Conor Brady

Conor Brady, a renowned creative leader, is a passionate believer in the power of great storytelling, experience design and design craft across all media. For Conor, these are core approaches to solving our clients’ business problems.

In his role as Chief Creative Officer at Critical Mass, he oversees all the agency’s work and drives creative excellence on a global scale. Conor has nearly a decade of experience as a Chief Creative Officer at digital agencies Huge and Organic. Throughout his career, he has worked with many of the world’s largest and most admired brands, a few of which include Nike, Pepsi, Audi, Hilton, Citi and Samsung. His work has won awards across the globe from Cannes to London to Asia. He is also a regular member of some of the industry’s most respected award juries, having served as a judge on the Design Jury at Cannes (twice), The Andy's, the D&AD awards and the Webby's.

Born in Belfast, he began his career by helping create the first 100 book covers for Vintage Paperbacks at Random House in London and then moved into the music industry as a creative director at Universal Music/Polygram, designing record covers.

"I started with Razorfish back in London and back then we were a very young industry, very immature in a lot of ways, just trying to figure out what we were doing. There was always a lot of suggesting things to clients that weren't all that realistic. For example, back in 1999 there was talk of interactive TV and it's just barely arriving now, so I think back then the primary screen was the desktop. Now, I look at where the type of work we do lives on something like 16 different touchpoints ? desktop, mobile devices, kiosks ? it's just an endless list of ways to get in front of a customer. That said, I think some of the best work comes from the game space. We've done some work with PlayStation and, while much of the focus is on what happens within the console, we've been looking at what you can do when it's off. The experience shouldn't end there. There's a community that revolves around many of these multi-player games, so what can we bring to that? So we've been extending those game experiences into essentially site-based experiences so they can build that community into an almost fantasy league type aspect. But it's not a huge leap to say that experience can be brought to the TV screen through the connected console.

It's such an exciting space to work in, that as long as we keep that playful attitude towards our work and experimental aspect of what we're doing instead of just resorting to the tried, the trend and the tested, I think that's where we can have a lot of traction."