Once upon a time, entertainment and advertising were two separate lands. Each land was dynamic, and cool, in its own way, but their denizens rarely commingled. In yet another land, the geeks of technology toiled in isolation on tasks both obscure and unfriendly. And then the winds of innovation blew through. Everything changed.
Today, a new creative map is taking shape, as the barriers between these businesses fall away, spurred by a swarm of adventurers and explorers… For companies and consumers, actors and artists, marketers and musicians, there is no turning back. On the contrary, this is the wave of tomorrow.
I simply wanted to call out Fast Company for being one of the first to acknowledge the highly significant metamorphosis transpiring within the global business landscape: the collision of tech, culture & commerce. I frequently introduce myself as a catalyst for convergence, largely due to my multifaceted professional background. Years in the entertainment, technology and advertising spaces have lead me to one realization: nothing can bolster the three of these disparate industries more than their fusion.
So thank you, Fast Company, for so eloquently echoing my credo.
Foam Core, A Projector & 48 Sleepless Hours
I’ve developed about half a dozen 3D projection mapping projects, but this one was by far the most demanding.
We were faced with challenges galore: 14 surfaces of assorted shapes and sizes, a 1,500 lumen projector (rather weak), a budget of $0, two people and a 48-hour deadline. Alas, we beat our deadline by two whopping hours, all while running on fumes and black gold.
We transformed a small dark room into a sprawling cityscape. A Coldplay-inspired music bed and a poignant voiceover track helped transport the audience into the story, pixel by pixel, building by building. It was fresh, captivating and emotive. Flat video on screens just doesn’t compare with the potential for immersion offered by a multi-sensory AR installation.
Video soon to come.
PRESSPAUSEPLAY: A Film About Hope, Fear and Digital Culture
A must-see documentary for all in the professional creative space (and equally as important for those not in the creative space.) Articulate, thought-provoking and inherently controversial.
The creative landscape is changing. Some talk about a revolution. Others talk about a natural evolution. These changes affect everything. From creation to distribution, from artist to consumer.
The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.
Eat Your Heart Out, Betty Crocker
Check out our recently released iPad app, How We Love Food, a digital cookbook developed as a homage to summer afternoons in the kitchen. Why can’t cooking be a communal activity? The app features close to a hundred gourmet recipes and hand-painted illustrations of each dish. All proceeds from the sale of the app go to support Urban Roots, a signature program of the youth empowerment nonprofit, YouthLaunch — that uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and increase access to healthy food.
A little peek at the 4-canvas projection-mapping installation we developed last week… It was the fruit of 3 sleepless nights and a whole lot of energy drink.
Our brief was to take corporate storytelling to the next level. I think we gave PowerPoint a run for its money.
One of my core responsibilities at Tocquigny (and more specifically within Tocquigny Labs) is to immerse myself in emerging technologies, with the key objective of identifying their respective applicabilities within our space. When something is launched, for instance Google+, it is my task to become the resident expert, with the capability of answering a wide gamut of business and technical questions from both internal stakeholders and clients. Like a scientist, I must see beyond the buzz-ridden Mashable articles and “Trending Topics”, and actually submerge myself in the technology. This all leads up to the key function of Labs: adding relevance & context. I get to put on my creative cap and architect innovative applications of the technology specific to our diversified client-base and their short- and long-term needs.
We have a roadmap of technologies in queue, but this week’s was one we had been waiting to test out for quite some time: the Kinect motion-sensing input device (created by Microsoft). Released in conjunction with the XBox 360, it didn’t take long for technologists to see the Kinect’s applicability beyond gaming. The infrared device brings John Underkoffler’s visionary gesture-control interface from Minority Report to life.
This $150 consumer-facing infrared camera has introduced natural user interfaces (through gesture- and voice-control) to the masses. Offered many different names by the tech-crowd (computer vision, NUI, gesture-control, feature-recognition, spatial navigation, et al), the Kinect represents what many feel is the future of physical computing.
This week, we took the Kinect for a lengthy test-drive. Most notably, we used the device to capture full-body movements and converted them into commands that were fed into a piece of music composition software. Illustrated by the above photo, a person can control a digital symphony simply by moving any joint in their body. Sounds like a toy, right? A pretty practical toy… After all, this experiment was the catalyst for dozens of ideas pertinent to our future-facing clientele.
Thanks to the digital crowd-funding platform, in mere months, an iPhone accessory went from being a garage prototype to spawning $169,200+ of liquid capital and 2,600 pre-orders. The above 3-minute video was all it took to convince thousands to offer up a chunk of their paychecks to an eager entrepreneur. But enough about the power of Kickstarter. You can read articlesandarticles about the revolutionary platform on TechCrunch.
What I am more excited about is this recently-funded technology project. As the long-tail gets longer, it seems that we’re starting to see a trend in rapid technology consumerization. Hardware and software that was initially developed for the enterprise is now being compacted, manufactured and distributed to the consumer audience. The B2B and B2C markets are converging!
The GoPano Micro is a sub-$100 alternative to a ~$50,000 technology that I’ve been focusing a whole lot of my time on for the past two years — 360° Video Capture. A simple camera adaptor for the iPhone 4 allows anyone to create full-motion interactive panoramic videos. Can you imagine the future of UGC with this technology? Realtors will create virtual video tours; families will re-live vacations like never before; crimes will be increasingly solved by forensic video evidence; filmmakers will release audience-controllable feature films. Hell, I predict that YouTube will support interactive 360° video by 2013.
We’re living in the age of the paradigm shift. Entrepreneurs are in control. Immersive storytelling is no longer an artform. A simple video can spawn thousands of micro-investments.
There’s no better a time to be a part of the action.
“THE TRADITIONAL APPROACHES ARE NOW OBSOLETE. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARKETING THOUGHTS ARE GONE. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES AREN’T A NOVELTY. THEY ARE ALL WE’VE GOT LEFT.”
- Seth Godin
I work in advertising. Well, marketing. Scratch that… I work at a company that does a lot of things (including marketing and advertising). Argh. Who likes being confined to a definition? It doesn’t allow for agility. And agility, in my point-of-view, is the key facet driving modern business.
Audience behaviors are changing; technologies are evolving. People make purchasing decisions differently; companies are driven by a new set of needs.
There are a handful of companies that really grasp this paradigm shift. A few notable ones:
As the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles, it’s our goal to provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.
Why are we doing this? The way we see it, companies need an alternative to both current ad agencies as well as current crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today, but one that also delivers the engagement, cultural relevance, results and return on investment that crowdsourcing {if managed and directed well} can deliver.
Anomaly - The Intellectual Property Development Company
A few quotes from the various media outlets:
Anomaly is defiantly not an “Ad agency” the company sets store by developing its own intellectual property which it can licence to clients in return for share in revenues. Their aspiration is to be a product developing IP company, marketing their own portfolio of IP as well as doing that for major brands. - Creative Review
Since its inception in 2004, the founders and directors have truly shown a different way of doing things, blurring the borders between providing traditional marketing services and working as a business development partner. Eschewing the traditional client/agency relationship, Anomaly works to develop intellectual property for both itself and for its clients… - Business Week
The Lab’s manifesto, care of former Executive Creative Director, Robert Wong:
The long version: “The Google Creative Lab is a small team that strives to rethink marketing across every kind of media, currently existing or not with Google as its sole client. Our mission is to ‘remind the world what it is that they love about Google.’ Our job is to manage and steward the brand, find new ways to communicate the company’s innovations, intentions and ideals, and do work of which we can all be proud. We want people ambitious and crazy enough to think we can actually change the world.”
Each company on this short-list is future-proofing themselves by ignoring the ‘industry model’, instead adopting unorthodox approaches built for tomorrow.
Film Studios, Meet Social Media
Hollywood studios are still scouring around for the perfect digital distribution & monetization model. Silicon Valley (with the help of indie filmmakers) is trying to beat the big boys at their own game.
Case-in-point: FlickLaunch - the first independent film digital distribution platform built entirely on Facebook. It allows filmmakers to stream movies for free to the first 1,000 ‘likers’, thereby leveraging consumer social graphs to drive revenue and buzz.
FlickLaunch provides the tools for filmmakers (who pay a min. $250 fee) to set up “Likeable” fan pages that will stream movies for free for the first 1,000 users who hit the “Like” button. After that, the magic of the social stream will hopefully take over and produce thousands of new viewers willing to pay $1 or $2 (via PayPal for now) for each 7-day rental. Films can viewed on a PC, mobile phone or tablet. The filmmaker keeps 70% and FlickLaunch keeps the now-standard 30% of the proceeds. (A FB credits option rolling out in a couple of weeks will lower the take to 50%.)
I most admire the business model due to the inherent way that it merges content distribution, marketing and monetization. Economies of scale, eh?
Keep an eye on this space.
…a peek at one of this week’s experiments at Tocquigny Labs (our in-house R&D think-tank).
Inspired by MIT Media Lab’s Junkyard Jumbotron, we decided to create our own asymmetrical synchronized multi-screen virtual display (whew). In under 30 minutes, we calibrated and stitched together two laptops, an iPad, an iPod Touch and an iPhone to form one discrete video display — all controlled by the iPad’s touchscreen.
Quantifiable Proof That ‘Multi-Sensory’ Drives Engagement
NPR’s iPhone, iPad, and Android apps have together surpassed five million downloads, an impressive number — but most of their users never stream audio. When they do listen, however, they are far more engaged.
According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd. (“Pageviews” in this case refers only to news content, not navigation pages.) The ratio holds up for iPad users, too: Listeners view 8.1 pages per visit, versus 3.9 among readers.
- Andrew Phelps, The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University
Multi-sensory engagement evokes realism. Realism drives the seamless integration of digital in our daily lives.
Read more about NPR’s mobile app analytics findings here.
One of my favorite consumer-grade immersion technologies of today is the stitched photo panorama. With higher resolution cameras, gyroscopes and internet connectivity built into a growing number of mobile handsets, I predict a whole lot of movement in this arena.
When I first got my hands on Occipital’s 360 Panorama app for iOS, I knew it was revolutionary (albeit a bit of a toy for the early-adopter set). Last week’s launch of Microsoft’s Photosynth app proved the value the auto-stitching technology could bring to the masses — hinting to me that this space is just about to blow up.
Unfortunately, there are still many issues with both platforms (image fidelity, color correction, brightness/contrast, blurriness), but that’s to be expected with revolutionary technology.
As a test, here are panoramas created with each of the apps (taken with my iPhone 4 at different times), both at Tocquigny’s weekly All-Hands-On-Deck meeting:
Ratings Revolution: The Future of Television Analytics
** part of my ongoing blog series on using emerging technologies to transform the entertainment + business landscape **
Each weekday morning, I wake up to a copy of the above Nielsen TV Ratings Report in my email. It’s pretty interesting to see a measure of the overall viewership of primetime network television shows. But that’s about as much utility as I get out of it.
Unfortunately, though, this same ratings data was the justification for $21.7+ billion of ad revenue yielded by the major broadcast networks in 2010. Woah there! It’s no less than asinine that TV networks and advertising/media agencies almost exclusively use Nielsen’s increasingly obsolete Target Rating Points system to attach a value to specific television properties and programming slots.
The company’s proprietary Local People Meter technology and archaic paper diaries simply collect a small aggregated sample of audience TV watching habits and high-level demographic (age/geo) data to determine a program’s rating, and therefore, fiscal value. Does it really make sense to use cumulative viewership (potential reach ÷ estimated reach) as the primary metric to gauge potential marketing effectiveness or a television program’s success?
Granted, Nielsen does release reports on the effectiveness (receptivity, resonance and reaction) of specific ads, and performs brand-recall studies as illustrated in the above widget, but that information typically doesn’t correlate with the valuation of the media buy.
Effectiveness vs. Performance The objective of an agency or brand’s media buying function is to increase the sales of a product by appealing to a targeted audience with the highest propensity to buy that product. In this case, why aren’t we valuating the primetime lineup based on the amount of peer influence the audience has or the collective sentiment, political affiliation or buying power of viewers? This is the standard practice in digital advertising — why should broadcast be so different? In addition to the above, I have seen one KPI stick out as a true predictor of marketing performance — engagement. The issue: Nielsen has no way of quantifying the amount of, or value of, audience engagement.
The Secret Of course there is currently no cut-and-dry solution, but companies like Networked Insights, BlueFin Labs and the just released Trendrr.tv are providing practical alternatives to Nielsen. Of those three, Networked Insights seems to be the most substantiated by data. The company’s SocialSenseTV analytics platform has already been used to advise TV executives during the May 2010 broadcast upfronts. Their brilliant report (view the PDF here) illustrated total viewership as not being entirely indicative of an audience’s social influence, passion or engagement. Nielsen’s #10 ranked show at the time, ABC’s LOST, acquired the highest social index ranking on Networked Insight’s report. It’s still not 100% representative of an advertised product’s increased sales numbers, but we’re getting closer and closer.
Side note: the entertainment analytics space seems to be moving pretty quickly. Since I published my blog post on the advent of social television check-in apps in February, a number of TV execs have disclosed to me their plans to use metrics from IntoNow, Miso and Get Glue to identify and engage core influential audiences of certain shows on a microscopic level. TV is getting ever more personal. More on that in a future blog post.
A sneak peek of a video projection mapping project we’re developing in the Tocquigny Labs studio. Transforming 2D video into a 3D experience.
Hello there. My name is Craig. I develop & produce interactive transmedia experiences. I fuse the principles of immersive storytelling, the power of emerging technologies, and the fundamentals of business development, marketing and monetization to execute innovative, world-class engagement programs.
Actionable Ideas: From Mind to Market
I am a strategist, futurist & technologist, currently working to identify the nascent relationship between content, distribution channels and the modern consumer, alternative means of monetization for traditional media, and strategic ways to develop, distribute and market creative content via non-traditional platforms.
Many of the posts on this property are my day-to-day commentary on the intersection of Hollywood (content), Silicon Valley (technology) and Madison Avenue (marketing & monetization). It's an ever-evolving space -- one that I seek to revolutionize in years to come.
