Advent calendar: Rob Ford

We don’t have to travel today, as we stay in the UK to meet with Rob Ford the “brain” and the owner of the site we all love, The FWA. Here are his 5 answers…
1) Which is the digital project that impressed you more this year and why?
I really didn’t have to think too hard about this… Get the Glass! by North Kingdom and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is the most outstanding digital project I have seen in a long time. It actually made the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I first saw it. The production levels impressed me the most, not forgetting the super-creative ideas behind the whole project. This is a definite contender for Site Of The Year.
2) In your job, which is the most important thing you learnt this year?
Print and TV are dead. When you read that one of the world’s leading creative magazines has a monthly readership of only 13,000 you know there is no contest between print and web. Sites like Digg probably get that many people in twenty minutes. I’ve been really and surprisingly impressed with Facebook. Was never a fan of MySpace, took up LinkedIn but found it rather pointless but Facebook has actually been useful and is one of the reasons I am actually writing this.

3) As a digital creative what’s on top of your agenda for 2008?
My focus for 2008 is the next version of the FWA website. We currently have an audience of well over 300,000 unique regular users that have no facility to interact with eachother. So, the new site will certainly be exploiting social networking. The problem is that FWA has grown into a monster in size so it will be no easy task designing and developing the new website. Having said that we have one of the world’s leading interactive agencies on board so the end result should be very exciting indeed. Stay tuned!
I also have a book coming out early 2008 called “Guidelines to Success Online, TASCHEN”, which has input from some of the world’s top Creative Directors, CEOs, Ads etc.

4) What, in your opinion, will be a killer application / key trend in interactive marketing in 2008?
I think we will see a lot more Interactive movies/video, like: Let the game continue.
Technically, a lot more application stuff like: Picnik
Plus, a lot more 3D thanks to Papervision3D, like: Canon EOS Europe.
Finally, we will see more High Definition video in websites, like: Assassin’s Creed.
5) Which book would you give as a Christmas present to Adverblog’s readers?
This is a tricky one for me as I am not a bookworm. Buy a book on local walks and then take one or have a nice long shower. Clearing your mind is the best tonic and source of inspiration for anyone. If you’re like me, you probably have a pile of new books waiting to be read! Hang on, let me quickly check out Amazon… maybe if you are reading this you should consider this book