool for creating empathy and treating people as people, not as targets. “Technology is an important element on the empathy scale. You must use it to establish a more personalized engagement, with more context data and greater understanding of what people want. Our industry seems to believe that using technology puts a distance between people, but the truth is it allows us to get very close to what people want and need. Technology in this industry offers great opportunities to get closer,” he said. He also spoke of cultural relevance. For Ter Haar, if you find something that is culturally relevant for your target, it will spread itself around on its own. “I think that as an industry we don’t need to create culture, but rather need to be culturally relevant because it is one of the most important elements of success today.”
