A Wider Net

EMS 2008 ended last Wednesday, but there is still much to share. The exhibit floor contained more than 60 exhibits covering a wide range of event technology and services. As you might expect at a marketing summit, there was pretty much every type of audience acquisition tactic deployed there - SMS text message contests, the ol’ bring-the-thing-in-the-swag-bag-to-our-booth-and-enter-to-win-a-thing…. thing, great big steaming heaps of swag, big lead-gen contest giveaways, bikini’s and “brand ambassadors” (the linguistically neutered version of “booth-babes”), a guy projecting logos on the wall using a video-projector-on-a-stick, digital versions of “spin the wheel to win a prize”, oxygen bars, massages, video games, and the old standby - chocolate. I did not, however, see any sweaty Buddha’s on unicycles. Someone was asleep on the job.

Here are three of my favorites:

KAON Interactive featured a unique kiosk solution, called the v-OSK (see example screen below), that allows exhibitors to showcase products that cannot be on the show floor due to size or other constraints. An entire library of products can be featured on the interactive touch screens and operators can easily get a feel for the product by rotating and zooming around a photo-accurate 3D model. Having produced many kiosks of this type of over the years, I think this is the slickest virtual product demo solution I have seen. It isn’t 3D stereo, but I imagine that is the next step in this product’s evolution. I was particularly impressed that the assets and most of the interactive experience can be replicated online as well as on the kiosk, making the solution immensely more valuable. KAON can produce these as a turnkey service but they also work with production and design agencies for content creation, including model building.

Pixman, the army of ambassadors-for-hire schlepping 30-pound knapsacks connected to LCD-monitors-on-sticks that hover over the wearer’s head like a freakish square digital halo, were the ones with the video-projector-on-a-stick. They obviously like to stick stuff on sticks. But they also like being the center of attention, which is good because they usually are. They have upgraded the LCD monitor knapsack rig to include a qwerty keyboard built into the arm band of the wearer for data entry - sort of what Wonder Woman’s amazon bracelets would look like if Microsoft made them. The projector-on-a-stick was very clever as a way to sneak a video onto a surface and then turn and run when the fuzz get the call. All of their technology supports their “nomadic media” tagline - media that can wander and deliver a message to a large event from within the crowd.

Last, but not least, I liked the Immersa-Dome from Aardvark Applications - a rentable sensory thrill ride that bombards you with immersive video, programmable scents, wind, seat vibration, and wrap-around sound. They can even add interactivity and high definition video. Since throughput is an issue with this one-seater device, I think the price is a little steep, but if you have the space and budget, and if you need to get someone immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of a brand - then this is the coolest way to wrap that all in one. They also make multi-sensory theaters for larger crowds, but they aren’t quite as immersive. Considering how dorky you look sitting in the chair with your head inside a dome that makes you look more than a little like the Martian from Bugs Bunny, the theater may be the way to go. Use your own judgement to gauge the dork-tolerance of the crowd.

Day 2 started off with a celebrity-laden presentation by Rohan Oza, Sr. VP of Marketing for Glaceau - the Coca-Cola-owned makers of Vitamin Water and Smart Water. He described the meteoric rise of their product in a category they had to define themselves - “enhanced water”. Despite the plain packaging design and unprecedented category, Vitamin Water is already bigger than Snapple, will be bigger than Red Bull next year, and bigger than Gatorade in three years, according to Oza. I found their celebrity partnerships particularly impressive, especially when you consider that 50 Cent signed up when the company first launched, demanding a stake in the company instead of payment, and his own “formulation”.

The first breakout session of the day for me was a data collection session led by Motorola Sr. Sports Marketing Manager Sharon Brown. Motorola also featured a celebrity-studded presentation featuring, among others, Danica Patrick, who made history this week by becoming the first woman to win an Indy car race. Sharon described a number of comprehensive private and industry events where Motorola captured date in return for prizes or entrance. Many of their programs also involved SMS text messaging to gather email addresses in return for chances to win prizes.

Today’s luncheon keynote was Jeff Singsaas, the General Manager of Event Marketing for Microsoft. Jeff opened with a stunning reel depicting some of the 20,000 events Microsoft stages annually. 75% of these events are Microsoft branded events. He slipped in the mind-melting stat that Microsoft is spending nearly $1billion on events annually.

He proclaimed that Digital will never replace face-to-face events, something I whole-heartedly agree with. Then he proceeded to detail Microsoft’s strategy to deliver virtual events - online companions to face-to-face events as a mechanism to extend reach and lifespan of the event. In one example, a CES virtual event website, they received 100 visitors online for every 1 visitor on site - a staggering bonus to their event spend ROI.

Ron Allen, Microsoft’s Marketing Solutions Manager, detailed their internal platform for executing virtual events. In a nutshell, they are working to deliver online alternatives to most onsite event components, using a variety of media and navigation techniques. Streaming video and photos are just part of the overall online experience. You can see what this looks like at their virtual events demo site. You’ll be able to see the whole keynote when the EMS team post it to their website.

The next session I attended covered 360 degree engagement - live and online components of events. This session also featured Microsoft technology and the speaker was Connie Fontaine - Manager of Experiential and Multi-Cultural Communications from Ford. She spoke in depth of their innovative partnership with Microsoft to launch the Sync feature - a system that lets you control your phone and MP3 player with voice commands. In fact, last night they won an X award for activation of a cause related event (not sure what the cause was).

She described a very interesting social networking/social media/viral campaign featuring two young women, Kim and Seana, who traveled across the USA performing music and delivering videos of their experience along the way. While the webisodes were somewhat scripted, the women were real. In fact, they surprised us at the end of the session by having Kim, the singer/songwriter of the pair, perform a song in front of us - 300 marketing people in chairs (tough crowd). She sounded delightful but she was about 4-foot-nothing and we could barely see her! One attendee commended Connie for being a true representative of experiential marketing by bringing Kim into the presentation. I agree - that was a very cool touch.

During some of the exhibit hours I checked out a variety of products ranging from interactives to video projection spheres. My favorite was the immersion dome, which I will feature in a separate post.

The last session of the day was the unveiling of data from the EMI EventView study, which George P Johnson launched nearly a decade ago. This data, however, covered the past three years. Highlights from this presentation:
- Event Marketing, as a percentage of a large company’s total marketing budget, dropped slightly from 26% in ‘05 to 21% in ‘07, probably due to the rise of digital marketing.
- Trade shows, as a percentage of the types of events large companies participate in, have risen from 52-62% since ‘05 - trade shows are UP!
- Marketer’s perception of ROI value of various types of marketing was down slightly over the past three years, but Event Marketing is still considered the top ROI model due primarily to two factors - the # of people reached, and the focussed targeting of that audience.
- Procurement is apparently having less of a say in the final decision of which vendor is selected for Event Marketing activities.
- 41% of large companies plan to implement green initiatives in their event functions within the next year. Only 25% had no plans to do so at all.

And last but certainly not least, the night was capped off with a networking party at the River East Art Center. Ethos design provided the environment which included a massive lighted bar, distinctive modern furnishings, and large projection scrims with video images of an artist painting what appeared to be Japanese text and illustrations on rice paper. The artist was also in the room painting actual panels among us. Everything they provided was eco-friendly in some way. Bacardi was a sponsor, and is 100% to blame for any typos in this post.

Tomorrow is a half-day before we catch a flight. I may not be able to write about it until Thursday. Regardless of what happens tomorrow, this has been an outstanding event full of valuable information and conversations

I just got back from Vermilion, a fabulous Latin-Indian fusion restaurant where we enjoyed some explosively flavorful combinations. I am told this is the hottest trend in Chicago cuisine. I can see why. According to our waiter, one of the dishes, a lobster tail thingy, was voted one of the top 20 dishes in America by USA Today. How could we NOT try it? HIGHLY recommended (the dish AND the joint.)

Today was a great start for the Experiential Marketing Summit. We ran into many old friends in the trade show and event marketing industry, and we were pleased to hear that the attendance reached over 1,000 people this year.

The morning started for us with a 3.5 hour workshop led by Event Marketer Magazine founders Kerry Smith and Dan Hanover (the event organizers) talking about some research recently gathered by the Event Marketing Institute and trends about the industry as a whole. Kerry started with the research slides and revealed that, to everyone’s surprise, ROI measurement is markedly down in the event industry. 82% of the industry reported measuring ROI of their events in 2005 compared to only 67% in 2007. If you’re thinking that gets you off the hook - guess again. They also found that companies that measure are 2.5 times more likely to get their marketing programs funded than those that don’t measure.

One of the clear problems with ROI measurements was illustrated at the start of the session when Kerry asked who in the room actively measured their events and roughly 30% raised their hands. However, when he asked who had dedicated budgets for measurement, hardly anyone raised their hands. Apparently corporations want their measurement and they want it for free. That clearly won’t cut it.

Dan Hanover, a lively, entertaining, and intelligent speaker spoke next. He started by explaining that the term “destination” will replace the term “experience”. There were a lot of groans in the room as people saw a rebrand in their company’s future. Destinations are defined as places people will line up to attend - can be trade shows, mobile marketing exhibits, private events, popup stores - whatever. As long as people want to get there and will go out of their way, wait a while, and even pay to get in.

Dan also reminded us that event marketing is getting more and more expensive while attendance probably isn’t going up. We need to reach more people. To do this, the industry needs to come up with ways to get more people to draw 4 additional people into the brand. “This is the only way we’re going to be able to afford this stuff in five years,” Dan forecast.

The highlight of the day was the luncheon general session with Amy Curtis-Mcintyre, formerly the marketing maven behind Jet Blue’s meteoric rise. As of last Monday, she is with Hyatt Hotels. Amy was a fantastic speaker - warm, funny, smart, sharp, and refreshingly frank. She had a remarkable ability to answer seemingly complicated marketing problems with very simple and logical solutions. She shared an outstanding anecdote about a trip she and her husband took to a fancy resort in the mountains, riding there in a rented Jeep SUV. When they were ready to leave, they packed up the Jeep and discovered to their surprise and delight that the resort had filled the tank with gas without asking. The Jeep had been running on fumes when they arrived. This was so amazing to them that they spoke of little else about their fabulous trip other than this mind-blowing gesture. It made me wonder what my company can do to surprise and delight our customers to this degree.

She said that her goal at Jet Blue was to make Coach Class “suck less”. In fact, by eliminating First Class, the whole Jet Blue plane felt more upper class. She also shared that she launched jetblue.com with a budget of $200K in only 60 days and it turned $5K in ticket sales on day 1. She said it was simple and idiot-proof - something she takes seriously with everything her customers touch. One of her most colorful yet insightful comments dealt with corporate branded merchandise: “if people don’t want to steal your sh!# then your brand is in real trouble.”

She described how Jet Blue spent as much time and effort marketing to their internal audience as they do their customers. Treat your employees very well and they will treat your customers very well. Think about how a shoddy photocopied job application form feels to an applicant compared to one that is beautifully designed. She said “great design rules” - we couldn’t agree more.

The afternoon sessions were mostly great. First, I took in Ric Peeler and Bryon Rhoads from Intel who spoke about their social media experience with events like CES and the Intel Developer Forum. They had many interesting tips and examples to offer. One highlight was their CES 2007 exhibit which allowed people to produce videos in the booth and upload them to YouTube. The highly Intel-branded videos enjoyed about 100,000 views in aggregate, including user-generated content highlighted by this Dancing Dork.

The last session that I attended didn’t do much for me. It was billed as a “virtual event” overview but it was actually about two people who use a $99/mo webinar package to sell cruise vacations to retired people.

After the sessions they opened up the exhibit hall for a reception with free drinks and nibbles. There were many interesting exhibits, including KAON interactive who makes the V-OSK virtual product demo kiosk, which I will write about in detail later.

All in all, it was an outstanding day 1 and I need to crash immediately in preparation for day 2!

An interview-style keynote at the SXSW (South by Southwest) tech conference featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy got rather out of hand this week. Why? For several interesting reasons. First and foremost, the content was poorly prepared - neither the guest nor the interviewer had a clear sense of what the keynote would discuss and actually ran out of stuff to talk about. Also, according to some who were there, Lacy, having written a book about this guy, seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about herself and her personal experiences with the one she calls “Zuck.”

But what’s really interesting is what happened when the crowd sensed that they weren’t going to get what they came for. They took over. Fueled by Twitter, the mobile phone networked community of people constantly twittering (text messaging meets a chat room) about what they’re doing at any given time, the crowd started to build up a hearty amount of disdain over the content on stage. Soon all of Twitter was dominated with conversations about this train wreck of an interview. Then, the worst of social media took over - the crowd simply started shouting out questions and took over the interview. It finally devolved into an unconference. Twitter and unconferences - two very south-by-southwest regional phenomena.

What made a crowd of people suddenly feel they had the right to hijack the conference? Perhaps it was mob mentality. Perhaps it was social media and user-generated content spilling over into the real time real world. Perhaps the same internal controls that prevent most people from acting out violent video games don’t apply to being rude and disruptive at a conference?

And perhaps this one of many disruptive events to come that will remind us that, increasingly, the audience wants to be part of the conversation and if don’t give them a voice they may raise their own.

Video below:

Steve Jobs’ 2008 Macworld keynote came and went the other day, as did my carefully written post about it. So upset was I, at accidentally overwriting half of it, that I shelved it until today. Ever been there?

Anyhow, I felt that having just written a retrospective comment about last year’s big Macworld revelation, the iPhone, it would seem logical to follow it up with something about this year’s keynote. This year’s keynote had it’s share of major announcements, although none of them quite as significant as the iPhone and none of them were strong enough to keep the stock market from plummeting that day on bad retail news.

Here were the major points from the keynote:

- iPhone and iTouch will get new software. The iPhone gets a free firmware update including a Google-driven mapping system that creates GPS-like functionality without actual GPS hardware in the phone. It works by triangulating the position of the phone from three nearby cell towers. Run out of nearby cell towers, and you run out of functionality for this service. Presumably you will also run out of roads to choose from anyway. The iTouch gets a suite of applications that should have been on the device to begin with including mail. The early adopters get to pay $20 for the update while new buyers get it for free. That’s two slaps in the face to early adopters in a year. Goodness, this brand is teflon.

- Apple TV Take 2 - A new, cheaper version of Apple’s set top movie and TV download-and-player is now able to operate without a Mac. So the price drop from $299 to $229 is actually a price drop from $2299 to $229 - if you count the previously necessary Mac. It also can download podcasts, designed for a 2″ screen, and feed them to your HDTV, maybe a 40-60″ screen. That will be a bit like looking at dust mites under an electron microscope - really nasty when magnified. Kudos to Apple, however - this service has a chance for success with every major studio already on board.

The significance of this product is amplified by the fact that Apple also announced a new laptop (See below) and neither the laptop nor the Apple TV box contain any support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Apple has quietly yet profoundly declared the high definition optical disc format war, recently claimed over and won by the Blu-Ray camp, totally irrelevant. Downloads are the future. Microsoft was thinking the same thing, as their XBOX movie and TV download service had managed to grow to twice the size of their nearest competitor. This will certainly impact our video production and media authoring plans in the near future. I am very interested to know what the cable TV industry has to say about this product. I suspect they have something cooking.

I am also a little surprised that Apple TV has no user-rating functionality (at least, I don’t think it does). This is a big part of YouTube, and even Blockbuster and Netflix allow users to rate their content. The lack of community and peer recommendation within Apple TV and, for the most part, iTunes continues to disappoint. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to have preference-based recommendation engine like Blockbuster or Amazon. They seem to be completely blind to the process of media discovery by users.

- New Laptop. Easily the biggest news from Steve Jobs was the unveiling of the MacBook Air. An impossibly thin yet technically superior machine, the MacBook Air is as beautiful as it is respectable. It is a green machine (mostly biodegradable or biorenewable), and it is a pricey machine ($1,800-$3,200 ish). While the trend in notebooks has been toward the cheap, Apple and, to a certain extent Sony, have opted to maintain premium models to keep up their brand image.

You can check all this stuff out, and more, at Apple.

The keynote seemed to drain the life out of the whole internet. Everything ran slower. It worried me that all these new iTunes movie rentals are coming through Akamai, the same delivery network we were using to produce a live webcast at the same time as the keynote.

Footnote: The coverage of the keynote was extraordinary. Apple refuses to webcast the event, which is beyond belief. Instead, a legion of live bloggers, twitterers, and phonecam streamers delivered us the news guerilla-style. And it looked bad. Apple should really control the way it looks, and if they can’t keep a lid on it, they may as well broadcast it or allow it to be done right. This blog even listed all the top coverage and updated it in real time with the status, since many went down under pressure. QIK - a beta live phone webcasting system had a few brave souls trying to webcast it live, with very poor results. I still think they’re onto something BIG.

Last January, Apple deflated the giant CES press juggernaut by launching the iPhone a few hundreds of miles away at Macworld Expo. This year, a year after it’s unveiling, CES suffered the same scene-stealing effect, and Macworld hasn’t even happened yet! Dozens, and it felt like hundreds, of new cell phones were unveiled at CES and almost everyone one of them was compared to the iPhone. Surprisingly, the general consensus seems to indicate that not one of them beat, or even matched, the iPhone.

You have to admire Apple’s brand strength and the game-changing ability to shake up an industry that Apple had no prior experience in, and according to some technical analysts, no business being in at all. If you perform a Google search for “compared to iphone CES” you will find pages of search results showing a sample of the comparisons being made between the products at CES 2008 and the iPhone from Macworld 2007 (which, I seem to recall, had more features than the version that ultimately hit the streets).

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how crappy the phone really is as a phone. Similar to the iPod, it falls short compared to its competitors in many ways. No support for Exhange or Lotus Notes makes it terrible for enterprise users. The browser can’t play flash movies so they conned YouTube into making special versions of their most popular videos just for iPhone users. The memory is very limited and it has no expansion capability. It has zero physical buttons - a mistake that pretty much every wanna-be at CES was not willing to make. And most importantly, it’s stuck on AT&T which, according to most users and Consumer Reports, is in a dead heat with Sprint for the bottom of the barrel for quality and service. Not to mislead - it’s a marvelous product in many ways, too. Its combination of small combined with easily the most intuitive user interface and robust media capabilities make it a delight to play with.

I am particularly grateful that Apple entered this market, even though I will never get one as long as they are stuck with AT&T. The changes in the phones that have already resulted form their entry are remarkable, even though a little short of being truly competitive from a gadget sexiness perspective.

What can we, as marketers, learn from this? Two rather obvious things:
1. Customer loyalty can too easily be undervalued. Oddly, Apple built that loyalty with great products and great marketing but to my knowledge, they didn’t do it by publicly listening to them. You may find it easier and better to do it in plain sight.
2. Recognizing a market that is completely saturated with second-rate products like the previous generation of cell phones is good business. It’s easier to stand out when everyone else is wearing the same shade of gray.

Photo from All About Symbian

Gizmodo has a nice top 10 booths of CES roundup. I would bet this is the only gallery of its kind in which Peter Frampton is depicted as a “top booth”.

EDIT - And Engadget added something of a booth gallery, too.

Or you can just check out the rapidly growing Flickr pool tagged CES2008.

The bloggers from Gizmodo ran amok at CES with a tiny portable IR transmitter that shuts down almost any TV screen in sight. The fact that CES, with 1.85million square feet of TELEVISIONS wasn’t prepared for this even though the devices have been around for years, is fairly surprising.

This sort of prank isn’t unique to CES, so exhibitors at any show will want to heed this vivid warning and block their IR ports. In the meantime, I have to work on not laughing every time I see this video of the prank in action.

EDIT - The blogger has been officially banned from CES, and additional actions against Gizmodo may also be taken.

Reactrix, a gesture-based interactive signage company who is best known for their permanent interactive floor installations in malls all over the USA, partnered with Samsung at CES to showcase a new product called WAVEscape. Clearly a competitive offering to Gesturetek’s Gestpoint, the WAVEscape appears to be considerably easier to stage. You simply hang a 3D Infrared sensor bar above the screen and you’re ready to go (I think). The sensor can detect hands and fingers in 3D so it can react to motion such as a horizontal sweep or a forward point, which it would probably interpret as a mouse click. It appears to work with several people at once.

The video at Gizmodo makes it look fairly decent, although it suffers from the same awkward lag that Gesturetek’s products can have when the application isn’t well-tuned. They demonstrate the device being used in a “box the panda game” (has PETA seen this?), a traditional point-and-click application, and virtual volleyball.

As a method for creating a compelling interactive experience, with one or more participants, this looks like another promising offering. Is it as intuitive and slick as Microsoft Surface? Not even close - but it can service a larger crowd, will probably work through storefront windows, and is much easier to hang on a wall. It is also much easier to keep clean!

CNET has a nice article about it, too.