It's not enough for Johnnie Ingram to leave his footprint on the ad business.
The new creative director at Team One in Los Angeles had himself rendered in 3-D so his friends and former colleagues "can have a little piece of Johnnie wherever they may go," according to the agency's tongue-in-cheek announcement of his arrival on the West Coast.
A tech lover who has worked at Saatchi & Saatchi, Juniper Park, Leo Burnett and Taxi on brands like Mini Cooper, Burger King, Kraft and Cheerios, Ingram tapped into Team One's nascent VR lab—an in-house geek-dream repository of Oculus Rift headsets, supercomputers and development software—for this project.
One of the lab's creative technologists spent about an hour tinkering with a Kinect to produce "3D Johnnie," which can be printed "so he'll always be by your side." This, the agency adds, is "not creepy at all." You also have rendering options for the image, and the ability to enjoy it in full VR mode, if you fancy the idea of joshing around with the disembodied upper-half of a creative director.
Ingram, who will work on Lexus and other Team One clients, joins an ongoing cross-country relocation boom, which has seen a flood of senior-level creative executives leave New York for Los Angeles. But in Ingram's case, he—or at least his upper-body avatar—could end up being bicoastal.
Definitely not weird.
Check out Ingram in good old-fashioned 2-D below. 