Why we need new realities | Kirk Johnsen, Wieden+Kennedy | OnBrand '18

[Music] hello everyone how are you that was a great talk by Alan and that's actually a nice set up for what I'm about to talk about so I am the business director of a sort of future forward innovation and emerging tech and creative tech department within Wieden and Kennedy Amsterdam widening Kennedy is an advertising agency and much like Ilan was talking about we place a very high value on this sort of symbiosis between brands and culture so you're gonna hear me talk about culture and creativity within that context a fair amount during this so that was kind of a good primer we're big believers in this sort of disproportionate share a voice that we can achieve when we bring brands together with cultural context but today I'm gonna talk more about what we're doing in in my department the department of new realities and I'm going to talk about why we as an advertising agency think it's important to be really dedicating resources and thought in this space to to make sure we're sort of ahead of the curve so I will also define new realities at least how we define it as we go into it so I won't just ask the question now a couple slides on what I'm gonna tell you before we get into it so we're gonna talk a bit about why we invested in this this new realm that people are dabbling in rather than just say pay lip service to it being important I'm gonna talk about some of the things that led us into this space and in this sort of importance and value of it and then get into a bit more practical application so if I'm going to talk about some of the projects that we've been working on and then also some lessons that we've learned so this isn't to say it's a template for everyone and this is what you should be doing that's really our point of view on the space and we're getting involved in why we're getting involved and hopefully you can take away a little bit of education from it if you decide that it seems valuable for you and what you're doing and maybe some of the lessons or things that you can take away and apply maybe not hopefully a little bit otherwise it'll be a big waste of time so first of all why new realities and let me define new realities a little bit as well here so for us new realities is is very broad it's basically anything that is new and technology driven and experiential driven that could be coming our way as marketers for the moment in the sort of upcoming future this is a lot in immersive computing augmented reality virtual reality mixed reality because there's so much in this and there it's such a wide sort of spectrum to work within so that is probably mostly what I'm gonna be talking about today the creative technologies in that space and how we're applying those to brands and specifically experiential and creative experiences so what led us into this space I won't dwell too much on any of these points because I think they're all well let's just say none of them are totally groundbreaking but it's really the confluence of a quite a few signals that led us to think well you know what this is actually becoming quite valuable and if we want to be a valuable partner to the clients that we work with we need to get ahead of the curve on these things and make sure that as they become more massively adopted which is happening more and more every day that that we are experts in them that we are creating experiences that are valuable for our consumers and their brands one of them that I'll go really quick on this once everybody knows it media fragmentation we no longer can sort of put out a piece of content that is seen by tons of people very easily there are still some things that cut through and do this but it's it's much tougher landscape these days so this is one thing where we sort of had to challenge ourselves how do we diversify our output how do we continue to engage in a changing media landscape another one is new economy elan talked about this one a little bit before but these companies like an Airbnb or Instagram that we work with these companies are creating more of a direct one-to-one connection with their consumers they're removing the barriers between products and marketing and they're creating new kind of connections with their consumers so we take inspiration from that we're trying to find new ways to to break down those barriers and get closer to the consumers that we're trying to engage ad blockers this might be kind of a funny one but I saw a statistic the other day that in the developed economies there's 25 to 30% adoption of people on the internet of ad blockers and we're not trying to specifically circumvent ad blockers but we saw this as a signal that you know advertising is in sort of a race to the bottom in some ways and we don't think actually when it's done well that people want to avoid ads we think there's a lot of value and brands engaging the right way and consumers actually really enjoy it so we took this as a challenge to say how are we sort of improving the landscape and making people not feel like they want to skip or block what we're doing culture forecasting this one's a little bit more ambiguous like I said earlier we're we're a company that places high value on what's happening in culture and helping brands be a part of that that cultural storm when we look out at the world we see as everyone here I'm sure sees much more in the space of experiential around technology there are it's becoming more and more part of everyday lives if you look at the last you know 15 years at a minimum this is you know increasing very rapidly so we think this is gonna continue to be an important part of not just tech but culture investments this is something that can't be ignored the space that we play in is dominated by a few players these days especially we talk about digital media and tech and when you see those companies the googles of Facebook's the Microsoft's the magic leaves Alibaba is all these companies investing in this base it starts to define what is going to be important so we can't ignore where we see the money going we see an expansion of emerging tech capabilities obviously this is going to happen over time you know technology is going to continue to get better but we see a pretty steep curve when we start talking about immersive computing we think that we're gonna start to see more and more mass adoption of this we think we're gonna start to close the gap between consumer expectations and what these technologies are actually able to do right now so hopefully that will increase adoption and actually make it more more viable and beneficial for brands to get involved in the space experiential marketing again this is another one that's not groundbreaking it's been around for a while it's kind of a hot topic with marketers for us we see a few facets to this that are very valuable for us when we talk about new realities one is that that more sort of one-to-one connection we're able to connect to create with consumers like I talked about before another is in a LAN talked about this as well brand purpose another sort of buzzword or buzz phrase when we talk about brand purpose we think one of the most valuable things brands can do is to actually do to not just say and actually investing in new types of experiences for consumers in a way that sort of communicates your brand still to them is very valuable and goes beyond just say creating a billboard also speaking of billboards a you know there's there's also may be higher stakes when we talk about experiential so in the case of a billboard you can you can create kind of a mediocre ad and it probably isn't gonna do a lot one way or the other for for your brand when you talk about experiential you talk about higher stakes you're asking consumers to really invest more of their time or their sort of cranial resources into your brand so if you do something great you're gonna see a huge upside to that you can create long-term loyalty and memory structures around your brand have you do it poorly you're gonna get the opposite so we like that it's higher stakes that there's not room for mediocrity that you really need to push the envelope creative opportunities we are a creative agency we're born from an agency that really values creativity and creative approaches to brand problem solving so we asked ourselves is there capacity in the space for creating interesting and powerful executions experiences for consumers that are going to help build brands and businesses for us the answer is yes and so when you bring all these things together and and probably a few more you know we decided this is not something where we can watch from the sidelines that we can just pay lip service to and say these are important things that we should think about them more we decided you know what we need to put together a group of technologists and producers and strategists and people that can really dedicate expertise and human resource into tackling this space I'm going to talk about two of these points just a little bit more so creative opportunities for us there's a there's a massive space that is you know even just an immersive computing but emerging tech in general how you define that is very broad there's a big spectrum for us we are we're much more interested in the human and emotional and creative and experiential side this is just a choice that we've made when we think about what's important for us what we're really good at what we think it's the value we can add to our clients it's not to say that there's not a ton of value in creating enterprise level pipelines and services and tech platforms that's amazing as well it's just for us when we asked ourselves the question of what makes sense in this space we always look at it from a sort of human side first and creativity side first so talk about investment for a second you know this was an interesting thing for us not because we're chasing the money but more because money means as I said earlier better technology more consumer adoption better opportunities to engage our consumers with our clients brands so if we look at this curve I'm not going to go into the exact numbers under each one of these bars but as a curve in general I think people can career looking at a pretty big adoption and investment in AR and VR for those of you interested this is mostly driven by mobile based AR and smart glasses followed by VR and then if we look specifically at the advertising or branding industry we see a similar curved just an indication you know we're already seeing a lot of you know paid media options in this space we're seeing more and more sort of large platform and large scale adoption and access for these platforms again if you're interested right now they're predicting the biggest industries for this our retail automotive entertainment CPG but I think it's safe to say this is gonna be affecting all of us now and very soon so all of that combines we decided to create this dedicated unit within widening Kennedy called the department of new realities I have this slide so this is our office on the Heron rock just in central Amsterdam and those windows are where we sit and that this is basically to highlight you know for us it's not about creating some sort of skunkworks department that's off you know doing their own operations and you know creating crazy things that nobody really in the agency understands this is really about having a unit of people that can that can elevate the entire agency that can be elevating all of our clients work diversifying our output as I mentioned earlier so we have you know just this little internal mission statement about how we're basically what we're trying to do is just uh sure in these new technologies and new opportunities by sort of showing people by taming them to showing them that they're not as crazy as they may seem they're not as difficult as it may seem but also stoking people's interest in them by showing what are the potential opportunities with them so that's enough kind of the theory and about us and why we've gotten into it I'm going to talk a little bit about some more practical things some of the projects we've been working on recently and and some of the lessons we've been taken away as we've been doing it so the first one is Corona and a bit like Alan was talking about before this is a brand that really values getting outside this is a brand that we've been working with as a global client for a few years now and we worked with them to help define a brand space that really makes sense Corona is a beer that you can drink inside but just but it's much better outside on a beach and so as a brand we've we've sort of centered around this notion of us being better humans and more outside we started thinking about that I think the the inherent or easy sort of assumption would be that technology can't really help in this technology belongs indoors but actually as we thought a little bit more about it we thought about how virtual reality can be so influential and so deeply immersively experiential and so rather than try to recreate the outdoors we decided to use virtual reality to sort of tease people to give people a taste of the outdoors and and through that encourage them to enjoy it more so we created we took we went to Mexico City which is like if you've been there the craziest hottest urban environment and we took over a building and we created an entire experience from the moment you walked into the door you were greeted by actors and actresses you were taken into a party you didn't really know what was going on you were then introduced to a virtual reality experience which replicated paradise being in a jungle so we had full room scale VR untethered we had multiple haptics I actually sat for hours and watched people from the outside go through this thing they they they really had a visceral reaction to a lot of it and then from there you were escorted up upstairs to a beach bar and the whole idea was that you have this this mental change that happens when you experience the outdoors and you can get to a more meaningful mental space that's that's important as humans so I'm just gonna play a little video that shows you this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so a few lessons that we learned on this one one of them and this is one of the first things you know we hear from clients which is very understandable is how do we scale this thing so many of these technologies don't naturally scale right now we think that's changing but right now that you have to find tricks you have to find ways to get broader brands scale and value and and that's always a custom approach by us there's no one-size-fits-all but in the case of this experience you know we were able to put a few thousand people through the experience over the course of a couple weeks but Corona is one of the biggest brands in Mexico and we knew that that wasn't enough we needed to get the brand credit for doing this so what we did in this case is we invited a lot of influencers and media publishers we did a lot of promo leading up to the events and we we designed the space with this word Instagram ability in mind so so all of these things combined meant that they experienced the feeling that people got from it was being broadcast out into the internet and into TV waves and Corona was getting the credit and they were getting a lot of cultural impact based on this so they actually I mean one of the statistics is became the top trending topic in Twitter all across Mexico just from this one event in Mexico City another lesson we learned to bleed your assets so another way to to amortize costs over time and over executions and over geographies is to think about how you might use what you've created in different ways so in this case we took the the 3d assets from inside the VR world and we created excuse me this sort of portal at retail so there's a parallax to this this window this TV screen as you walk by it it moves in 3d and it looks like you're looking into another paradise world it's connected to that little cooler in front of it as well as you open and close that different things happen so this launched afterward recently in Italy and it's rolling out to other markets around the world it's this replicable model that really allows us to to use those assets even more to get more value out project and another lesson in this this is broader than just this project but prototype to excite we don't think you can get people to really understand these experiences when you just show them in a deck or when you just show a video of them so we've spend in our spent an hour spending a lot of resources in prototyping to get our clients and internal audiences really excited about something in the case of this project there actually wasn't a brief there wasn't some long story board presentation to start we just made a prototype of what it could feel like to go into this paradise world in VR shared that with our clients and from there it was just a matter of how big and and where do we do it so we really try to focus a lot on giving people that feeling as early as we can in the process pit mat Banshees this is a this is one that's one of our own internal IPs it's a VR based video game it ties into some of our passions and we as a department we love horror and Halloween and all the accoutrements of that genre so we created a video game based in VR where you're sitting on a bicycle a physical bicycle with haptics built into the experience and you're riding this bicycle through a dystopian Amsterdam so obviously we were influenced by our daily commutes into the office but the the idea with this video game is that you're you're riding through the streets you're trying to dodge these biker banshees that are trying to kill you you have a little bail on the bike that you can use to avoid them and it just creates a really fun and really immersive video game we did the light we designed this game to be something that could be taken around to different events and just be part of a sort of VR showcase for the technology for the department and one of the things we learned here is the power of voyeurism so when we were designing this whole experience and letting people test and try it we learned that not only was it really fun for the people playing the game but it was almost as fun for the people watching the people playing the game then sort of trying to ride this bike and almost falling over and laughing and crying and all these things were actually really fun to watch so we took an extra step to really make sure we were designing the space that we were designing the bike that we're designing the headset we're designing everything in a way that it became a viewable thing so you could have you know a dozen people watching while one person was was trying Moncler so I don't know how many of you are into fashion Moncler recently back in February launched a completely new approach to their fashion concept called genius so they're moving from two big fashion drops a year to eight mini collections throughout the year to help them really broaden the reach of this concept we've been working with them to create a book that that showcases all the collections and and give you gives you the feeling of what happened at the launch event which is really the epicenter of of this new concept and then adding an augmented reality layer to it so I'll play a little video here but basically within this book there are eight different chapters each one shows one of the different designers and design concepts in augmented reality in 3d and then it there's a cover as you see there on the left and a center spread and so there are ten different 3d augmented reality experiences within the app as you look through the book and each one is is inspired by the designers in the clothes themselves so this this application and book just launched last week it's a the book is available in some pop-up stores in New York and Tokyo and really the the big lesson that we learned here and this is this is an old one and maybe a little bit trite in this context but it's important to remember the medium is the message so for Montclair a brand that is high luxury fashion and innovation we wanted to create an experience that that sort of signaled that without just saying it so we created an app that was built for the highest and smart smartphones we created an app that was really high fidelity and a bit esoteric like the brand and we paired it with a book that only a select few people can get so much like the product itself it's it's a little bit hard to get but if you do manage to get your hands on and it's amazing so we think it's important to continue to sort of think about the brand and how it exists when you're making the the technology itself this is an example we we collaborated with an artist who's also creative director at widening kennedy some of you might know him his name's Alvaro Sotomayor he's well known for his single line art drawings especially of bowls because he's Spanish and he wants to commemorate the 69 different bowls that have won bullfighting matches by killing a manotaur in the the history of Spanish bullfighting so he's done these as two dimensional line art for years and we introduced him to Google tilt brush where he could start to paint in three dimensions which really opened up his mind so he painted in three dimensions we took those files converted them over to augmented reality and then we did a gallery where we created these these markers that mimic his art and they actually cue the the 3d art in augmented reality that's all bro [Music] and one lesson from this was to think transmedia so like I said earlier you can transpose your content into different spaces and locations too to try to maximize the benefits of that content but also it can open up creative opportunities so for Alvaro we moved him from drawing in 2d on a canvas to 3d and virtual reality to 3d and augmented reality to a real gallery and he's actually now working with some large-scale 3d printers to print these I don't know 5 meters high for some of his clients in metal which is pretty cool senseless fairytale like much like bitmap Banshees this is something that was fueled largely by our own interests and you know we think there's actually a lot to be learned from children when we talk about VR na our space they they look at these in a in a sort of fresh way and give us perspective that we don't have in our own adult brain so senseless fairy tale is a children's book told in a VR 3d world and we give children these tools to interact with the space they can play musical instruments they can open up different boxes they can sort of affect the the clouds in space all these different things and this launched it's in a kid last year here in Amsterdam arrey they say these boo-boos and whatnots the lesson here was to continue to test with your audience we're all used to the the testing world within you know branding and comms but even with these new technologies we learned a lot when we were in our early stages of development we let some kids try this out and we we assumed going into it that children would want to treat this as a game and they would we had them sort of unlocking these different gates at via different games of you went and you progress through and become the ultimate fairytale princess as most kids want to be but we found out if they they really just wanted an open sandbox where they could just bang everything and mess things up and make it their own world so we we redesigned it so that became a little bit more free play space for them this is the last one lava is a music and augmented reality platform that we've developed this stems from us having a passion for music we looked at the music space if you look back at the sort of symbiotic relationship between music and media over the years starting with radio radio brought music the capabilities of you know broadcasting to a ton of people at the same time and having these shared listening experiences which is revolutionary at the time you fast-forward to TV TV like MTV vh1 brought all new waves for these artists to connect with their consumers in their their fans via these visual storytelling devices and that created a whole new genre for music and then you have the Internet the Internet has been maybe good and bad for music but as no doubt had a huge influence on it its democratized that it's created new means for curation all these different things it's really turned it over we think that immersive computing especially augmented reality is probably the fourth wave when we talk about the symbiotic relationship between media tech and and music so we've developed this platform to to create experiences for that also is a collaboration space for four brands for musicians for artists for platforms to come together and create new things so our first execution on this platform is for an album called SOS and this artist necessary explosion for him his music is is a bit 70's and heady and the vinyl aspect of his album release was really important for him so we collaborated with him we created eleven different 3d AR sculptures each one inspired by a different track on the LP and then we created an app that pairs with the record itself so when you when you have the record you point your phone with the app at it and then there's a audio figure printing much like you see with Shazam recognized as a song and cues up the the appropriate sculpture that are there's some animations that take place when you move closer and further away from the sculptures and it really just gives you this deeper more immersive connection with the music as you go through it you know it's it's as I said earlier it said it's a next step it's an evolution from say music videos because you can you can understand the artists even more you can go a bit deeper into the music this is the final lesson this is kind of a broad one for lava as well as everything I've been talking about we think it's important if you're gonna get into the space to to really think about what you're good at and what you're passionate about for lava not only re obviously you know very interested in creativity and creative technologies but we also have two creative directors who have worked for a long time in the music industry creating visuals and directing music videos for big name artists so we wanted to bring that passion and expertise into lava but more broadly you know the the big theme I'm talking about here is figure out what's good for you what's right for you what gets you excited because if you don't have those things at the start it's a really difficult climb but if you have those of you if you figure out how you think emerging tech can help you with what you want to be doing anyway then then it seems much easier and much more downhill so that's it thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]