Why We Need New Realities?

Hello everyone, how are you? That was a great talk by Alain. And it's actually a nice setup for what I'm about to talk about. So I am the business director of a sort of future forward innovation and emerging tech and creative tech department within Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam. Wieden & Kennedy is an advertising agency. And much like Alain was talking about, we place a very high value on this sort of symbiosis between brands and culture. So you're going to hear me talk about culture and creativity within that context a fair amount during this. So that was kind of a good primer. We're big believers in this sort of disproportionate share of voice that we can achieve when we bring brands together with cultural context. I'm going to talk more about what we're doing in my department, the department of new realities. And I'm going to talk about why we as an advertising agency think it's important to be really dedicating resources and thought in this space to make sure we're sort of ahead of the curve. So I will also define new realities, at least how we define it as we go into it, so I won't just ask the question. Now a couple slides on what I'm going to tell you before we get into it. So we're going to talk a bit about what we're doing. Why we invested in this new realm that people are dabbling in. Rather than just say, pay lip service to it being important. I'm going to talk about some of the things that led us into this space and the sort of importance and value of it. And then get into a bit more practical application. So I'm going to talk about some of the projects that we've been working on. And then also some lessons that we've learned. So this isn't to say it's a template for everyone and this is what you should be doing. It's really our point of view on the space and how we're getting involved and why we're getting involved. And hopefully you can take away a little bit of education from it if you decide that it seems valuable for you and what you're doing. And maybe some of the lessons are things that you can take away and apply. Maybe not. Hopefully a little bit. Otherwise it will be a big waste of time. So first of all, why new realities? And let me define new realities a little bit as well here. So for us, new realities is very broad. It's basically anything that is new and technology driven and experiential driven that could be coming our way as marketers. For the moment and the sort of upcoming future, this is a lot in immersive computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality. Because there's so much in this and it's such a wide sort of spectrum to work within. So that is probably mostly what I'm going to be talking about today. The creative technologies in that space. And how we're applying those to brands and specifically experiential and creative experiences. So what led us into this space? I won't dwell too much on any of these points because I think they're all... Well, let's just say none of them are totally groundbreaking. But it's really the confluence of quite a few signals that led us to think, well, you know what? This is actually becoming quite valuable. And if we want to be a valuable partner to the clients that we work with, we need to get ahead of the curve on these things. So let's kind of make sure that as they become more massively adopted, which is happening more and more every day. That we are experts in them. That we are creating experiences that are valuable for our consumers and their brands. One of them, and I'll go really quick on this one because everybody knows it. Media fragmentation. We no longer can sort of put out a piece of content that is seen by tons of people very easily. There are still some things that cut through and do this. It's a much tougher landscape these days. So this is one thing where we've sort of had to challenge ourselves. How do we diversify our output? How do we continue to engage in a changing media landscape? Another one is new economy. Alain talked about this one a little bit before, but these companies like an Airbnb or Instagram that we work with, these companies are creating more of a direct one-to-one connection with their consumers. They're removing the barriers between products and marketing, and they're creating new kind of connections with their consumers. So we take inspiration from that. We're trying to find new ways to break down those barriers and get closer to the consumers that we're trying to engage. Ad blockers, this might be kind of a funny one, but I saw a statistic the other day that in the developed economies, there's 25% to 30% adoption of people on the Internet of ad blockers. And we're not trying to specifically circumvent ad blockers, but we saw this. This is a signal that advertising is in sort of a race to the bottom in some ways. And we don't think actually when it's done well that people want to avoid ads. We think there's a lot of value in brands engaging the right way, and consumers actually really enjoy it. So we took this as a challenge to say, how are we sort of improving the landscape and making people not feel like they want to skip or block what we're doing? Culture forecasting, this one's a little bit more ambiguous. Like I said earlier, we're a company that places high value on what we're doing. We're focusing on what's happening in culture and helping brands be a part of that cultural storm. When we look out at the world, we see, as everyone here I'm sure sees, much more in the space of experiential around technology. It's becoming more and more part of everyday lives. If you look at the last 15 years at a minimum, this is increasing very rapidly. So we think this can continue to be an important part of not just tech, but culture. Investment, this is something that can't be ignored. The space that we play in is dominated by a few players these days, especially when we talk about digital media and tech. And when you see those companies, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Microsofts, the Magic Leaves, Alibabas, all these companies investing in this space, it starts to define what is going to be important. So we can't ignore where we see the money going. We see an expansion of emerging tech capabilities. Obviously this is going to happen over time. Technology is going to continue to get better, but we see a pretty steep curve when we start talking about immersive computing. We think that we're going to start to see more and more mass adoption of this. We think we're going to start to close the gap between consumer expectations and what these technologies are actually able to do right now. So hopefully that will increase adoption and actually make it more and more viable and beneficial for brands they get involved in the space. Experiential marketing, again, this is another one that's not groundbreaking. It's been around for a while. It's kind of a hot topic with marketers. For us, we see a few facets to this that are very valuable for us when we talk about new realities. One is that more sort of one-to-one connection we're able to create with consumers like I talked about before. Another is, and Alon talked about this as well, brand purpose. Another sort of buzzword or buzzphrase. When we talk about brand purpose, we think one of the most valuable things brands can do is to actually do, to not just say, and actually investing in new types of experiences for consumers in a way that sort of communicates your brand still to them is very valuable and goes beyond just, say, creating a billboard. Also, speaking of billboards, there's also maybe higher stakes when we talk about experiential. So in the case of a billboard, you can create kind of a mediocre, and it probably isn't going to do a lot one way or the other for your brand. When you talk about experiential, you talk about higher stakes. You're asking consumers to really invest more of their time, more of their sort of cranial resources into your brand. So if you do something great, you're going to see a huge upside to that. You can create long-term loyalty and memory structures around your brand. If you do it poorly, you're going to get the opposite. So we like that it's higher stakes, that there's not room for mediocrity, that you really need to push the envelope. Creative opportunities. We are a creative agency. We're born from an agency that really values creativity and creative approaches to brand problem-solving. So we ask ourselves, is there capacity in this space for creating interesting and powerful executions, experiences for consumers that are going to help build brands and businesses? For us, the answer is yes. And so when you bring all these things together, and probably a few more, you know, we decided this is not something where we can watch from the sideline, that we can just pay lip service to and say, these are important things, that we should think about them more. We decided, you know what, we need to put together a group of technologists and producers and strategists and people that can really dedicate expertise and human resource into tackling this space. I'm going to talk about two of these points just a little bit more. So creative opportunities. For us, there's a massive space that is, you know, even just in immersive computing, but emerging tech in general, how you define that is very broad. There's a big spectrum. For us, we're much more interested in the human and emotional and creative and experiential side. This is just a choice that we've made when we think about what's important for us, what we're really good at, what we think is the value we can add to our clients. It's not to say that there's not a ton of value in creating enterprise, level pipelines and services and tech platforms. That's amazing as well. It's just for us when we ask ourselves the question of what makes sense in this space, we always look at it from a sort of human side first and creativity side first. Let's talk about investment for a second. You know, this was an interesting thing for us, not because we're chasing the money, but more because money means, as I said earlier, better technology, more consumer adoption, better opportunities to engage our consumers with our clients' brands. So if we look at this curve, I'm not going to go into the exact numbers under each one of these bars, but as a curve in general, I think people can agree that we're looking at a pretty big adoption and investment in AR and VR. For those of you interested, this is mostly driven by mobile-based AR and smart glasses followed by VR. And then if we look specifically at the advertising or branding industry, we see a similar shaped curve. Just an indication, you know, we're already seeing a lot of paid media options in this space. We're seeing more and more sort of large platform and large scale adoption and access for these platforms. Again, if you're interested, right now they're predicting the biggest industries for this are retail, automotive, entertainment, CPG, but I think it's safe to say this is going to be affecting all of us now. And very soon. So all of that combined, we decided to create this dedicated unit within Wieden & Kennedy called the Department of New Realities. I have this slide. So this is our office on the Herengrok just in central Amsterdam. And those windows are where we sit. And this is basically to highlight, you know, for us, it's not about creating some sort of skunkworks department that's off, you know, doing their own operations and, you know, doing crazy things that nobody really in the agency understands. This is really about having a unit of people that can elevate the entire agency, that can be elevating all of our clients' work, diversifying our output, as I mentioned earlier. So we have, you know, just this little internal mission statement about how we're basically what we're trying to do is just usher in these new technologies and new opportunities by sort of showing people, by taming them to showing them that they're not as crazy as they may seem. They're not as difficult as they may seem. But also stoking people's interest in them by showing what are the potential opportunities with them. So that's enough kind of the theory and about us and why we've gotten into it. I'm going to talk a little bit now about some more practical things, some of the projects we've been working on recently and some of the lessons we've been taking away as we've been doing it. So the first one is Corona and a bit like Alain was talking about before. This is a brand that really values getting outside. This is a brand that we've been working with as a global client for a few years now. And we worked with them to help define a brand space that really makes sense. Corona is a beer that you can drink inside but is much better outside on a beach. And so as a brand, we've sort of centered around this notion of us being better humans when we're outside. And we started thinking about that. I think the inherent or easy sort of assumption would be that technology can't really help in this. Technology belongs indoors. But actually as we thought a little bit more about it, we thought about how virtual reality can be so influential and so deeply, immersively experiential. And so rather than try to recreate the outdoors, we decided to use virtual reality to sort of tease people, to give people a taste of the outdoors and through that encourage them to enjoy it more. So we created, we went to Mexico City, which is like if you've been there, the craziest. Hottest urban environment. And we took over a building and we created an entire experience. From the moment you walked into the door, you were greeted by actors and actresses. You were taken into a party. You didn't really know what was going on. You were then introduced to a virtual reality experience which replicated paradise being in a jungle. So we had full room scale VR untethered. We had multiple haptics. I actually sat for hours and watched people from the outside go through this thing. They really had a visceral reaction. Yeah. To a lot of it. And then from there you were escorted upstairs to a beach bar. And the whole idea was that you have this mental change that happens when you experience the outdoors. And you can get to a more meaningful mental space that's important as humans. So I'm just going to play a little video that shows you this. I'm saved. Thank you. Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! Hola! And one lesson from this was to think transmedia. So, like I said earlier, you can transpose your content into different spaces and locations to try to maximize the benefits of that content. But also it can open up creative opportunities. So, for Alvaro, we moved him from drawing in 2D on a camera and canvas to 3D in virtual reality to 3D in augmented reality to a real gallery. And he's actually now working with some large-scale 3D printers to print these, I don't know, five meters high for some of his clients in metal, which is pretty cool. Senseless Fairytale, much like Bitmap Banshees, this is something that was fueled largely by our own interests and we think there's actually a lot to be learned from children when we talk about VR and AR, and they look at these in a sort of fresh way and give us perspective that we don't have in our own adult brains. So, Senseless Fairytale is a children's book told in a VR 3D world. told in a VR 3D world. And we give children these tools to interact with the space. They can play musical instruments, they can open up different boxes, they can sort of affect the clouds in space, all these different things. And this launched at Cinekid last year here in Amsterdam. This is where we want to be. Buzz the Beast. Hooray they say, the higgledees, boo-boos and whatnots. Babbleglove is you, the imagination of imagination, of imaginality, feet big or low. The lesson here was to continue to test with your audience. We're all used to the testing world within branding and comms. But even with these new technologies, we learned a lot when we were in our early stages of development. We let some kids try this out. And we assumed going into it that children would want to treat this as a game and we had them sort of unlocking these different gates via different games that you went and progressed through and become the ultimate fairytale princess as most kids want to be. But we found out that they really just wanted an open sandbox where they could just bang everything and mess things up and make it their own world. So we redesigned it so that it became a little bit more free play space for them. This is the last one. Lava is a music and augmented reality platform that we've developed. This stems from us having a passion for music. We looked at the music space. If you look back at the sort of symbiotic relationship between music and media over the years, starting with radio. Radio brought music the capabilities of broadcasting to a ton of people at the same time and having these shared listening experiences, which was revolutionary at the time. You fast forward to TV. TV, like MTV, VH1, brought all new ways for these artists to connect with their consumers and their fans via these visual storytelling devices and that created a whole new genre for music. And then you have the internet. The internet has been maybe good and bad for music, but has no doubt had a huge influence on it. It's democratized it. It's created new means for curation. All these different things. It's really turned it over. We think that immersive computing, especially augmented reality, is probably the fourth wave when we talk about the symbiotic relationship between media tech and music. So we've developed this platform to create experiences for that. Also as a collaboration space for brands, for musicians, for artists, for platforms to come together and create new things. So our first execution on this platform is for an album called S.O.S. And this artist, Necessary Explosion, for him, his music is a bit 70s and heady and the vinyl aspect of his album release was really important for him. So we collaborated with him. We created 11 different 3D AR sculptures. Each one inspired by a different track on the LP. And then we created an app that pairs with the record itself. So when you have the record, you point your phone with the app at it. And then there's audio figure printing, much like you see with Shazam, recognizes a song and cues up the appropriate sculpture. There's some animations that take place when you move closer and further away from the sculptures. And it really just gives you this deeper, more immersive connection with the music as you go through it. You know, as I said earlier, it's a next step, it's an evolution from, say, music videos. Because you can understand the artist even more. You can go a bit deeper into the music. This is the final lesson. This is kind of a broad one for Lava as well as everything I've been talking about. We think it's important if you're going to get into this space to really think about what you're good at and what you're passionate about. For Lava, not only are we obviously very interested in creativity and creative technologies, but we also have two creative directors who have worked for a long time in the music industry creating visuals and directing music videos for big name artists. So we wanted to bring that passion and expertise into Lava. But more broadly, the big theme I'm talking about here is figure out what's good for you, what's right for you, what gets you excited. Because if you don't have those things at the start, it's a really difficult climb. But if you have those, if you figure out how you think emerging tech can help you with what you want to be doing anyway, then it seems much easier and much more downhill. So that's it. Thank you very much.