Creative Director & Co-Founder — Sport, Technology, Culture
I create things that people want to take part in. Interactive livestream performances, digital memorabilia, remote fan experiences – culture the mainstream hasn’t fully caught up to yet. Twenty years doing it as a creative director, and more recently as a co-founder building the product myself.
One of the world's most recognised gamers. Their favourite game. Backed by a 50-piece orchestra providing the live score.
Every match at the ATP Finals had its own digital object, with fans collecting matches across the full eight days.
Naming and building the identity for a category that didn't exist yet.
Naming and building a studio identity built to earn trust in a category nobody trusted yet.
A platform for the fans watching from home. Built from scratch. Taken to market.
Every race generates thousands of data points. We turned them into collectibles that capture the moments that mattered.
Toronto, Cincinnati, Shanghai, Turin. The first fan loyalty platform to run across the ATP Masters 1000 season.
15-metre football fan sculptures built from 2,600 recycled crates. 25 million photos. 6 years running.
A match-by-match collectible experience across the Champions League, designed from live ball data.
How a brand built on luxury, scarcity and exclusivity enters web3 without cheapening a single thing.
Figured out which web3 mechanics actually work, then built the system brands could buy into.
The world's first living couture dress. Worn on the BAFTA red carpet. Brought to life by EE's 5G network.
Geo-locked digital vouchers, cracked via audio search through spy-themed shop windows. 85k film views. 50+ press hits.
Shop the red carpet live, from anywhere in Britain. 3.8 million Story views. £300k equivalent media value.
Turning a £5 charm into the most desirable thing Crocs ever made.
A mobile game that brought colleagues together through murder.
A gallery the size of a fish tank where artists can bring their vision to life - without the cost and fuss of putting on a real show.
An experiment in engineering virality from scratch. 2 million views. The experiment worked.
Reaching consensus to enter the Opepen permanent collection, using a style I'm known for. 910 opt-ins. Consensus reached!
Reaching consensus working entirely outside my visual identity. AI embraced. 743 opt-ins. Consensus reached, again!
54 artworks given free to Set 054 holders, two years later. A gift, and a question about what extraction really means.
Twenty years finding the mechanic that turns an audience into participants, then building the conditions for it to happen. I’ve done it as an agency creative director and as a co-founder building a product from nothing.
Sport, web3, gaming, culture, art, I move between them because the instinct is the same everywhere: find what people already care about, then give them a real role in it. I don’t need the technology explained to me before I can sell it, and I don’t let it get in the way of the idea.
Outside client work I run my own independent art practice, self-initiated projects with no brief and no client, just an idea and an audience deciding whether it’s worth their attention. Some have gone properly viral, some have sold out in days, all of it sharpens the same instinct I bring to client work. You can follow the process itself at studyfrogs.com.
How I work
I’ve led fully remote teams for three years, and I care about how the work gets made as much as what comes out the other end. I say what I actually think about an idea, and I take ownership of a problem as soon as I see it.
I thrive in ambiguity. Give me an open brief with no roadmap and I’ll set the direction, commit to it, and keep iterating as we move forward. I’m good at looking at a messy problem and figuring out a starting point and potential directions fast.
My hunger to bring dope ideas into the world is relentless, and often infectious. If you’re building something in a space still finding its shape, I’m a good person to have in the room.
What can I say? I owe a lot to this man. I've had the privilege of working with and learning from Warren for over seven years. Warren is inspirationally creative, constantly curious, patiently pragmatic and a gentleman. He introduced POKE to so many things we wouldn't have enjoyed had he stayed in South Africa and embraced what a new world of Publicis·Poke could offer and I'll be always thankful for that.
Warren was one of Poke's most treasured creatives. He's a brilliant strategic creative thinker who loves solving complicated tech and innovation led problems. His understanding of our connected world, digital culture and technology trends is superb as is his ability to get into consumers heads and hearts. A very fresh, intelligent creative thinker who also happens to be a joy to work with.
Warren is a fantastically rounded, highly strategic creative director. He is able to think very freely around creative and strategic problems without bias and indulgence. Warren is broadly skilled enough to shape concepts that span product, communication and media, so are always well structured for optimum engagement and distribution in digital and social media. His personal interest in augmented reality gaming has also added depth and powerful sensibilities for judging experience design in systems. Warren was instrumental in initiating a huge sponsorship deal between Niantic and EE which emerged directly from this interest. I would highly recommend Warren to clients as a free thinking strategic creative who can effectively shape complex communication problems into something unique and compelling. Oh and he's also incredibly easy to work with, mixing his high ambitions to create powerful, meaningful work with humility and an openness for critique.
Warren is special. He's ambidextrously minded; a highly creative, modern conceptual thinker, but with ability to rationalise his ideas with watertight, logical strategy. Meaning he doesnt just create nice, original ideas. But ideas that deliver results. Better still, he's really great fun to work with.