How many times have you heard that agencies can no longer attract the best talent? If you’re like me, you’ve heard it one too many times, which makes this story a smile-inducing moment.
According to Lindsay Rittenhouse at Ad Age, The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne is joining Deeplocal as an experience designer.
No, the band is not breaking up. The band is intrigued by what it can do with machines, specifically what kind of music it can make.
Fruit Genie Is the New Piano
How did Wayne Coyne and Deeplocal get together?
“Anyone who is involved in robots, I am automatically interested in them,” Coyne told Ad Age. Deeplocal, which was founded at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is interested in robots.
The Flaming Lips recently collaborated with Deeplocal and Google’s AI team, Magenta, to create “Fruit Genie,” which the band incorporated into its headline concert at Google I/O in May.
Deeplocal CEO Nathan Martin, said, “One thing that we originally thought was, ‘hey, we’re going to build stuff for the live show.’ And then we were way more in sync with Wayne as a marketer. He understands what we understand about marketing [about] simple stories, [catering to] short attention spans, make something that people can remember, be different.”
I can’t say for sure what Coyne’s role will be at Deeplocal, but I see him as an active participant. This is not the guy you turn to for a symbolic gesture. Coyne is an inventor who lives at the edge of musical exploration. Deeplocal is fortunate that his interests happen to intersect with their needs.
