Experience Manifesto

Talking Experiences at the Adobe Think Tank, Advertising Week 2017

I had a chance to sit down with Don Bennion from Adobe during Advertising Week to talk about what makes a great experience, the value of data and the importance of authenticity!

360 Tour of Advertising Week TechX

Our friends over at VirtualAPT created a great 360 video tour of the recent Advertising Week TechX. Click here to see the full video and take your tour of TechX!

Pawn VR at Advertising Week TechX 2017

Love what Baaria Chaudhary and Marjorie Wang did with Pawn VR at #AWTechX #AWNewYork. They 3D scanned attendees to turn them into chess pieces in a new, immersive chess game experience. What makes it even cooler is that the entire experience was created live during Advertising Week. Thrilled to have them participate!

You can now click here to download the full experience!

Propelify 2017

Earlier this year, I had the chance to bring my thoughts on Stop Thinking Killer App, Think Killer Experience to life at Propelify 2017. My presentation covered several key thoughts:

• Stop with the limitations. We need to stop focusing on the limitations. Everyone knows they exist, but we still need to make great content. I've had so many conversations with friends who were doing VR/AR 10 or 20 years ago and they were all doing awesome, cool things, even with all of the limitations we had back then.
• Add the other senses. We're slowly starting to see more experiments with other senses coming into the space and I hope that continues. That includes spatial sound, scent and touch.
• Set the environment and bring in the physical. So often we walk into a brightly lit room, with no cues at all to enhance the experience. There's nothing there to set the mood of the experience or at least break us from the reality of being in a plain space. Make it a set and see the difference in the experience.
• Think cycle time. This point is specifically for location based entertainment and promotional efforts. After doing tens of thousands of events and watching many, many people waiting in line, I can tell you that you need to complete a story arc in no more than about 7 minutes total. It's very hard for guests not familiar with either video games or VR to step into an experience and then wander around trying to figure out what to do. They need to have a story that's easy to understand and navigate. The need to feel like they completed something or they will walk away frustrated with the technology.

So take a listen as I talk VR from 25 years ago and how that work can help us navigate the VR/AR today. You can ready all of my thoughts about VR/AR here.

Advertising Week TechXperience 2017

A few months back, I had coffee with Mari Kim Novak, who was about to start as president of Advertising Week, the annual celebration of the advertising indstry that happens in NYC. She wanted to create a new experience for Advertising Week, something that focused on the emerging technologies everyone's talking about, like VR, AR, AI, voice and others. Having taken my tours at CES several times, she also wanted something that would be curated and, just as importantly, contextualized so that attendees would understand why we were talking about these technologies, not just what they are. As Mari Kim explained in an interview with AdWeek:

To showcase what some startups around the U.S. are doing, Novak said the conference has created a “playground,” called TechX, “for our industry partners and attendees to come and be introduced to these technologies, to feel them and try them—not to be in a trade show environment where they get pitched and sold to.”

Included in this year’s selection is Vntana, which creates interactive holograms for brands like Lexus. There’s also Envrmnt, an AR/VR/360 video startup that’s that’s working to compress files to make it easier to stream and download data-heavy experiences. On the AI front, there’s IV.AI, a startup that’s working on everything from chatbots to other uses of AI.

Lance Pillersdorf, co-founder and COO of Advertising Week, had this to say about TechX:

There is a knowledge gap within our industry between those creating the next generation of technology and the executives challenged to utilize it for their clients. We wanted to address this by carefully curating an experience that allows us to provide attendees an unbiased evaluation and contextual understanding of the power of these innovations. Technology is continuing to shape our industry and TechX is our way of giving Advertising Week Delegates a one-of-a-kind experience within an already packed thought leadership program.

I worked with my network of friends and creative technologists, including my Elias Constantopedos, to begin finding the best companies out there. I also enlisted Fred Schonenberg, Allie Feinstein and the team at VentureFuel to help source additional interesting companies from their network as well. And out of all of that effort, AW TechX 2017 was born!

We received a great deal of positive feedback, including:

• "It was AMAZING. Every exhibitor was the best!"
• “It was the best event we have been to”
• “Absolutely splendid and world class”
• “The entire team can’t stop talking about it”
• “When you left the event, you were twitching with excitement and wanted to go back in.”

Chris Pfaff, who helped bring both envrmnt and Valossa to the event, also gave us a great review, saying:

The Advertising Week New York 2017 TechX experience in Times Square, in a pop-up space between H&M and the NASDAQ MarketSite, curated some of the hippest tech for the ad world, from September 25-28. From digital art projects to AR apps to VR tools and holographic displays, the TechX arena offered a wide palette of commercially available experiences for attendees – creatives and media buyers – to play with and understand.

The value of TechX cannot be understated: TechX was groundbreaking in its depth, bringing start-up companies in the immersive and AI worlds into a forum for major brand conversations on the state of the ad industry...TechX was a rare opportunity to glimpse some of the more inventive ways to deliver and measure ads – and no PowerPoint involved.

If you didn't get a chance to visit the TechX space or if you did and are looking for additional information about what happened during the week, there are several ways to learn more about the companies involved:

• You can click here to see the materials our friends at Citia put together for the event. There's a complete list of all of the participants there.
• You can click here to see a full 360 video of both the main TechX floor and the Playground downstairs created by our friends at VirtualAPT.

I also love what Baaria Chaudhary and Marjorie Wang did with Pawn VR at #AWTechX #AWNewYork. They 3D scanned attendees to turn them into chess pieces in a new, immersive chess game experience. What makes it even cooler is that the entire experience was created live during Advertising Week. Thrilled to have them participate!

In addition, I also used TechX to launch my new consultancy, the Experiential Advertising Group. EAG is a consortium of companies that builds strategic immersive experiences from innovation labs to Experiential Advertising programs using the latest in emerging tech including AR, VR, Robotics and Sonic Haptics, and others. We're already working on a number of projects and ready to help companies create a wide variety of experiences. Please reach out if we can help in any way.

Some pictures from TechX 2017