Our Young Gun profile takes a look at some of the young talent across the advertising, adtech, marketing and media sector in Australia. It aims to shed light on the varying roles, people and companies across the buzzing industry.
Today we speak to VERSA conversational architect Tyler Hamilton.
Time at the company:
Three and a half years.
How long have you been in the industry?
Three and a half years, but have been tinkering most of my life.
How did you get here? Was this always the plan?
Definitely not! I initially studied advertising at uni to get away from development. I had no idea that programming could be so creative until I joined VERSA. Our CEO, Kath Blackham, gave me my first industry role as a creative technologist intern. This led to me picking up voice technology, and I’ve been specialising in the conversational design/development world ever since.
Who guides you day to day?
Everyone in my team, but especially my PM Sarah, my boss Kath, and our tech director, Guill. They’re always challenging and encouraging me, as well as helping me figure out my path ahead.
What’s the best thing about the industry you work in?
How quickly everything changes, and how much there is to learn. A lot of the work I do starts from a blank slate. I love being able to have the opportunity to create new things, and set benchmarks and standards for things that have never been done before.
And the biggest challenge?
That can also be the biggest challenge. There’s sometimes not a lot of examples or guidelines you can always go from, so it can lead to you second-guessing your work occasionally.
Whose job have you set your sights on in the future?
This is a hard one, my last few roles didn’t exist a few years ago. So maybe it’d be a robot speech therapist or something. I just hope it sounds cool.
Where do you turn for inspiration?
I follow a heap of newsletters and podcasts, as well as a few geeky subreddits.
My favourite advert is:
The Hungerithm from Snickers definitely stands out for me. I was in the last year of uni when that came out, and it opened my eyes up to a new way of advertising. One that was highly interactive and had a place next to creative development.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
How many hours I've really sunk into Pokemon.
In five years' time I'll be:
Who knows! But hopefully it's just as interesting trying to explain to my parents at Christmas.
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