Superhype

Behind the launch of Windows 7 Phone Series

Windows Phone 7 Series – Touch Experience from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

How do you give tens of thousands of people a hands-on experience with a new phone when you have only a handful of prototypes to share?

That’s exactly what Microsoft did at the Mobile World Congress February 15 with the introduction of the Windows 7 Phone Series, the next generation of Windows Phones.  Through a major press conference featuring Steve Ballmer and a splashy demonstration, Microsoft impressed bloggers and media with one of “its most ambitious projects” in the words of Engadget.  And Microsoft pulled off the feat without having the finished product at event.  Here’s the inside scoop.

In December 2009, Microsoft approached my employer Razorfish with a challenge: could we create an interactive simulation for its new Windows Phone 7 Series?  There was one catch: the simulation needed to be done in time for the Mobile World Congress, only weeks away.  Only a few prototypes would be ready by then — but the event happens only once a year, and given its prominence and the need to generate market enthusiasm for the phone, waiting to share the finished product at the 2011 Congress was not an option.

According to my Razorfish colleague Jonathan Hull, the Razorfish Emerging Experiences team in Atlanta collaborated with the Razorfish Microsoft account team in Seattle to build a touch-based phone experience that emulates the user interface of the new software.  The emulator would be the only way that Congress attendees visiting the show room floor could interact with the software (only a limited number of media would have access to the prototype devices), and the team needed to work in complete secrecy.  (The phone interface was kept under wraps until launch day.)

The challenge for Razorfish was to reverse-engineer the design, animation, and interaction of an actual device.  “Accuracy was extremely important, and we had to ensure the design and motion in our experience was a perfect re-creation of what Microsoft believes is a game-changing mobile experience,” Jonathan said.

To ensure the job was done correctly under the tight deadline, Razorfish used the Razorfish Touch Framework (RTF), a software that makes it easier and faster for designers to create multi-touch experiences on a variety of surfaces such as in-store kiosks, interactive window displays, and mobile phone applications.  (RTF is based on Microsoft technologies such as Windows 7, .Net, and Windows Presentation Foundation.)  By using the RTF, Razorfish developed the application from scratch in less than four weeks.

While the team was working through the details of the technology and experience design, it received a new challenge: could Razorfish also build an online experience to support the official announcement?

“Our team took on the project with less than three weeks to build the web experience,” he said, with once again the Atlanta and Seattle offices combining their know-how to create an online advance look at the product (embedded with the ability to share content through email, Facebook, or Twitter).  Razorfish developed the website with Microsoft Silverlight.

When Steve Ballmer went onstage February 15 to perform a live demonstration of the new phone, the simulator was ready, too, with huge crowds watching the demos.  As Jonathan reported from the Congress, “It’s been very gratifying to see conference attendees and members of the press experience Windows Phone 7 Series for the first time, flicking and gesturing through the 3D user interface and learning about the key features of the operating system on 40-inch monitors.”

The engaging experience was crucial to the positive reaction that the launch received from the likes of The New York Times and Engadget.  The New York Times noted that the phone software has a “cleaner look than most of today’s smartphone software.”

To me this story demonstrates the changing role of the agency-client relationship.  Agencies have an opportunity to help clients solve business problems like launching new products and services.  But assuming the role of business partner means the agency needs to do more than devise messages that say things more effectively.  The next-generation agency creates experiences that make brands come to life.  Only a strong blend of technology and experience design, coupled with a deep understanding of the client’s business needs and customers, makes this kind of relationship possible.

You can learn more about what happened at the Congress on the Razorfish Emerging Experiences blog.

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Five lessons on creativity from the Eagles

Album liner notes are a lost art — which is unfortunate because well-written liner notes leave insightful clues about how and why musicians develop their art.   For instance, here are five lessons I learned about the creative process after I read Cameron Crowe’s liner notes for The Very Best of the Eagles (released in 2003):

1. The right setting can unlock an idea.  As a touring band, the Eagles lived in hotels.  Don Henley explains to Crowe that he drew upon the obvious — the band’s daily living space while touring — in developing the landmark song “Hotel California.”  He says, “The Beverly Hills Hotel had become something of a focal point — literally and symbolically.”  He discusses how the language of architecture spoke to him, and the mission style of early California contained a certain mystery and romance that informs the song.  To develop the song, he and Glenn Fry literally drove around looking for visual cues to stimulate their thinking, including trips into the desert.  They’d drive out to a house in the San Bernardino Mountains and sleep on the floor to clear their heads and let ideas settle in. Their reliance on physical location to inspire them helped produce one of the great songs in rock history.

2. Sometimes ideas take time to develop.  The classic song “Desperado” existed for years as a fragment in Don Henley’s song book, never seeing the light of day as a full-blown song until the right set of circumstances unlocked its potential.   It wasn’t until the Eagles had released the band’s first album and Henley was learning how to write songs together with Glenn Frey that “Desperado” became a song ready for the public to hear.  Again Don Henley relates in the liner notes: “Glenn came over to write one day, and I showed him this unfinished tune that I had been holding for so many years.  I said, ‘When I play it and sing it, I think of Ray Charles — Ray Charles and Stephen Foster.  It’s really a Southern gothic thing, but we can easily make it more Western.’  Glenn leapt right on it — filled in the blanks and brought structure.  And that was the beginning of our songwriting partnership . . . that’s when we became a team.”  And Frey adds, “I think I brought him ideas and a lot of opinions; he brought me poetry — we were a good team.”  One wonders what would have happened to “Desperado” had Henley forced its creation before he had the right partner?  Fortunately, he had the patience to wait for the right circumstance — a complementary song writer.

3. Ideas are everywhere.  It’s been said that great artists appropriate ideas wherever they can find them, and certainly the creation of “Witchy Woman” is a case in point.  According to the liner notes, the song fragment originated with guitarist Bernie Leadon playing a “strange, minor-key riff that sounded sort of like a Hollywood movie version of Indian music.”  Leadon and Henley recorded a rough version on a cassette.  But the song’s beguiling lyrics “Raven hair, ruby lips, sparks fly from her fingertips”) didn’t develop until Henley came down with a flu and high fever while he was reading a book about Zelda Fitzgerald.  “I think that figured into the mix somehow — along with amorphous images of girls I had met at the Whisky and the Troubadour,” he remembers.  I love it: one part Zelda Fitzgerald, a pinch of L.A. club life, a strange riff, and a high fever — all coming together to create a hit song.  And if you listen to the song lyrics, you can tell he created an archetype of many experiences as opposed to a literal interpretation (which would not have worked).

4. Collaboration = creativity.  Too often we associate working in groups as a creativity killer.  But as Lesson #2 also shows, the right team can unleash creativity, too.  The song “Take It Easy” is another case in point.  “Take It Easy” came about after Jackson Browne started playing a fragment for Glenn Fry.  Browne had already written some of the lyrics based on an experience hanging out in Winslow, Arizona, waiting for a car to be repaired.  As Fry relates, “He started playing it for me and said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t know — I’m stuck.’  So he played the second unfinished verse, and I said, ‘It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.’”  And that’s all it took for the song to suddenly blossom: one brief line nudged Browne to finish what became the first in a long line of Eagles classics.  Collaboration need not occur in the manner of side-by-side writing, though.  Sometimes you can collaborate with many thinkers far and wide through crowd-sourcing.  But just pick the right crowd.

5. Creativity can be organic.  “Victim of Love” derives its power from the hardest rocking guitar sound the Eagles had ever unleashed — and it’s practically a live Eagles song with no overdubs, which is amazing for a band that was famously polished and obsessed with overdubs.  As Fry remembers, “We just said, ‘Look, let’s just cut this thing live and this will be it.  It’ll be what it is.”  I think it’s worth noting that by this time the band had released several albums.  The Eagles were confident enough in their sound to take a risk and record a song in a completely different way they were accustomed to playing.  They might have needed the break from tradition to jolt their creative juices.  They earned the moment.

Fortunately thanks to the continued publication of box set anthologies, you can still find thoughtful liner notes.  My favorite liner notes — intelligently written and insightful — include the 1991 Lynyrd Skynyrd box set (an excellent band biography), The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968, released in 1991 also, and Neil Young’s Decade from 1977.  How about you?

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Marketers must think like technologists

At the recent Razorfish Technology Summit, CEO Bob Lord declared that “CMOs who do not understand technology will die.”  In that spirit, on February 10, my employer Razorfish published its first-ever Razorfish 5: Five Technologies That Will Change Your Business under the guidance of Razorfish Chief Technology Officer Ray Velez.  The audience for this report consists of C-level decision makers.  The report’s premise: technology has become so intertwined with a successful customer experience that CMOs need to think like technologists as well as business strategists.  Razorfish 5 assesses the importance of technologies ranging from cloud computing to multi-touch.  Among its predictions:

• Cloud services will make it easier for businesses to tap into a consumer’s social profile, making brands more social than they are now.  Facebook Connect will become more powerful than Facebook.  More transactional business will be conducted through the cloud, perhaps even stock trading on Facebook and Twitter.

• Multi-touch, already a mainstream phenomenon, will infiltrate retail environments so extensively that multi-touch will be the norm.  Soon a national retailer will have multi-touch in every store.

• Agile software development methods will push businesses to think of software development as a solution to innovation.

I invite marketers to read more by downloading a PDF here.  Moreover, this blog post from the Razorfish Technology blog and this press release also contain summary findings.  Please let us know your reactions.

Tags: agile, cloud, Razorfish

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iPad could unleash creativity

The unveiling of the Apple iPad has inspired much commentary among my Razorfish colleagues.  I’ve read tongue-in-cheek reactions from Amnesia Razorfish.  Domenic Venuto, head of the Razorfish media/entertainment practice in New York, has discussed the iPad’s implications for the publishing industry in a MediaPost article.  And emerging media director Jeremy Lockhorn in Seattle has assessed its potential consumer interactivity with Forbes.  At the risk of overgeneralizing, I’ve summarized here some prevailing impressions from the Razorfish media/entertainment practice:

• The iPad will not just be another platform for distribution content but a means to unleash creativity.  That’s because the iPad promises to bring iPhone functionality to a larger device, which makes it possible to deploy richer experiences and immersive content interfaces on a reading device.  The iPad will not be just a larger screen for reading words.

• The iPad will encourage more distribution of interactive video especially as video becomes easier to distribute across multiple platforms.

• The iPad is especially appealing to Razorfish because we create experience that build businesses.  We can expect multi-touch capability to provide no end to the applications that can be created for businesses looking to connect to consumers or improve employee productivity.  What’s also going to change the way brand experiences get created is the likely capability that the device will support interaction by more than one person.

• One of our clients is already looking to roll out iPad versions of titles, which shows how seriously media companies want to embrace the technology.  However, Razorfish counsels our clients to view platform developments like the iPad in context of one’s broader marketing and publishing strategies.  We advise clients against embracing the iPad just for the sake of saying they are deploying a content distribution strategy that utilizes the iPad.

• Apple is not alone in upping the stakes for device readers.  Amazon’s recent announcement that the Kindle will support third-party application development in 2010 opens up the Kindle for experimentation and innovation.

I find these comments by Jeremy Lockhorn and Domenic Venuto to be instructive:

• Jeremy as cited in Forbes: “[The iPad's consumer interactivity] has big implications for advertising as an educational tool and as a sales channel . . . It means that when consumers watch TV shows and movies, they could potentially be able to do more than just play, pause and stop.  When viewing an episode of TV’s Mad Men, for example, consumers could tap on objects, such as Don Draper’s hat, to get more information about the items and where to buy them.”

• Domenic as cited in MediaPost:  “We’re incredibly excited about the increased surface size we get to play with for a multi-touch device.  Whether it’s an advertising or publishing client we’re building new experiences for, this breathes life into the category.”

I don’t think you can overstate a simple truth: the bigger screen is better for consumers who like the interactivity that comes with devices like iPhones but are tired of squinting as they read hand-held devices.  Let’s face it: the older you get, the more likely you’re welcoming a bigger screen.  I wonder if Apple has found the right product at the right time for Baby Boomers?  If so, we’re talking about people with bigger disposable incomes.

Special thanks to Domenic Venuto, Jeremy Lockhorn, and Katie Lamkin for their ideas leading up to this post.

Tags: Apple, iPad, Kindle, Razorfish

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The Top 10 Searches of the Decade

Tired of reading lengthy analyses of the decade we just left behind?  My employer Razorfish has a solution: a visual depiction of the major trends affecting search engine marketing throughout the past 10 years.   A Decade in Search is a rich media experience that touches upon major trends and events ranging from the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 to the launch of Google Caffeine in 2009.  According to A Decade in Search, the top 10 searches of the 2000s were:

1. Facebook

2. Baidu

3. MySpace

4. World Cup

5. Wikipedia

6. Britney Spears

7. Harry Potter

8. Shakira

9. Lord of the Rings

10. Barack Obama

To get insights about the decade ahead for search, please check out Razorfish Search Marketing Trends.  Meantime, do any of the Top 10 searches surprise you?

Tags: Baidu, Britney Spears, Facebook, Lord of the Rings, MySpace, Obama, Razorfish, search, Shakira, Wikipedia, World Cup

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Help Haiti

Through social media, we’ve become virtually real-time witnesses to the earthquake in Haiti, but more importantly, we can become active participants in helping out.  As reported by CNN, the Red Cross is mobilizing support via Twitter.  All you need to do is text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts.  You can also spread the word by re-Tweeting posts from @RedCross.  I am sure there are many more ways to give; in the interest of time, I’ve cited the @RedCross effort.

Tags: Haiti, Red Cross

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The face of a great brand

The best-selling album of the decade?  Not Eminem.  Not Usher.  But The Beatles 1, a collection of Beatles Number One singles that has sold 11.4 million units since its release in November 2000.  Pretty astonishing for a group that broke up decades ago.

One can argue that the lack of Beatles music in digital format contributed to the sale of the physical CD. But I think there’s a lot more to the popularity of The Beatles 1: quite simply, the Beatles created an enduring brand.  I’m not talking about successful marketing (although the band has been well marketed over the years).  No, the Beatles created a great brand by creating a great experience — the songs and albums that delight us over and over each time we hear them.  Without compelling music, the Beatles might have enjoyed success initially but not this kind of long-term loyalty from one generation to the next.

Sound obvious?  I hope it sounds so obvious that all of us aspire to create something great.  I’m not saying we can all be Beatles, but we can follow their example — by trying to create something memorable for others, whether you are publishing content, providing a service, or marketing a product.

It’s worth pointing out that the Beatles enjoyed wild success during its 1964 invasion of the States after the band’s music began to take hold. The music (specifically the song “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) ignited the interest among American consumers.  The promotion of the band built off that interest, in turn.

To build a great brand, don’t get obsessed with generating buzz or influencing the influencers.  Create something great first.

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Word-of-mouth supergeniuses

I walked away from the 2009 Word of Mouth Supergenius event with many ideas and impressions, a fraction of which made their way to my Twitter stream in real-time.  The event, hosted by Gaspedal, brought together leading word-of-mouth practitioners who shared tips for marketers seeking to build their brands in authentic ways.  Some take-aways:

• Coca-Cola empowers its employees and associates to become brand ambassadors through social media instead of trying to control them.  Adam Brown, Coca-Cola’s group director for digital communications, discussed how Coca-Cola is revising and disseminating its own guidelines, not just for employees but for bottlers.  It’s encouraging to see a major brand like Coca-Cola realizing the power of its own employees and business partners to create word of mouth.

• Starbucks isn’t afraid to fight back when unfairly attacked by rumors that spread via word of mouth, as discussed by Matthew Guiste, Starbucks digital strategist.  When Starbucks notices a nasty rumor like the false story about its attitude toward military personnel, the company uses word-of-mouth tools like Facebook to push back — and hard.  The brand is not afraid of looking like a “corporate big brother.”  And when Starbucks fans notice Starbucks speaking up, they join in to defend the company.  I found Matthew’s points to be inspiring to any major brand in the public light.  If your critics are using word-of-mouth unfairly to attack, it’s OK to fight back.

• Too many brands worry about transparency.  Brands should not participate in word of mouth to be transparent.  They should use word of mouth to build credibility, with transparency being a means to doing that.  Transparency was one of the many topics discussed during a free-wheeling discussion hosted by Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation.

• I also appreciated what Mitch had to say about “in praise of slow.”  The digital world is fast-moving, obviously.  But it takes time — and a lot of patience — to build a true community especially through word of mouth.  Mitch challenged bloggers in the audience to focus on creating meaningful content over a period of time instead of worrying about how frequently blog posts are written.

• Buzz does not create evangelists; evangelists create buzz.  And the key to inspiring evangelists is creating a great experience, a key take-away from a discussion by John Moore.

Creating experiences, not one-way messages, resonates with my employer Razorfish.  We’ve placed a heavy emphasis on helping clients like Mercedes-Benz USA bring their brands to life through compelling experiences, mostly in the digital world.  In 2010, you can expect to hear more from Razorfish about the importance of experiences that build businesses — in commentary from executives like our chairman Clark Kokich, in thought leadership, and, of course, in the work we do for clients, to name a few ways.   Meantime there are many lessons to be learned from the supergeniuses who spoke on December 16.

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Escaping the social media echo chamber

Embracing social media is like speaking in public.  Technically any company can do it.  But doing it well is a different story.  On December 8, my employer Razorfish announced the development of new offerings for those marketers who want to employ social media and influencers effectively.

The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing strategy offerings help clients create approaches for employing social media and influencers to meet their business and marketing needs.  The offerings build on experiences gained during the past several years with clients ranging from Carnival Cruise Lines to Levi Strauss & Co.

Although Razorfish helps companies employ social in many ways, our latest set of offerings focus on formulating strategies to use social in a measurable manner.  Why?  Because too many companies have told us they have been pushed into building Facebook pages and Twitter accounts without even knowing why or to what benefit.  They tell us they wish they had created a coherent strategy for linking social to their real business needs instead of implementing a bunch of tactics and asking questions later.

So, here are a few things Razorfish is not doing through our offerings:

• Promising to increase your Twitter followers by 900 percent.

• Using stories about Motrin moms to scare you into adopting Social Influence Marketing.

Rather, we are:

• Helping clients formulate sustainable and measurable approaches to social.

• Ensuring that our clients’ social strategies break free of the vast social media echo chamber.  Razorfish helps clients connect social to their larger marketing and business needs.

To be clear, Razorfish has been actively involved in Social Influence Marketing for quite some time.  What we are doing now is formally packaging our intellectual property around social strategy in a more repeatable way.  My colleagues such as Shiv Singh can tell you even more about our new offerings.

Tags: Carnival Cruise Lines, Levi's, Razorfish, Social Influence Marketing, social media

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The Tiger Woods brand will be just fine

Tiger Woods might be in a world of hurt, but his brand is going to be just fine.  For a famous athlete, he has a bland, anonymous public persona.  His image is built purely on sports performance and not much else.  His self-described “transgression” has not tarnished his image because, well, he lacks one.

It would have been a different story if:

• He had done something to tarnish his image as an athlete, like, say, smoke crack or take steroids.  Putting his health at risk would have been in greater conflict with his brand as an athlete than cheating on his wife because his entire public persona is wrapped up in his success as a golfer.

• His behavior had alienated the middle-class Americans that corporate sponsors worry about.  But marital infidelity is too common among mainstream society to tarnish his appeal.  Contrast his situation with the scandal that resulted from Michael Vick’s involvement in illegal dog fighting.  It’s not so much the illegality of dog fighting that turned Vick into a pariah to corporate sponsors — but rather middle-class America’s perception of dog fighting as repulsive, fringe behavior.  Chances are the target demographic for Accenture (a former employer of mine) or Nike know someone personally who has had an affair.  I doubt that few, if anyone, in that demographic know someone personally involved in dog fighting.

• He was a female athlete.  An unspoken “boys will be boys” attitude prevails when it comes to celebrities misbehaving, a standard that does not apply to women.  How marketable do you think the married Danica Patrick would be if a story broke that she was cheating on her husband, replete with saucy texts to guys and hush-hush voice mails to alleged lovers? Do you think Dara Torres, a mom and successful Olympic swimmer, could have survived a revelation about marital infidelity during the 2008 Summer Olympics?

Bottom line: Tiger Woods the brand will be just fine because Tiger Woods did nothing to hurt Tiger Woods the athlete.

Tags: Accenture, Danica Patrick, Dara Torres, Michael Vick, Nike, Tiger Woods

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