Charlene Prempeh on unlocking creativity
What channels do young people find most useful and exciting? If you’re mentally answering TikTok or Twitch or Instagram, you’ve missed one. According to Charlene Prempeh, founder of creative agency A Vibe Called Tech (AVCT), they also love LinkedIn. That’s right – the very same place you go to spy on other people’s career paths and laugh at corporate drivel is also a Gen Z hotspot.
Even Prempeh was surprised by the discovery, which came about as part of some marketing strategy research for a major cultural institution in London that included setting up a working group of young, diverse people and hosting workshops and insight sessions to understand what platforms they were using. “I was like, this isn’t true,” laughs Prempeh, who set up AVCT in 2018 with creative director Lewis Gilbert. “My immediate response was, this is clearly wrong. And then we talked to them about it and found it wasn’t wrong. This is genuinely what they were using because they were interested, even at a very young age, [in getting an idea of] what their careers were going to be.”
Portrait of Charlene Prempeh by Taran Wilkhu
Research has played a critical role throughout Prempeh’s career, which began at media agencies including Zenith and OMD, where she developed brand strategy based on audience insights. After this she moved to the BBC, once again using audience insights to develop programming, and then onto the Guardian, where she was instrumental in establishing and developing its newly fledged digital marketing team.