Transcending the podium

In the last few months of 2008, I was lucky enough to go to a couple of conferences (The Feast and IDEA). I noticed something cool that happened in both, and wrote some of it down. For those who haven't seen my January column yet – even for those who have – here it is...



Too tiny? Here's the text:

For a few years now, we have been realizing the importance of engaging consumers beyond one-way communication. One of the most exciting things we've noticed lately, though, has been the application of this idea within the industry itself, most recently with conferences. No longer content as a "lean back" culture, the ideas that stick the most with us are ones in which we lean forward and participate. As time goes on and we get better at practicing what we preach, we will be able to shift conferences from the confines of a stage in a packed eight-hour day, and into a continuous conversation.

TOMS Shoes
Blake Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS shoes, which gives a pair of shoes to a child in need every time a pair is sold here. He gave a presentation on the brand’s story at the last AdAge IDEA Conference in October. At the close of his talk, he promised a free pair of TOMS to every single one of its 250 attendees; all they had to do was text their email address to a specialized number. The following day, everybody got an email requesting shipping, sizing and style information. Subsequently, a free pair was also sent to a child in Argentina. More than just admiring the brand’s philosophy and being inspired at the conference, the IDEA attendees will now be reminded of TOMS every time they wear their free pair. http://www.tomsshoes.com

Pop!Tech Accelerator
Pop!Tech is an annual fall conference that brings together the greatest and most inspired minds to share ideas about the future of science, technology and culture. And rather than just talking about the ideas of tomorrow, Pop!Tech facilitates those ideas to come to life. Enter Accelerator, a digital network that helps bring socially innovative ideas to action by linking the relevant people necessary to get projects done. Accelerator leverages the collective intellectual power present at the Pop!Tech conferences and turns it into an ongoing active partnership to affect positive social change. http://www.poptech.org/accelerator

Fame Game
A web site run by Fame Theory LLC, Fame Game creates publicly facing profiles for people in the New York media community and uses an algorithm to calculate their social capital. Those on the site can “claim” their own profiles and actively influence their social connections and media attention; eventually, they can leverage their fame to better get their ideas and projects into culture and the public consciousness. Fame Theory talked about their project at the FEAST Social Innovation Conference, closing with the news that everybody in attendance had been registered on the site, their social capital being calculated at that very moment. Their next project is to unveil a new model for commissioning artwork by funding 10 original works of art and showcasing them at the next TED conference. The art’s “fame” will then be monitored for a year after the event. http://www.famegame.com

This may be a catch-22, though. If everyone starts to do this, will the entire experience eventually become diluted, each individual speaker or brand being remembered less and less? Probably not, since "engaging people beyond the podium" is pretty open-ended, and even in these 3 examples have been vastly different from one another. I'm excited.

New Next: Geotility

Thanks, Faris. He's the one who came up with that word just now upon reading the column. My title was originally The Journey is the Destination, not "The Journey's the Thing." Don't really know what happened there.

At the beginning of the summer, the third annual Come Out & Play Festival hit New York with a bang – people blanketed the city, turning themselves into game pieces and using space in a creative way to have a good time. From a New York City vs. London photo scavenger hunt to a multiplayer game in which GPS triggers from mobile devices reward teams with tools to help them win, Come Out & Play capitalizes on “city-size fun” by making a city the game board.

Games aren’t the only things that have made places the center of focus: over a year ago, we talked about Dodgeball and Helio's Buddy Beacon as location-themed examples of real time documentation. We’ve come a long way since then: combining geography with technology has progressed exponentially. And yet, our prediction is that it’s only a hint of what’s still to come.

Location-based services are nothing new to us: from package tracking to looking up driving directions, we’ve been using geographic information to help us do things for years. But the current wave of geographically aware technology that has the ability to literally know where we are adds a completely new dimension to our things.

Find a place
Mobile handsets like the iPhone and Nokia Nseries devices seem to be causing the biggest splash in mobile mapping, heightening services and behaviors that we are already familiar with. We use Yelp.com to find new restaurants, bars and boutiques, for example. Now when you’re in a new neighborhood and away from your computer, you can find out which restaurants are blocks away from where you’re standing, and how to get there (you can even add photos taken with your mobile device and write reviews while you’re still there).

Find your friends
Remember Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that let’s you know what your friends are doing? What about Dodgeball, where all of your friends registered on the site are notified on your whereabouts every time you text message? Picture these two services together and on steroids. A new Twitter client for the iPhone (and, probably by the time you read this, for other handsets as well) lets you to see all other users that are close by, so you can know what they’re doing and where they’re doing it.

Tag your photos
Geo-tagging is a behavior quickly becoming ingrained in our photo-uploading activity; now a GPS-enabled mobile device can tag your photos as you upload them directly from your phone so you don’t have to think about it. Handsets aren’t the only players in this space, either: Eye-Fi is a wireless memory card that automatically adds location labels to photos that are uploaded to the Internet, directly from your camera.

I had a ton of fun writing the October 2008 column I submitted last Friday; I'll be able to share at the end of next month.

I'll probably be cross-posting this on House of Naked in a few minutes...

New Next 08 [on retail]

For some reason we haven't received the January issue of Media Magazine yet, so I haven't gotten the chance to show you that column. Well, they were very nice and just sent me the PDF, so here you guys go. It's about retail as an underutilized channel (more interesting than it sounds, actually; I was initially dreading writing it but then had a super time doing so!).



Here is the text, for those of you who want fewer (i.e. zero) clicks:

When you work in advertising and media circles, the thought of retail communications can be a dull one, bringing to mind uninspired point-of-sale displays and staff push tactics. Retail executions from the same said agencies are, for the most part, produced as an afterthought, often containing the same messaging as the rest of a campaign as though a consumer will behave with all touch points in the same way.

Often, the most creative we can be is with a shelf wobbler. When you consider the huge opportunity to give consumers an experience in which to physically immerse themselves; retail can be the missing link to establishing a full connection with your brand.

Apple got it right years ago: They transformed the torturously lackluster computer purchasing experience into a beautifully simple and service-focused one that truly matched the aesthetic of the rest of the brand. Today, some argue that the best ad Apple ever produced was its store.

Supreme is a NYC-based skate brand that keeps their consumers in mind: A few years ago they installed an immense plywood skate bowl into their multistoried Los Angeles store. Inspired by the empty swimming pools that were home to skateboarders in the 1970s, the formerly unused piece of retail space was transformed into something that helps customers interact with the brand.

Benjy's, one of the biggest sandwich retailers in the UK, unveiled their "Delivered" service in 2003. They drive to business parks with "vanchised" vans that unfold into fully functional coffee and sandwich shops. (Think the poshest roach coach ever.) This was both good for the consumers and also gave Benjy's the opportunity to enter into areas where they previously had no presence.

Uniqlo remains consistent in its theme of accessible simplicity: Before it opened its doors in New York's SoHo, the retailer moved crate-like pop-up stores around the city to show that the affordable and label-free clothing was shipped straight from Tokyo and made accessible to us. Their Japanese design philosophy translated perfectly to the store, neatly stacking and lining up brightly-colored clothes - a retail design style that is usually reserved for high-priced fashion houses and boutiques in the United States. Uniqlo also opened a concept store called UT that celebrates the democratization of the T-shirt. When the store opened, the four-story space was stocked with nothing but T-shirts in clear plastic canisters and at affordable prices, designed by avant artists like Terry Richardson and Gareth Pugh.

When retail is needed in the marketing mix, look at it as an exciting opportunity instead of a burden. Make the move beyond the window clings.

The next one will be published in about two weeks, which was even more fun to write because I got to do a ton of research on Damien Hirst. And that's all the teaser you get for now. Have a great weekend everyone.

[x-posted to House of Naked]