This has been a strange year for many of us in the guerrilla / event / promotional world. Many of our budgets were slashed, evaporated and long standing clients simply disappeared seemingly overnight. Companies that I have been friends or competing with for years ceased to exist in surprising numbers. Everyone was hurting, everyone was cutting staff. It was not the greatest time to be a business owner. If you were not involved in some sort of Social Media, it was hard getting any attention from anyone. We business owners often have these inflection points, experiences where we need to take a hard look at our company and figure out how we need to pivot in order to succeed. Sometimes the that answer is something we have to dig hard to find, sometimes the market determined it and on occasion you just stumble upon it.
About a year ago, my tech partner Alpay Kasal and I posted a video of a concept in development that we called the Interactive Mirror, it was based on a few guerrilla concepts we were working with at the time about adding interactivity to surfaces and happened to be super fun to play with. It was a touch enabled projection mirror that allowed people to interact with technology in a way that most people had not seen before. To date it has received over 1.2 million views on the various video sites. The response we received opened our eyes to the fact that people pay attention to that which they have not seen (a founding premise of my company). Through that video alone we were able to get a few clients and to date have executed interactive mirrors in events and tradeshows all over the country and were honored to be a featured exhibit in the recent Gizmodo Gallery. We are working on our biggest execution to date with them and talking with another brand about taking them international.
Since then, we have focused a sizable share of our energies on trying to come up with ways to get brands and consumers engaged through technology. It seems to be a young and growing niche and has given us some excitement and passion that the economy had depressed out of us. Since then, we have gotten an amazing reception to our new tech offerings. Here is how we have been implementing some of our new offerings.
In the last 2 months we have executed fully customized multi-touch tables for Wyeth combining video, animation, powerpoint type presentations and a nifty gesture that flips the entire screen from the operator to the viewer:
Store windows for GE that are activated by terms typed into Twitter to show a real-time visualization of the conversation around a topic happening on the service.
And most recently, we designed a game for a medical trade show in San Francisco for Pfizer. It is a bike riding game that takes place in SF for patients with Hemophilia and encourages them to get outdoors and enjoy themselves while tackling their condition. In addition to designing the game, we built a wireless controller into a set of BMX handlebars using an Arduino kit and adults and kids alike had a great time riding along the wharf and down Lombard Street. You can read more about the tech behind it here.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of the ideas we are working on to step up the technology level we can utilize at events, trade shows, nightlife and promotions and we look forward to showing you the latest as it comes up. If you are in the guerrilla and promo space, we encourage you to look at how you can put interactivity into your programs, not only can it be great, relevant fun, but it seems to be where people are focusing their attention these days. Those that stay to traditional promotion methods may find their livelihoods threatened by the blips and beeps of the future.
