Predictions for 2015 from Dumbo’s creative agencies

For the holidays, dd:Social asked creative agencies to get creative: Digital Dumbo’s Andrew Zarick got all his partners on the event to present two minutes on their successes in 2014 and end with one prediction for 2015.

True to form for this crowd, hardly any of them followed the rules (as in, most gave more than one prediction, one gave none and it didn’t seem like anybody kept it under two minutes).

Here are some of the cool bits of news we got about the companies’ work this last year:

• Carrot Creative built the Vice News iOS App. Carrot was acquired by Vice late last year.
• Carrot also worked with The Nature Conservancy to #SaveTheElephants.
• “When we looked at the landscape of higher education websites, we were really disappointed about what was going on,” David Landa of Free Association said, prefacing his company’s work on Cornell University’s website, where they basically re-did the whole thing from soup to nuts.
• Free Association came out with its own new app, too, Pingsy. The iOS app aims to make what is much too hard (making a simple plan to meet up with a friend) much easier.
• Tim Nolan of Huge showed Simpson’s World, which the company helped Fox put together. He said they tried to come up with every possible user experience someone might want, such as watching only the shows with certain characters.
• Hush talked about the space it created to help people conceptualize the New York Times re-brand and its emphasis on video.
• Prolific Interactive created an app for Alex and Ani that lets you see their bangles on your own wrist, as a sort or augmented reality experience (but it does not appear that this app is out yet).
• Red Antler spoke to its role in what may have been the least popular reinvention of a popular app of 2014. It worked with Foursquare. The team apparently helped with Swarm, which CEO JB Osborne described as “the fun, little brother, check-in app.”
• Red Antler also got the most votes via Bloomberg Businessweek for its effort through to rebrand net neutrality (we’ve been covering it a lot here). They argued for “Access Equality.”

Now, onto the predictions for 2015:

• Carrot predicted that Disney would buy Nintendo so it could add Princess Peach to the Disney princesses, that Vince McMahon would run for the White House in order to bring back the XFL and that some of the people in the room might come to work for them (fair bet that the last one is their only really serious one).
• Free Association predicted that design would be further automated (which is relevant to the previous dd:Social we attended) and that the purpose of wearables would become clear.
• Huge predicted that “The Internet of Things” would become the “Internet of Everything,” as the web reaches everywhere.
• Prolific predicted that Research in Motion would come storming back with a Blackberry that stomps the iPhone.
• Red Antler simply suggested that creatives and entrepreneurs should trust their quirks. “The future looks different,” Osborne said, so don’t take your great idea for a company and wrap it in an experience that simply apes Apple or Google or Samsung. “Take some risks; make it work.”