Experience Manifesto

Immersion & Escapism - Is this the Future of Video?

Take a look at the video from our panel during Advertising Week on the how we can move VR forward. Great group of folks and an excellent discussion!

Virtual reality enables you to step into another world – a stimulated environment brought to life by a marketer’s control and imagination. Once there, consumers can suspend belief, interact, move, and be totally surrounded by a brand. That’s what makes it irresistible to advertisers. Yet, it’s a solitary experience that’s costly to create and consume with specific hardware requirements needed by the end user. So, when should you initiate a VR project? What goals does virtual reality help achieve? Could 360 degree video also meet your objectives? Will you gain something from using virtual reality that you couldn’t through other mediums? How will mixed reality affect video in the coming years? We’ll put those questions to our panelists.

• Anthony Iaffaldano, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Business Insider
• Sarah Bachman, Vice President of Mobile Strategy and UNCVR, Horizon Media
• Chris Helm, COO & Co-Founder, Blend Media
• Bryn Mooser, Co-Founder & CEO, RYOT
• David Polinchock, Founder/Chief Experience Officer (CXO), Experiential Advertising Group
• Miheer Walavalkar, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer, LiveLike

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!

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

Advertising Week TechXperience

Very excited to announce that I have been brought in, along with a partner VentureFuel, to create a unique, tech experience for Advertising Week 2017. As you may know, Advertising Week is the premiere ad industry event, with 100,000 attendees and dozens of co-located industry events over the four days. The event runs September 25th - 28th and you the location we have secured is on Times Square at 43rd Street.

We are taking over a 12,000 sf space right on Times Square for this experience, creating tremendous visibility for all of our participants. We're looking for emerging tech companies, VR, AR, digital artists, holograms, projection mapping, AI and others to help create a must-see tech showcase here in NYC. In addition to the showcase, we will be hosting tours to agencies and clients, to go beyond the "here's something cool" and help them contextualize what they're seeing.

I'm reaching out to you, my network of friends who know cool things, to help us find things beyond the usual. This is the first time Advertising Week is doing such an event and we want to make sure it's the best it can be!

So, if you're interested i participating or know someone who might be, please contact me by Thursday, August 24th with the following:

• All company information, including contact information
• What the company does
• Description of what you would present
• What makes you unique
• How much space you need
• Tech requirements (Note: We're not sure what tech we will be able to provide at this time)
• What staff you will you have on-site

Don't hesitate to e-mail me if you have any questions or need any additional information. In addition to having space at the experience, there may also be speaking slots available, as well as opportunities to participate in our Ask a VC breakfasts and the start-up competition. This is a great opportunity to reach the best of the advertising community in a great setting. Space is limited, so please make sure you get back to me by the 24th to be considered.

I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you!

David

Advertising Week TechXperience

The ultimate innovation destination for advertisers. Immerse yourself in the latest tech breakthroughs and emerging media trends curated by thought-leaders VentureFuel and Experiential Advertising. The journey begins with the Innovation Gallery which features awe-inspiring interactive installations and bleeding edge tech advancements: haptics, holograms, the canvas of the future, AI, VR and AR. Sourced from start-ups, corporate and university research labs and our global network, you’ll get to explore these technologies hands on and in-depth. In addition, TechXperience will showcase cutting edge, digital artists throughout the day and at special events at night.