the trans-media convergence future and “pervasive experience”…from Corning

(eyeball time: 5.3 minutes for the cool video clip…)

you may not know it, but corning was a stagnant usa rust belt glass company until they pioneered the development of high impact glass for mobile devices, large flat screen tvs…and yes, even that “telestrator” blackboard wolf blitzer and everyone at cnn uses non-stop to show you election results to earthquake data…today, they own the world…look at your phone…your computer…your video screen…corning is in your face… with practically bullet proof glass… and wait till you see the new flat screens we saw at ces this january in las vegas which will hit the market by june, 2011 at a best buy store near you…

our transparency moment about our relationship with glass companies, with a nod to madoff’s folly: we have no economic or business interests or relationships with corning (they don’t even know we exist, much less care)…so we show you this blatantly wonderful visionary video made by corning that shows one of the many ways we believe that trans-media/convergence is entering our lives…sooner than you think…  we call this the world of “pervasive experience…” we remember the first apple visionary video from the 1990s…visioning an iPad-like device…and tablets…they are here now and the technology curves are much steeper…so you get things much faster…

so as the perfume ad for obsession perfume says…”share the fantasy”….

nothing else to say…

creating fun branded trans-media content for mobility: Tocquigny’s TripCast™by Jeep®

Tocquigny's TripCast™by Jeep®

(eyeball time: 2.5 minutes but you might read faster…or longer if you get into the cool video clip…)

the dea skinny on what’s happening:

http://www.tocquigny.com

check it out… it’s Jeep®’s first iPhone application: TripCast™, a trek-tracking, geo-social sharing utility which leverages iPhone as a mobility platform using all its bells as whistles for Jeep® branding purposes. Check the vid now… please…or else you won’t know what we are talking about below unless you are a savant or swami with powers none of the rest of us have… more below…

a lot of advertising or interactive agencies talk the trans-media talk but few know how to do it. Comes Tocquigny, an amazing austin-based full service interactive, social and mobile marketing firm. they get it on pretty much everything and are creating very innovative trans-media campaigns and solutions to enhance brands.

o.k., more on why we love this iPhone app…

1. this is what great product branding is all about

Tocquigny ‘s TripCast™by Jeep®  fully leverages apple’s iPhone as a mobile entertainment platform for the Jeep® brand… Jeeps® are about adventure. but you knew that. while it is true that you can make a social statement pulling up in a tuxedo or ball gown in a Jeep®  for valet parking at the next met ball in nyc, Jeeps® are more about, well, like taking an adventure trek someplace. to swipe another product’s motto: “share the fantasy!” mobility can also be about adventure, travel, maps, social networking, personal videos and photos…they all are fun and…you got this by now…so are Jeeps®!

that appears to be the general logic behind Jeep’s® TripCast™, which enables you to share and broadcast your trip, via twitter and twitpic to friends and family as a well as map your trip data in real time and listen to iTunes music. you can also store your trip for all kinds of Jeep®-like adventures which are part of the Jeep® “adventure experience” brand: kayaking, biking, and hiking. TripCast™ by Jeep® is a part of a new form of socially branded entertainment emerging in the marketplace. you don’t need a Jeep® to use TripCast™  so it is subversive the way the best advertising always is…it gets you thinking life might be more fun owning a Jeep® having an “adventure experience” parked in your driveway, available on demand . [note to don draper: that is great creative branding.] the trans-media entertainment experience is synonymous with the brand. the iPhone application features leverage the brand and the mobility concept wonderfully in an integrated way.

2. leveraging trans-media content with the mobile platform’s features

most iPhone applications are “hi! I am an application. I happen to be running on your iPhone. but that is just because i can.” true, there are thousands that leverage one or more aspects of the iPhone’s features but most don’t. Jeep’s® TripCast™ goes the extra mile using features built into the iPhone in a broad and deep way most others don’t: real time mapping, the iPhone camera, video, connectivity to facebook and twitter/twitpic, music from the iTunes store and mash ups with gowalla and foursquare’s technologies which run on the mobile platform as well.

3. showing how powerfully trans-media can work for mobile

it is sad but true that most brands simply “get on facebook” and think they are done. they don’t think about how they can leverage their brand  features with the features of the platform with which they are working. the core qualities of what their brand is about…in Jeep®’s case, a mobility metaphor. obviously, Jeep® is a synergistic [sorry, bucky, we had to use that word] brand for mobility. that is what a car/truck/SUV does. it moves around places. like a mobile phone, it is the essence of mobility. Tocquigny’s creative genius was putting these concepts together and expanding the Jeep® adventure experience metaphor into “adventure entertainment tools” linking the brand with the application they built and on the technology platform where they placed it.

the stakes:

according to the latest pricewaterhousecooper’s “2010 global entertainment and media outlook,” the wired and mobile global advertising market will be $66 bb in 2010 and grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.4% over five years to $103 bb US in 2014. While not the size of exxon’s annual revenues these days, when viewed as a single segment of the worldwide advertising business, it is impressive growth, second only to video games. Anyway, nothing to sneeze at in the world of digital entertainment.

the dea takeaway:

1. brand managers and agencies

get with the trans-media program even more than you are. but don’t get all gimmicky on us with all kinds of gizmos and silly ideas. a good place to start is to think about trans-media venues, platforms and features which would lend themselves well to your advertising brand. then carefully and deliberately map your brand’s core qualities to the target market experiences you can provide and then pick the appropriate content and platforms for them the way Tocquigny did for TripCast™ by Jeep® by selecting the iPhone for a mobile application. make sure they are compelling, aligned with the brand and useful.

2. partner up

you know a lot but not everything. depending on who you are, figure out your ecosystem and do what you do best. if you are a brand manager, find a great agency who understands branding, trans-media, content and technology. if you’re an agency, find people and companies that know how to integrate facebook, foursquare, gowalla and iPhone apps together with content, video, phone and photo assets. if you’re area a content management company, find ways to create, manage and publish content easily across platforms with easy-to-use content management templates (like multiple mobile phone types from different companies, in this case). if you’re a network player, built a value-added services layer into your service architecture to allow closer integration with your mobile partners be they phone manufacturers or content providers… but nobody can do the whole mash up themselves. although it’s getting much easier…

3. the mobility opportunity and its core characteristics

think about all the ways you can leverage the fundamental qualities of the mobility experience…ask yourself some of these key zen mobility questions to get started, add to the list, then work yourself back to the pieces of your puzzle… your brand, your digital venues, your content, and the platform features you can leverage, etc. once you have locked onto some initial creative concepts…you are on your way…

mobility questions

for more information, please contact us at 512.825.6866 to discuss the issues more fully and the specific impact & implications to your business. it’s free!

why the“flower” user experience changes everything for everybody…

(eyeball time: 2.0 minutes but you might read faster…)

the dea skinny on what’s happening:

while the mainstream anemic usa game industry plugs along trying to woo new viewers with hd, wireless, 3d technology and interactive gizmos like wii and microsoft’s kinect, a quiet but potentially seismic revolution has been taking place elsewhere. it is a “game,” rather, an experience called flower, and it is not about gaming…it is about user experience. ask your local hipster about it. they will know.  thank the people at sony playstation for trying to take the whole industry in another direction with this innovative move. this affects all user experience design because it implies an entirely new design paradigm: human emotions. and that is powerful stuff to be messing with.

comes a company started by 2 people out of university of southern california’s usc games institute… thatgamecompany led by two geniuses, kellee santiago and jenova chen, who we visited and interviewed in their santa monica studio. their idea? make user experiences based on human emotions. whadda concept. forget stupid categories like “casual gamer,” “hard core gamer” and “gamer.” their games (ahem, experiences)  are designed around a single emotion, amazing images, music and free exploration with mind-blowingly simple interaction. there is no “objective” except an amazing experience of chasing flowers across a landscape. you need to see the two video clips on our site to see what this is about. the first is an interview with kellee santiago, ceo of thatgamecompany which created it, and the second is a clip of flower. you need to do this now to get it.

several years back, kellee and jenova went to sundance and showed cloud, their first graduate-level “student” game done while at usc. next thing you know, enlightened executives at sony playstation sign them and cut a 3 game deal and place them on the sony playstation network. now you can download flower from the sony playstation network for just under $10us, making the purchase of a playstation3 worth the entire purchase just to get the ability to play this game alone. it is ground-breaking and will make you experience intense happy emotions. whadda concept, but we said that before! some users have reported literally tearing-up emotionally, it made them so happy.

as kellee says, flower is a video game poem that asks something different of the “player” with “no score, no time limit, no death.” their company tag line is “life in balance”  and they have another game under development for sony called journey to augment their other titles flOw and flower. hopefully sony and others will sign them to keep things flowing out of that game company in the future.

the stakes:

the future of user experience. what they are doing has much wider implications for anyone and everyone in trans-media. think about it: if you can deeply touch feelings, emotions in a user experience, this has many touch points way beyond gaming. it is about experience design.

kellee, jenova and their crew of ten+ others at thatgamecompany in santa monica are trying to push the boundaries of what games can do. but they are pioneers in developing new ideas about what a user experience can be: there is a simple interface which makes the experience immediately accessible (apple kind of made some hay with this concept, ‘ya think?), a user navigational experience that feels explorational without boundaries, a use of images and music that provide an intense emotional experience that alters your state.

besides altering user experience, thatgamecompany represents the game-changer almost-a-do-it-yourself-production small company which can make games at a fraction of what the big boys and girls like our friends at ea or lucas games spend. no mocap, hd or expensive cgi. but highly competitive with around 10 employees right now… as such, they represent the shift to network-based game delivery which traditional game companies are only starting to explore with sony, xbox and wii.

the dea takeway:

if you are a game company, think about exploring this space or acquiring a company that can do these things. it will improve your legacy product lines on a go-forward basis. it may push your offerings in entirely new directions.

for everyone else, including chief marketing officers at fortune 500 institutions or any company providing user experiences on the web, look at how you can re-position your current offerings and make them more emotional. much more.

application designers of every type should look at flower, cloud, and journey and determine how they can simply their user experience design and make it emotionally pleasurable. there are a million ways to do this.

for advertisers and brand managers in all walks of life…well, this is what you do…manipulate emotions to get people to buy your stuff. look at how you can leverage emotions on the web around your brands. this is the key to brand management. strong powerful emotions. (btw, we have already seen a tv ad done which literally ripped off flower to sell some financial services product…come on people…let’s have some original thinking here!

may all your user experiences flower. to everyone at thatgamecompany we say: BRAVO!, BRAVO!, BRAVO! and THANK YOU! you move us emotionally  bigtime.

for more information, please contact us at 512.825.6866 to discuss the issues more fully and the specific impact & implications to your business. it’s free!