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In a previous blog post, I mentioned that my Avenue A | Razorfish colleague Joe Crump was going to discuss “Digital Darwinism” at the Cannes International Advertising Festival on June 21. Today I’m making available to you his final presentation courtesy of SlideShare. Make sure you check out the top 10 digital brands, which Joe unveiled at Cannes using the Avenue A | Razorfish proprietary Brand Genes Scoreboard:

1. Google

2. Apple

3. YouTube

4. Flickr

5. Netflix

6. Nike

6. eBay

8. IKEA

9. Coca-Cola

10. Mercedes

These brands scored the highest when we measured them against atributes like immersion (how easy it is for a consumer to become engaged with your digital home), social (whether a consumer finds your brand worth sharing), and adaptive (how well a brand responds to a consumer’s digital environment), among other qualities. By contrast, the Interbrand top brands are as follows:

1. Coca-Cola

2. Mercedes

3. General Electric

4. Nokia

5. Microsoft

6. IBM

7. Disney

8. McDonald’s

9. Toyota

10. Intel

Coca-Cola and Mercedes are the only two Interbrand top brands that make the Avenue A | Razorfish top 10 list. So . . . do you agree or disagree with Avenue A | Razorfish? For more reading on Digital Darwinism, go here.

How does a retailer like Best Buy build build awareness in the digital world for consumer products like cameras and GPS devices? It’s not like you can test a camera on a website.

Enter the Best Buy Summer Hub.

Built with my employer, Avenue A | Razorfish, the Best Buy Summer Hub employs rich media, snappy graphics, and a Facebook application to help consumers learn how consumer electronics devices can make summer more fun. The hub provide vacation tips relevant to six primary categories that people enjoy during summer: the beach, hiking and camping, the backyard, travel, sports and activities, and the road trip.

For example, in the “backyard” section, a brief video clip explains how you can create an outdoor theater in your backyard by using a bedsheet for a screen and a video projector with a built-in DVD player. I like how the tip is shared, too. A member of the iconic Best Buy “blue shirt nation” team quickly shares the tip accompanied by an image of the type of projector that would work best. She doesn’t perform a hard sell, either — she suggests you can borrow this equipment from your office, not just buy it.

(One suggestion: I realize it’s probably too expensive to do, but I’d love to hear some authentic songs of summer playing in the background as I visit the site, like “Soak up the Sun” by Sheryl Crow or the classic “Summer” by War.)

I think the digital trip journal is pretty cool, too:

Just click on the icon running at the top of the Summer Hub screen, and you are taken to Facebook, where you can load this application on your profile. From there, you can create a customized journal of a vacation and invite your fellow Facebook friends to keep track of your experience.

Of course, you can upload digital photos, too, which sounds like standard operating procedure at first blush. But think about it for a moment: instead of trying to sell you a digital camera, Best Buy creates a fun reason for you to want to own one and use it.

I actually just started a digital journal. Trust me: if I can do it, anyone can.

So why should you care about the Summer Hub? Because it’s one example of where marketing is headed: not pushing a message or a product at consumers but providing a captivating experience, usually one with emotional appeal.

We live in a world where consumers suffer from a massive case of ADD. We skim content briefly all over the digital world, snacking on small morsels of information and entertainment from digital video, blogs, websites, and portals. And we multi-task, too. (In fact, I’m toggling between email and a video while I write this bog.) How can even the most smartly crafted 30-second message reach us anymore? So ironically marketers are going in the opposite direction by creating entertaining and fun destinations where we won’t mind spending time with their brands.

That’s where experiences like the Summer Hub come into play: they’re not about overt messaging. The company branding is more subtle. Best Buy is banking on the chance that we’ll be engaged enough to spend some serious dwell time with the Best Buy brand and eventually buy a product online or in-store. Sure beats getting beat over the head with a loud banner ad.

Is there such a thing as a digital brand? Joe Crump certainly thinks so.

Joe is an executive in the strategy practice of Avenue A | Razorfish, my employer. On June 21 at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Joe will unveil the top 10 digital brands based on a new scorecard (created by Avenue A | Razorfish) known as the Brand Gene Scoreboard.

Joe contends that brands need to view the digital world differently than the off-line world. In his view, digital is “ruthlessly Darwinian.” Consumers form impressions of your website in milliseconds. If they don’t like what they see, they can shut you out forever with one easy mouse click. Or tell their friends how boring you are you on blogs, review sites, and social hangouts like Facebook.

His view: brands must tap into the immersive and social nature of digital to survive. They have to be more fast moving than ever if they want to put digital at the core of their success. He’s decided to do something about it by developing the Brand Gene Scoreboard to help companies assess how digital their brands really are.

The scorecard identifies seven attributes such as immersion (how easy it is for a consumer to become engaged with your digital home), social (whether a consumer finds your brand worth sharing), and adaptive (how well a brand responds to a consumer’s digital environment), among other qualities. Flickr, Netflix, and Nike score well when measured by the scorecard. But some of the leading brands according to Interbrand, like GE and IBM, perform poorly when we apply the Brand Gene Scoreboard to measure their digital brand savvy.

Joe’s point of view is not without controversy. To the naysayers, there is no such thing as a digital brand anymore than there are digital people. You don’t need digital to make your brand “social” — good-old fashioned word of mouth occurs in the offline world all the time and will continue to do so. And brick-and-mortar stores like American Girl illustrate that you don’t need digital to be immersive.

And yet . . . digital is different. Yes, people have been marketing through word of mouth for a long time. But as Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff point out in The Groundswell, digital turbocharges inherently social behaviors and takes word of mouth — for better or worse — to a whole new level. What used to be a long, gradual process can now happen literally overnight because of social media tools like blogs. And there’s no question that a digital destination like shaveeverywhere can turn even the most mundane product demonstration into an engaging and fun experience that’s hard to convey in the offline world.

If you are at Cannes, you can see his talk Saturday, June 21, at 1 p.m., Debussy Theatre, Palais des Festivals. If not, you can hear a flavor of his ideas by viewing the presentation at the top of this blog post (this is a preview of the Cannes presentation, which Joe delivered at the Avenue A | Razorfish Client Summit in New York on May 14.) Check this out, too, for further reading, and let me know if you agree or disagree.

What do a liquor company, sports brand, and a body deodorant have in common?

Smirnoff, Nike, and Lynx are all examples of brands in Asia/Pacific that are working with my employer Avenue A | Razorfish to embrace Social Influence Marketing, or employing social media and social influencers to achieve one’s marketing and business objectives. I recently gathered these and more examples for some research here at Avenue A | Razorfish. The experience opened my eyes to the international phenomenon of Social Influence Marketing. I hope these examples help you think more globally about marketing:

Smirnoff

The Avenue A | Razorfish Sydney office — known in Australia as Amnesia Group — is helping Smirnoff employ social media to build buzz for the Smirnoff Experience Secret Party. According to the Amnesia Group blog, Smirnoff is conducting a “treasure hunt to give away tickets to the Smirnoff Experience Secret Party 2008. Clues are released on a blog to tickets hidden across Australia. There is also a Facebook group which gives help and exclusive clues to ticket hunters. If that’s not enough cyber-fun, there’s also a GPS ticket tracker, which his switched on from time to time.” Want to read more? Check it out here.

Nike

The Avenue A | Razorfish Hong Kong office — known in China as e-Crusade — worked with Nike to create a mobile game that promotes the Nike Air Force One. You can experience more of that here. Two things stand out for me on this one: 1) use of mobile devices and 2) integration with offline.

Nike Women “This Is Love” Facebook Premiere Show Ticket Application

e-Crusade built this application to promote the Nike Women movie, Find Love. Facebookers were encouraged to send Premiere Show Tickets to their friends and show their love for them. The effective use of social media brought more than 4,000 Facebookers to watch the movie online. More details here.

Lynx

Lynx is the name in Australia for the Axe brand of male personal care products manufactured by Unilever. The target audience is the Gen Y male. If you know anything about the Axe/Lynx brand, you know that Unilever employs an in-your-face risqué approach to build brand with young men. Lynx is no exception. Basically the message is this: guys, Lynx will make you more attractive to women. I think this comes through in the Lynx MySpace page.

This is an example of linking Social Influence Marketing to other forms of branding. In addition to creating the MySpace page, Amnesia Group also designed the Lynx Effect, which won a Webby award a few weeks ago. Together the Lynx MySpace page and Lynx Effect website show how a firm can take advantage of the engaging nature of digital (and win a Webby for content that, if created for your personal use, would probably prompt a visit from HR).

In both instances, Lynx sends the same message: our product is all about making you more attractive to women. But in the digital world, you can convey that message through an experience, as evidenced by the games, polls, videos, and other content on the site. What’s more, you can take the experience with you on your mobile phone and download content on to your desk top.

ninemsn

To build brand and usage for ninemsn, Amnesia Group launched the Prize Rush campaign, described again on the Amnesia Group blog: The approach: use a trivia game to generate Live Search queries. More than 4,000 Prize Rush members were recruited across MySpace, Facebook, and ninemsn spaces, creating more than 11,000 posts. More than 68 million search queries were generated in a time span of 8 weeks. I like this one because the campaign met objectives for both marketing (build buzz for ninemsn) and business (generate Live Search queries).

Down the road, I will post Social Influence Marketing examples from Europe. Meantime, I welcome your comments and questions.

Have you ever wanted to get grounded in some basic web 2.0 concepts but were afraid to ask? On June 10, my Avenue A | Razorfish colleague Dave Friedman provided some answers in his presentation “Web 2.0: A Reality Check” at the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference. I have posted his presentation for your benefit, and here are some highlights:

It’s not about the technology

Web 2.0 is not a technology. It’s a technology wedded to a culture of collaboration and creativity on the web. Most importantly, it’s about consumers using digital to collaborate with each other. (Dave actually cited the Wikipedia defintion of web 2.0. Although I enjoy Wikipedia, the defintion seemed verbose and vague.) Example: 84 percent of affluent consumers surveyed by the Luxury Institute use ratings and services before making a purchase.

The driving principle behind web 2.0 – collaboration among people – is not new. People have been relying on each other for information about products and services for as long as merchants have existed. But web 2.0 technologies have turbocharged that experience. (Fortunately Dave resisted the urge to say “Web 2.0 is collaboration on steroids” or else I would have heckled him.)

The web 2.0 tool that matters most to retailers

Retailers usually understand the collaboration part of web 2.0. But they are mystified by the proliferation of web 2.0 media and tools, all of which have quickly formed their own argot: blogs, wikis, widgets, and so on.

Rather than attempt an exhaustive overview of most web 2.0 tools, Dave then focused on the most powerful one for retailers to understand: ratings and reviews, which allow customers to rate products and services and share their ratings with others. Ratings and reviews are a central part of the shopping process now. According to Forrester Research, half of people who shop online first do product research on Amazon.com because of the availability of reviews posted by their peers. Implication: having a rating and review section is not optional. Your customers expect it.

Social shopping

Dave also discussed how web 2.0 has fueled the social shopping phenomenon, or people relying on others to help them shop. The web has always been an effective place to do “surgical shopping,” or using price-comparison and search tools to find the right place at the right time to find a particular product you have in mind. But the problem with surgical shopping is that it’s not fun. Although there will always be a place for surgical shopping, digital can make the process more of an engaging experience by giving consumers the ability to explore different brands and involve your peers in the decision-making process. For example, on Kaboodle.com, consumers can find other people with similar interest in a product or category and share their passion for (or disgust with) their experience.

How retailers can embrace web 2.0

Finally, Dave discussed four ways retailers can embrace web 2.0:

1. Support multi-dimensional product comparisons. Give your customers access to product reviews and ratings even if you sell them through another channel. But make it possible to compare product, features, and styles.

2. Build places to make it easy for customers to play. Make it possible for customers to connect with other people. For instance, the Behr online paint store addresses the typically collaborative process of home design. At behr.com, you can upload photos and create possible designs based on lifestyle and color palette. After you create the ideas, you can share them with friends and family.

3. Engage in the conversation. Customers do want to hear from you – but they want to have a conversation. For example, Overstock.com includes a user forum and product rating function. You can even tell Overstock.com when you find lower prices elsewhere – which gives Overstock.com valuable input from the marketplace in addition to providing a voice for consumers.

4. Give people the ability to take your content and use it in other places. Your customer does not wake up every morning with a burning desire to visit online retailing websites. So make it possible for them to share information about you with their friends via“share with a friend” features. Clothing retailer Karma Loop turns customers into representatives for its brand by making it possible for you to download and design your own widget and post on your Facebook page.

Dave’s concluding point: if you’re still not sure what to do next, use your own network of trusted colleagues to get ideas – in other words, apply a little web 2.0-style collaboration to learn. That’s how Dave wrote the presentation you see on this blog post.

Meantime, check out these reactions in the blogosphere:

Tim Parry, Multichannel Merchant

Phil Windley’s Technometria

I welcome your feedback, too.

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed how marketers can learn a thing or two from the techniques of televangelists and how religious institutions like Willow Creek Community Church have successfully adopted secular marketing tactics. Now comes the June 13 Wall Street Journal, which discusses how U.S. churches are acting like global brands. To wit:

• The 8,000-strong Flamingo Road Church operates four locations in Florida and virtually through a location on Peru. The church seeks to grow to 50 locations and 100,000 members, not unlike a multi-national corporation. And, just like a global brand, the church uses its own logo, visual identity, and music at all its locations. Church leader Rev. Troy Gramling told The Wall Street Journal he seeks to copy the success of Starbucks and wants to develop “the look, the feel, the branding idea, of what Flamingo Road is.”

Sounds like a CEO talking! But I have some free marketing advice for the reverend: if you really seek to build a global brand for your church, lose the name. Flamingo Road Church is named after its Florida address. But I’m thinking Sin City.

Some might find it distasteful for a religious institution of any denomination to so nakedly embrace marketing. But religious institutions are no different than secular organizations that seek to attract and retain members: they need to make themselves known if they’re going to succeed. And like secular organizations, they can choose any manner of tasteful or obnoxious ways to spread their message through marketing. For instance, Rev. Gramling of Flamingo Road maintains The Potential blog where you can have a conversation with him. Opening up a dialogue in the blogosphere is a natural and smart move. But on the other hand, “prosperity minister” Mike Murdock uses a website and TV appearances to grovel for cash and make vague pronouncements about achieving wisdom. I have no idea what his message is except that he wants your money.

Regardless of whether you share their beliefs, you can see some marked differences in how they use marketing: Gramling being forward looking and conversational, Murdock employing the tired old approach of talking at you.

One cautionary note: for many years Willow Creek became the model mega church of smart marketing by offering people a vibrant, show-biz style alternative to the church-going experience. But Willow Creek focused too much on attracting members with contemporary music, skits, and other forms of experiential marketing. The church didn’t put much thought into keeping its “customers” after they’d joined. The church failed to customize its approach, and now it’s been reeling from a membership exodus. Let’s now see how a religious institution adapts its marketing and “service” approach.

The June 9 Advertising Age read like an obituary for the news publishing industry. On Page 1, Ad Age reported that U.S. News & World Report is dropping to a biweekly frequency in response to declining ad page sales and readership of the print edition. On page 3, Ad Age reported on Tribune Company’s announced plans to downsize its operations for essentially the same reasons. (Ad Age also printed a copy of a sometimes cringe-worthy memo that Tribune owner Sam Zell wrote to company employees, in which he refers to employees as “partners” and dances around the specter of layoffs.)

Apparently the downsizing begins at the top. On June 13, the Chicago Tribune reported the departure of publisher Scott C. Smith.

Ironically enough, I was meeting with a bright 20-something professional this week, and in the course of our conversation, she casually mentioned that she’s never purchased a hard copy of a newspaper in her life. “I’ve grown up digital,” she told me. “Why would I want to mess around with ink-covered paper in my hands when I can get all the news I want each morning on my personal device?”

Her remark speaks volumes about the news publishing industry’s struggle to transition to the digital era.

So what do you do about it? If you’re a news daily like, say, the Chicago Sun-Times, I think you need to realize that readers don’t care about your brand. I’d make the Sun-Times brand recede to the background in favor of promoting its individual superstar brands like Roger Ebert and its sports columnists. The Sun-Times is no longer a news destination that many people care about. But a copy of the Sun-Times can serve as the go-to place for the best entertainment and sports commentary in the industry, if it wants to be.

Meanwhile, back in 2003, Rolling Stone magazine did something completely audacious to lock in readers of its print edition: it offered a lifetime subscription for a one-time fee of the ridiculously low $99. That’s right: for $99, you got Rolling Stone for life. Rolling Stone is one of my all-time favorite publications. So the choice was a no-brainer. Sure enough, my subscription tag has an expiration date of August 24, 2056. Which raises a few intriguing questions:

1. How did they decide I was going to kick the bucket by then?

2. In the unlikely event I do hang on that long, can I demand a free renewal?

3. In the more likely event I croak before then, will each issue simply pile up in my mail box for decades?

The lesson from Rolling Stone: desperate times call for desperate measures.

A May 28 article by Stuart Elliott of The New York Times and a June 8 Associated Press article mention how Coors Brewing Co. has embraced Social Influence Marketing™ — or employing social media and social influencers to meet the business and marketing needs of the enterprise. As discussed in this blog post, the effort has not been without controversy.

As reported in The New York Times, the Coors Light brand, working with my employer, Avenue A | Razorfish:

• Launched a MySpace page to strengthen its brand relevance among males aged 21-29. The MySpace page isn’t just another destination plastered with ads. The page provides downloadable widgets such as a Happy Hour Locater that you can use to find bars in your zip code that serve Coors Light, and an “Excuse-o-rator” that generates random excuses to leave work early to celebrate happy hour.

• Created a viral video, the “Perfect Pour.” The video, posted on YouTube, is a humorous stunt — intentionally and obviously doctored — in which beer drinkers seemingly pour beer flawlessly from the new Coors Light vented wide mouthed can into a drinking glass from impossible angles and locations like behind one’s back or from the top of a roof. The video comes in two versions, one at a party, and the other at a bar.  Since their launch on April 8, the videos have been seen more than 400,000 times.

In both instances, Coors isn’t employing social networking sites and YouTube videos to embrace social media for its own sake. Rather, the company wisely employs social media and the power of viral marketing to achieve two business objectives: build brand with Gen Y males of legal drinking age and promote the vented wide mouth can.

Since The New York Times discussed the efforts, some bloggers have expressed disappointment and even shock that Coors did not disclose the fact that the “perfect pour” videos were actually the work of an agency. The implication is that Coors deceived consumers by not disclosing its role or that of Avenue A | Razorfish.

At the risk of sounding like an apologist, I disagree with the criticism, but I’m also interested in your opinion — should Coors have been more transparent in the effort or not? Here’s my take:

• How many people seriously believed those perfect pour stunts were the work of amateurs? The opening disclaimer (”this video should not be viewed by anyone under the age of 21″) should be your first clue right off the bat that this is no amateur effort. And it’s obvious from the comments posted on YouTube that most viewers were in on the joke from the start. Some were even critical of the video for not being even more imaginative.

• Coors is simply tapping into the engaging and social nature of the digital world by providing an entertainment experience. Experiential marketing is all about engaging consumers instead of pushing messages at them. The branding comes through in the obvious product placement of Coors Light and the conversational references to the wide mouth vented can throughout the video. I would argue that Coors revealing its role more obviously would be like a magician explaining a magic trick in the middle of a performance, thus spoiling the fun.

For another perspectives, check out this post from Launch Squad.

I’m interested in your reactions.

On May 14-15, I helped my employer Avenue A | Razorfish organize its 8th annual Client Summit in New York. Each year at this event, company executives, guest speakers, and clients discuss the state of the art in digital marketing. The theme of the 2008 event was “Rock the Digital World” (an homage to guest keynote speaker Sir George Martin, the fifth Beatle, who gave the audience an inside glimpse at the making of the seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). At this year’s Client Summit, Avenue A | Razorfish wanted to challenge the audience of digital marketing executives to think of their roles differently — more as leaders, not just developers of successful digital marketing programs. Here are two take-aways for me now that I’ve had a moment to reflect on those hectic two days:

1. Social media hits the mainstream. More than once, our guests noticed the number of times our agenda speakers discussed social media. I was asked whether Avenue A | Razorfish was trying to make a statement about its importance. Well, yes and no. On the surface, there certainly was an impressive line-up from the social media realm: Charlene Li of Forrester Research drew upon her book The Groundswell to deliver an insightful keynote about the ways social media are changing the conversation between the consumer and marketer. My colleague Shiv Singh hosted a panel on applying social media as part of Social Influence Marketing. Megan O’Connor of Levi’s demonstrated how the Levi’s 501 Design Challenge used a social community to build brand with female consumers. Ted Cannis and Olivier Pierini of Ford Motor Company showed how Ford embraces social media inside and outside the company through efforts like the Ford blikinet and the Ford Global Auto Shows blog. And Andy England, CMO of Coors, touched upon social media several times (e.g., the Coors Light MySpace page) as he described the ways that Coors has embraced digital in its marketing. But here’s the thing: we did not deliberately set out to pack the agenda with social media. All we wanted to do was find some cutting-edge content to make marketers think of new ways of embracing the digital world, and the social media examples like Levi’s and Ford bubbled to the surface organically. This story just goes to show how social media is becoming a natural part of our lives, regardless of our intentions.

2. The importance of marketing as an experience. Avenue A | Razorfish CEO Clark Kokich discussed how the future of marketing is creating experiences that engage the consumer, not plastering marketing messages across the digital world. (Example: the Post Cereals Postopia website doesn’t push messages about Post Cereal; it’s an immersive world, hosted by Post Cereals, that families can enjoy.) Two Client Summit speakers showed what Clark meant. John McVay, the Avenue A | Razorfish client partner for AT&T, performed a live demonstration of how Microsoft Surface table technology can make the purchase of mobile devices fun through a touch-screen experience. (By the way, to pull off the demo, our production team needed to mount a camera in the ceiling of the ballroom of the Sheraton New York.) Then Terri Walter, Avenue A | Razorfish vice president of Emerging Media, and David Polinchock of the Brand Experience Lab performed an audience participation game that’s best described through this blog post by my colleague Iain McDonald of our Sydney office (which operates locally under the name Amnesia). Basically Terri and David made us think about how an an advertiser can create a branded game experience for any large gathering people — say a theater full movie goers waiting for a movie to start. Why sit around watching cheesy ads in a theater when we can interact with the movie screen and each other through a game that employs a webcam? I would happily do that if an advertiser will participate.

So, to summarize both ideas from the 2008 Client Summit in one sentence: the future of marketing is tapping into the social and immersive nature of the digital world to create engaging experiences, not to push messages.

By the way, many thanks to Deidre Everdij and the team at Highlight Event Design for producing our most demanding Client Summit ever. Deidre and her team saved our butts many times throughout the show. Talk about rocking the digital world! You can read more about the Client Summit here and here.

On April 17, AT&T worked with Microsoft and my employer Avenue A | Razorfish to launch the first retail application of Microsoft Surface touch-and-recognition table technology at a limited number of AT&T wireless stores. Surface promises to improve upon the often-confusing process of buying a mobile phone in a retail store, and even make learning about mobile devices fun. Until its public launch, though, most consumers hadn’t even seen a Surface table. Few user experience designers had, either. So what was it like to create a user experience design for the launch? Superhype sat down with Rich Bowen of Avenue A | Razorfish to find out. Rich is a user experience lead dedicated to the AT&T account. He lives in Denver, and his work supports AT&T digital advertising and website design across the agency’s Atlanta, Austin, and Seattle offices. His job was to work with a team to design how consumers would interact with Surface tables in the stores. Here is his story.

Superhype: Rich, most consumers haven’t even seen a Surface table. Why are they important?

Rich Bowen: Surface can make the buying experience a lot more fun, especially for products that require high levels of consideration before purchase. With Surface, a salesperson does not need to explain how a mobile device works or whether AT&T can provide coverage to your area of the country. Instead, the consumer and salesperson can sit down at an interactive screen and see the information they need. For instance, using Surface, consumers can review features of a device by placing it on a table. Surface recognizes the device and displays a graphics-rich overview of features. Consumers can also use touch-and-hand movements to explore an interactive map that reveals how much coverage AT&T provides in different areas of the United States.

Superhype: When did you first learn about the opportunity to design a Surface experience?

RB: John McVay, the Avenue A | Razorfish client partner for AT&T, called me back in August of 2007 to say we had an opportunity to work with Microsoft and AT&T to bring digital to the retail space. I don’t even think Surface had a name yet. It was understood to be a “Microsoft multi-touch experience,” and that’s about it.

Superhype: What was your reaction? Had you ever seen a Surface table at all?

RB: I was very excited. We have been trying to move digital beyond the web all along, and one way to do that is through the multi-channel shopping experience. Avenue A | Razorfish already does a good job with the online part, but Surface would give us another opportunity to use digital to touch our consumers in the retail space at the point of purchase.

Superhype: Had you ever seen a Surface table before you got the assignment?

RB: I had never seen one, and it was understood that we’d need to start designing the experience without seeing one for awhile.

Superhype: Tell me about the team you assembled to pull this off.

RB: We assembled a team consisting of two user experience leads (including myself), an art director, a creative director, and a technology expert. The team was selected based on our experiences working with animation. We also needed to work in an even more collaborative fashion than we normally do because Surface was an unknown experience. Normally the user experience designers create a design and hand it off to the art director and creative lead to create the look and feel. But Surface was just too new, and there were too many unknowns, for us to be handing off work to each other like that. We set up the team to work in a room together and tackle questions and issues on the spot.

Superhype: So how did the team get started?

RB: We relied on some processes that work in general for us when we design experiences. It doesn’t matter whether you’re designing for a website or an in-store Surface experience: everything starts with a business challenge and consumer insight.

We first talked to AT&T to understand the business challenge. Andy Austin, the director of retail experience at AT&T, challenged us to decrease the time that customers spend with sales people and increase total order volume in-store – basically to sell more and do it in less time. Andy believed Surface would help him do that, and that’s what we set out to do. Once we knew that, we had our path laid out for us.

The second key driver of the design is consumer insight. We already had a strong understanding of how consumers research and shop for mobile devices online and offline because we have a long history of designing websites and digital advertising for AT&T going back many years. We’ve designed personas (composite sketches of a company’s customers) for AT&T’s wireline and mobile businesses going back to 2005. Our understanding of how consumers shop at AT&T stores was crucial to the process.

The team also agreed on how Surface would work in the store before we designed the experience. Our assumption was that the use of Surface would never be self-directed – it would be a tool to assist the sales agent, not replace the agent. And our consumer research told us that buying a mobile device can be complicated and challenging for consumers — so the last thing consumers want to do when they walk into a retail store is have to learn how to use a Surface table. We also needed to remember that consumers are going into the store to learn about hand sets, rate plans, and accessories. The Surface table would need to support that process of learning about devices and accessories, not get in the way of it. This assumption was important because as we started designing the experience, we would eliminate some ideas that, while kind of cool, would have gotten in the way of learning about mobile devices.

Superhype: Once you had an understanding of the business need and consumer insight, how did you begin the design?

RB: We worked with Microsoft experts to learn more about what the Surface table was going to look like. Microsoft shared with us documentation to help us envision how Surface operates. Then we began to develop storyboards for the Surface experience. This is where our understanding of consumer buying behavior comes into play again. We were able to figure out the relationship between the consumer, the table, and the customer service representative. Knowing what we know about how customers shop for mobile devices, we thought through the content and messaging that would work – devoid of any specific interaction design.

For instance, we knew that consumers usually walk into a wireless story with three basic questions on their minds: can the carrier provide coverage to the geographic areas of the country that matter to me? What kind of rate plan do you offer? And what kinds of devices and accessories are right for me?

So our first storyboard used the metaphor of a map to help a consumer understand whether AT&T supported adequate geographic coverage. And then we figured out storyboards for learning about rate plans and devices.

Superhype: How do you design a storyboard for someone sitting at a Surface table when you’ve not used one?

RB: The design team literally sat down in a room and pretended like we were sitting at a Surface table. We examined all the documentation provided by Microsoft and found some early videos of people interacting with Surface. Then we catalogued all the types of gestures a consumer might have with Surface — how you touch Surface, how it receives information, and what Surface does after receiving information. I’m talking literally about the gestures are how you interact with a table - touching two corners of a table, tapping an object on the table, or circling information. We mapped the gestures against the different interactions in the sales process.

When we designed the storyboard for the U.S. map, we started thinking about the ways people are accustomed to using a map. We mimicked how people interact with a paper map because many of those interactions are the same. Once we honed on the map and found out that the technology would work, we turned our focus to other applications like “phone explorer,” which helps consumers learn about handsets.

We conducted additional stakeholder interviews and got input from Andy Austin as we went down this process of creating storyboards. The storyboards were important because they helped us frame the business and design challenges — and they helped Andy sell the idea inside AT&T.

Once Andy got approval to continue, then we moved from storyboards from more detailed design.

Superhype: When did that happen?

RB: Our design work began in earnest January 2008 with a hard deadline of April 17 to launch.

Superhype: No pressure, right?

RB: No pressure at all. (laughs). I’m used to it.

Superhype: So what happened next?

A few of us on the team went to Microsoft developer training just to see a table. The developer training isn’t really geared toward designers, but at least we got to see one and get a feel for it. Once we got a better sense of how Surface works, we did more research into the process of buying a mobile device to refine our assumptions, and then we started designing the Surface interactions like were designing for a web experience.

We knew that geographic coverage is critical to the buying process, so we started designing the coverage map. It’s also the one area that has the most technology risk because we were working with a vendor of coverage maps who had never seen a Surface table.

Superhype: You say that you designed as if you were creating a web experience. But Surface isn’t a web experience.

RB: That’s true, but consumers are comfortable with the web metaphor. Remember, consumers do not want to walk into the store and feel like they had to learn about Surface tables in order to learn about a phone. We wanted to give them an experience as familiar to them as possible.

Having said that, although we used some basic web metaphors to get consumers comfortable, we also departed from the web experience. For instance, we use buttons to get information, not drop-down menus. Buttons are simpler especially in a store where there are more distractions going on around you when you’re learning. Drop-down menus make people hunt for things. We want people to see things immediately and just touch what’s important to them

And a menu isn’t the right metaphor for a Surface table. You don’t need that in a retail store, not if we want to make finding information instore easy. Instead, we use a little click wheel at the table.

Superhype: Can’t we make design online as simple as pressing a button?

RB: Actually, I think we will. Drop-down menus require a two-part interaction of clicking and navigating. I think we can improve upon the experience especially when consumers are shopping and buying a product online.

Superhype: When did you have the design done?

RB: We had it done April 11, just in time for an April 17 launch. But keep in mind that this is a “final design” for a prototype.

Superhype: What lessons have you learned so far?

RB: First off, include technology and creative in the user experience design process. Especially with a new experience like this, we had to be even more collaborative than we usually are. We needed technologists involved early to understand the boundaries of what is possible.

Second, never underestimate the value of content strategy and animation designers. The content strategists helped us determine which content would be most beneficial to the business and customer challenge. Animation design takes our insight into the brand experience to another level.

Superhype: What happens next?

RB: We are working with AT&T to observe how consumers actually use Surface in a store. Based on those learnings, we will adapt our design, and then hundreds more of these tables will be rolled out across AT&T wireless stores nationwide.

Superhype: When will that happen?

As fast as MIcrosoft can make them!

More about the launch here.