CREATIVE DIRECTOR | ARTIST | MAKER
I’ve built and designed brands from the ground up. Created sculptures made from recycled crates, photographed over 25 million times. Made collectibles from live sports data that fans wanted to own. A Destiny 2 livestream with an orchestra providing the score. A mobile game that brought colleagues together through murder. The brief changes. The question doesn’t: will people actually want to be part of this?
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.
15-metre football fan sculptures built from 2,600 recycled crates. 25 million photos. 6 years running.
Every match at the ATP Finals had its own digital object, with fans collecting matches across the full eight days.
One of the world's most recognised gamers. Their favourite game. Backed by an 80-piece orchestra providing the live score.
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.
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.
I grew up in Cape Town. While studying advertising, I started making street art and got obsessed with putting work in public spaces. I loved the challenge of trying to grab people’s attention.
I ran a clothing label and a gallery. I used guerrilla campaigns to market both. I spent some time at Animal Farm. A weird agency that invented ideas first and found clients to buy them second. The Coca-Cola crate sculptures came from there. Coke didn’t ask for it. We just turned up.
I moved to London. Over ten years I worked in digital agencies, making things for EE, Heineken, Intel Gaming, Virgin, Google. Around the same time, I was having art exhibitions in Amsterdam and making paintings and installations for an architecture firm. In 2021, I discovered the blockchain. I immersed myself in digital culture. I took that into Science Magic Studios, then co-founded Trace, a sports fan platform we built from scratch and took to market.
TL;DR
I try to make things that people would be annoyed to have missed.
People I've worked with tend to say the same thing: strategic, but never at the cost of the idea.
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.