Experience Manifesto

TikTok and Music Discovery

Unlike most folks my age (60), I'm actually on TikTok quite a lot these days. Started as research for a client and frankly, was pretty addicting for me. In fact, I recognized Charli D'Amelio before I recognized Boomer Esiason in the Sabra hummus Super Bowl ad. She has about 1.7 billion view of TikTok, far more than most brand views I've tracked on the site.

Yes, there are a lot of things that are just silly and yes, most of what's happening on TikTok isn't fundamentally different than what's come before it. Frankly, many of the things I watch on TikTok are sort of things we did when I was in high school, we didn't record it. To be fair, according to my daughter, we just barely had electricity when I was in high school.

But one thing I've really liked is the amount of new music I've discovered on TikTok. Not surprising, given where it started, But they've made it very easy to find the songs used in the various videos and that's made it very easy to find new artists. For example, even though Roisin Murphy has been around for a good number of years, I had not heard of her until her song Ramalama (Bang Bang) became part of a dance challenge on TikTok. Once I created a Ramalama station on Pandora, that led me to a variety of artists that I had not heard of before.

I know that TikTok has issues related to privacy, but the teens who spend an average of 52 minutes/day on the site don't seem to be worried. And honestly, what SM site these days doesn't have a privacy issue? I have seen some inappropriate material and a few fake news pieces, but I'm still on the surface even though I watch a lot. And I've only posted twice, both times about dogs we have that are looking for their forever homes.

According to a recent article in Forbes, TikTok was downloaded 123 million times in the US, about a third of our population. And we're far behind both India and China in total number of users. The average time spent per day is just under an hour, and most videos are under a minute. They've had some controversies around the monetization of the music on the site and they will need to address that as they continue to grow.

You don't need an account to watch videos on TikTok, so if you haven't checked it out, you should. I've posted some of the music I've discovered though TikTok below in case you need some new artists to follow. I might start posting more, so say hi to Old Fart if you actually have an account.

Ready for Members!

Excited to announce that after a few months of working on the infrastructure of the space, we're ready to open our doors to members! We are creating a word-class accelerator for companies working in retail, VR/AR and out-of-home (OOH). As we looked for our own space, we quickly realized that many coworking spaces are great for working, they are usually not very good if you need to do demonstrations of physical technologies.

Our space is just across the river from NYC, a short PATH train ride away in Jersey City. With 14,000 sf (and another 14,000 available if needed!), we have plenty of room to grow; set up your technology for live demos, meetings, seminars and getting work done in a living, breathing, future factory. It allows for you to go from concept to a real-world testing environment and get instantaneous data and feedback. This also allows our members from outside of the United States to have a US office location. We even provide staffing to present your products when you are away. And did I mention that the Cake Boss bakery is in the building too?

What we offer:

• Shared Space working with BEL design team
• Access to tech member network spaces while in NY
• Client support for hosted meetings
• Desks & office furniture 
• Conference room facilities
• Use of the shared space to host up to 4 events per year
• Demonstration area to present products and technology
• Kitchen for your staff and guests
• Wi-fi connectivity throughout premises

In addition, all members can participate in all events hosted on the premises including (based on availability and suitability) client presentations, industry specific events, meet-ups with other entrepreneurs, workshops about general business topics; demonstration events.

For members, BEL is your brand accelerator, helping you grow your business by:

• Demonstrating your technology to key retailers and clients.
• Presenting your technology to Unified/BEL clients and contacts.
• Working with Unified Merchandising LLC for manufacturing support, from prototype through final product.

Lastly, for companies outside of NYC, the BEL staff can act as your local business development staff. We can represent you in all client presentations that are necessary, acting as your staff on the ground in NYC and in the States. This allows you to be able to react quickly to client requests, without incurring last minute travel expenses.

Julian Fisher, CEO of our first member company, jisp said, "We are thrilled to be the first to take our place inside the Brand Experience Lab showing how the simplest, fastest and most seamless route to outstanding customer service lies in the hands of every shopper, their cell phone. And with jisp it is an experience once tried you’ll never want to shop any other way. It maybe a small step for shoppers but it’s a giant leap for retail."

Want to learn more about what we're doing? If you're developing innovative, new tech for the retail industry, click here to learn about our membership program.

If you're looking for space for your company, you can email David or Jim and we can give you additional information. You can also click here to download our full presentation.

Here are a few pictures of the space, come visit and see what it looks like in person! You can go to Brand Experience Lab for directions to our space. Hope to see you soon.

ETC 20TH Anniversary

Last weekend, Jim Ackerman and I had the chance to go down and help the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU celebrate their 20th anniversary. The Brand Experience Lab is starting to work with them on a number of initiatives and hope to have some of their most exciting technologies here in our space in Jersey City early next year.

Some 20+ years ago, I had the great fortune to meet Don Marinelli, then the Associate head of the drama department at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and and Scott Stevens, then with the computer sciences department at CMU. At the time, he and other CMU colleagues were working to develop a new program there, combining theater and tech into one program, the Entertainment Technology Center. As described on their website:

The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) was founded in 1998, and admitted its first class of graduate students in the fall of 1999. The ETC is an interdisciplinary research center offering a Master of Entertainment Technology (MET) that is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and College of Fine Arts. In the spirit of the ETC’s interdisciplinary focus, the center had two co-directors; Randy Pausch, a CS professor (who later delivered his inspirational Last Lecture), and Don Marinelli, a Drama Professor.

To this day, the ETC looks to continue being one of the most inventive and impactful programs in the world. Randy Pausch liked to say that the ETC is the world’s best playground, with an electric fence. Or in other words, the ETC provides the contexts, processes and best practices for the design and development of creative experiences. Since our first class, we have graduated a substantial and successful group of over 700 alumni, that help illustrate the solid basis of the ETC’s curriculum, which balances educational goals, professional development, and engaging experiences, or learn, work and play.

As always, we saw some great projects from the students, both full semester work as well as projects done in just one or two weeks. We were particularly drawn to experiences like Face2Face, where two people have to create one face and then follow a series of patterns by raising an eyebrow or puffing up a cheek. The fact that two people had to work together made it fun, as you can see by the short video below.

Another favorite was Goal in the Wall, a Kinect-based game with the twist of telling you the body part you needed to use for that specific round. Although Jim beat me all three games, we both had a fun time.

Back in the late 90's, when I first met Don and Scott Stevens, I was working with an agency and building one of my first experience environments and they work that they were doing at the ETC fit in quite well with what I was building. One of the first things I showed was a Synthetic Interview, a technology developed in the late 90's and we pretty quickly ended up doing a Synthetic Interview for GSK's Nicorette brand, letting you talk to Arnold Palmer and asking him questions both about why you should stop smoking and about his long experience golfing.

When we opened our first playground in NYC, technologies from the ETC were front and center in our experience. One of the first things we brought to our space was a very cool, audience interactive experience. The very first game I saw was the Baby Game, but we knew it would be something we could do a lot with.

We eventually turned it into a successful product that I called AudienceGames. We did very successful programs for Orange, Volvo, which won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and, it all started with msnbc and a program called Newsbreaker Live. That program traveled for the summer of 2007 and was called one of the best marketing ideas in the world. We had a great deal of fun working on this program and it was really great to bring one of the ETC technologies into the world.

We also had a Jam-O-Drum in our space, really one of my favorite experiences from the ETC. I loved that it was multiplayer experience that required 4 players to make the game work. Now that we're spending so much time in our individual worlds, this very social game experience is much more relevant if you're building physical spaces than it was when it was first introduced.

Lastly, the ETC created Quasi, an interactive robot that became the mascot for Give Kids the World that my daughter absolutely loved at the time. He came to NYC several times and traveled quite frequently, even making an appearance at the Super Bowl.

Toys R Us is Back!

Had a chance to visit the brand new, Toys R Us at the Garden State Plaza on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the first of their new physical stores.

Not surprisingly, the first thing you can notice is how small the store is compared to their previous stores. They are currently opening up two locations, the one we have here in NJ and a second one in Houston. While a traditional store from the first version would've been around 40,000 sf, the store I visited was about 6,500 sf according to reports I've read. Also understand that future stores will be about 10,000 sf, still much smaller than their older stores.

The other thing that you see right away is that it is much more experiential than the previous version of the stores. Although they had a few flagship stores (like the one in Times Square), most of their stores were really just large warehouse buildings with a lot of merchandise in them. They were pretty unfun places for a company dedicated to sell toys to children. Now, each area of the store is designed to let people actually play. My favorite was the Nerf shooting range, which I thought was pretty cool.

In order to keep the the number of SKU's down in the physical store, they've partnered with Target to deliver additional products through digital screens placed throughout the store. These screens are located throughout the store and allow you to find a broader range of toys than they can stock in the stores. Not sure how partnering with Target will help them build their own brand identity, so it will be interesting to see how this works out for them.

The good news is that the store was pretty crowded (I deliberately took pictures without people as much as possible) and kids certainly seemed to be having a good time. The store had a great deal of staff working the day we visited, so it will also be interesting to see if that continues after the holiday season.

I'll do some additional visits throughout the holiday season and see how it continues and will report back here when I do. For me, creating smaller stores, designed to let children actually play, is what they should've done years ago.

To Bundle or Unbundle, That is the Question

[This is a repost from this article that we wrote MediaVillage.]

For several years, I gave most of the presentations at the AT&T AdWorks Lab and of course, the entire discussion of un-bundling and cord-cutting was always part of the discussion. At the time, I used to say that I thought that cord-cutting was potentially more of a point in life thing and less of a generational issue. When you're single and loving alone or with roommates, you don't want to be the one stuck wit that monthly bill, so it makes sense. As you get older and have a family, you start to realize how much all of the channels cost to deliver all of the content you really want. Just take a look at this piece from last month about the costs for various streaming services.

I asked my wonderful daughter Sydney what she thought about all of this, and here's how she replied:

"What do you think about all the new subscription services?" That’s what my dad asked during our 2.5 hour car ride to CT. I answered sarcastically, “It means bad news for Netflix!" But more than that, it means bad news for consumers. Having everyone take back their piece of the pie means it will be harder for consumers to find and watch what they want, when they want.

People flocked to sites like Netflix because it made their lives easier. They are able to access a multitude of shows and movies from several genres. Everything is made readily available and the setup is easy to navigate. You can watch Thor: Ragnarok one moment, a Nat Geo special the next, and then move onto binging a new show all in one place.

Consumers don’t like sifting through multiple layers to find what they’re looking for. While new streaming services such as DC Universe and Disney+ may seem like a good idea to wealthy business men looking to get wealthier, I don’t think consumers will be as excited about this trend. For them, it just means their favorite shows and movies are being removed from the sites they already pay for. They will have to pay for multiple streaming services in order to get the assortment of movies and shows they want. I can easily see this causing strife between consumers and streaming services. Personally, I am very upset that the new season of Young Justice is only available on DC Universe when I watched the first two seasons on Netflix.

As a member of Gen Z, I can assure you we find ways to watch what we want, even if it’s not through conventional channels. Whether on Youtube or another less than legal website, Gen Z would rather find their own way to get the content they desire then pay for something they don’t want. However, there is a point where the desire for good content overpowers pride. In order to appeal to consumers, these new services need to keep their prices down and their options open. Users are more likely to switch if they believe the transition will be easy and painless. It is clear the decision to make individual streaming services was based on a desire to make more money, so streaming services will need to work hard to prove that they care about the customer’s experience too.

Good luck to Netflix when you go toe to toe with Disney +, to new companies trying to find a niche, and to consumers who will have to navigate the sea of streaming services. Honestly good luck to everyone involved in this shift, you’ll need it!

I share her frustration. Sadly, this had been going on for some time now. I wrote this back in 2015. During our SXSW presentation, William, one of our speakers, made an excellent point about content and Gen Z:

If the experience of free is better than the experience of paid, then they won't be paying!

While content providers and cable companies do everything they can to generate additional revenue, they continue to make it more difficult for consumers. It's not enough any more to have a full cable subscription, now you also have to subscribe to individual channels to get certain content. Want to see any of the new Star Trek shows? CBS All Access. Impulse? Youtube Premium. Handmaidens Tale? Hulu. Well, you get the idea. Suddenly, I'm spending $100/month for these services and I don't have premium cable channels yet.

I've now started seeing people asking who will start bundling all of these channels back together again. For example, in this piece in FierceVideo, Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar wrote:

In our opinion, however, ISPs that can create product bundles will be a lot more effective than those creating price bundles but the only company which has invested in this among ISPs is Comcast.

So, we're back to looking at who will bundle all of the streaming sites back together again. In a piece in Vox from March, wrote:

The streaming revolution, which promised to break down lots of barriers in the TV industry, is beginning to morph into something else. And what it’s morphing into looks a lot more like ... traditional television.

With Apple having music & TV bundles, BGR reports that they're now thinking about creating a super-bundle. From that report:

Apple has priced Apple TV+ aggressively on a standalone basis. It only costs about $5 a month, which is a testament both to the newness of the service and to the fact that there won’t be a lot of content available at the beginning — just a handful of shows, compared to the hundreds and hundreds of TV series and movies available on something like Netflix.

What Apple seems to be working on with this new proposed bundle offers some interesting possibilities, such as an opportunity to include the company’s subscription news service Apple News+. Depending on where Apple prices such a mega-bundle, it might be less of an ask to encourage consumers to sign up for it than to try and convince those same consumers that they need another standalone news app or something like Apple TV+.

The real question for everyone involved - consumers, content providers, networks, etc. - is how many of these will the consumers want and pay for. How will we discover shows if I have to pay for a channel to see a single show. Will consumers pay for one month of a service and binge everything (like I've been thinking about with CBS All Access).

TV would've failed at the very start if I needed to pay differently for each channel. I don't think we'll see these established channels failing, but there's no doubt that in a few years, we'll be back to paying someone to bundle everything again and complaining about how much it all costs.

It Really Isn't That Hard

Monday night, I needed to run a quick shopping errands to get ready for some meetings at the Lab, as well as just get some things done for me. So, I headed up to the Garden State Plaza, since I could do everything I need there. I did get everything done, but I also had very good experiences everywhere I went. Although I didn't get the names of everyone I dealt with, I had a great experience at each of the 3 stops I made. It just reminded me, how simple it is to give customers good service, no matter what your product is.

• My first stop was to the AT&T store there. I upgraded from a Note 9 to the Note 10+, a phone BTW, I really like. I was supposed to be sent a box to return the old phone, but after several weeks and multiple phone calls, I hadn't received it. Not wanting to get charged for the old phone, I took it with me and went to the AT&T store to see if they could help in person. Franke (I think that was his name) asked if I needed help, I told him what this issue was and he solved everything in less than 5 minutes. Got me the box, shipping label and made sure it was all packed and ready to go. He was polite, friendly, efficient and most all of all, solved a problem that four phone calls didn't.

• My second task was a visit was to the Swatch store there. I've been wearing a Bunnysutra watch (funny story about it, ask me the next time you see me!), so I visit Swatch stores much more frequently than I used to. I love that they will just clean it and polish it up and replace the battery for free whenever that's needed. Once again, the staff couldn't have been nicer and friendlier and we always have a fun conversation about the watch.

• Lastly, I visited the Nespresso store there to pick up some coffee for the office. Love their machine and particularly love that the pods are recyclable, but I'm not really knowledgeable about coffee. Again, the staff there couldn't be more helpful. From sampling some of the new blends to being able to give me good suggestions on which coffees I should buy, shopping there is always a fun experience. I always come away from their store feeling I got some fun coffee and got just a little more knowledgeable about coffee. BTW, their boutique in the Bloomingdale's at the Short Hills Mall is equally good.

At the end of the day, it's not rocket science. All of the people I interacted with on my trip were friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. They all seemed to enjoy what they were doing. And I walked away a happy and satisfied customer.

Bunnysutra

Bucknell MIDE Program & The Future of Retail

Earlier this summer, after Sydney was accepted to Bucknell, we learned about a program in the business school there called MIDE, their Markets, Innovation & Design program. I thought it was a pretty cool program and reached out to connect during one of our visits with Sydney. That started a conversation about ways we could work together during the school year.

Later in the summer, once we had the folks from Jisp move in, that started many conversations about how the store of the future would be designed if you didn't need cashiers and checkout lines, particularly at grocery and convenience stores. Our internal teams started thinking about it as well, exploring the entire checkout process that exists today and what would be done with that space once the checkout lines were removed and it spurred some great conversations.

In late August, I had the chance to meet with Collin Smith and we both thought that the idea of recreating the front end of a grocery store would be a great project for his class. Since they had to explore a topic and then actually design and build something, the ability to use our manufacturing resources at Unified to actually build some prototypes was pretty exciting.

Collin described the class and its process:

“Creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you....the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.” - Tom Kelly, IDEO

Our design studio at Bucknell's Markets, Innovation & Design program is building creative confidence by having students bring new ideas to life through prototypes people can actually experience and interact with to really feel what the future might really be like. We fill our studio space with supplies for very rapid and rough prototyping (ex. pipe cleaners, felt, fun foam, Play-Doh, popsicle sticks, tape, hot glue, etc.) so our design teams can think with their hands and physically build on each others ideas.

This collaborative project with Brand Experience Lab builds on these making experiences by giving these students real opportunities, tools, and mindsets to envision, design, and demonstrate possible futures of retail experiences. By bringing these ideas to life through low and high fidelity prototypes these students will be able to really ensure that what is designed makes sense in the future lives of people, bringing truly meaningful and differentiated consumer value.

Let’s make the future awesome, together.

I had the chance to meet with the class in late September and kick off the process with them. Throughout the semester, we'll introduce them to other designers and technologists who will give them more ideas to work with over the semester. There will be a variety of times throughout this process to see what the students are doing and we will update the blog whenever we can.

You can email me if you'd like to know more about the program and participate either as a technology or retail partner. We anticipate this to be the first of many programs and we couldn't be happier to be partnering with Bucknell on this first initiative.

More on MIDE:

As a Bucknell markets, innovation & design major, you'll learn to recognize what consumers want — before they even know they want it — and build a career developing the products, brands and messages to meet those desires. But you don't need to wait until graduation to get started. Whether you want to help entrepreneurs launch their first websites or start your own magazine, you’ll have freedom to follow your passions here. When you are ready to enter the job market, those experiences in and out of the classroom will make you stand out. Leading employers around the world actively recruit our graduates, who hold jobs with organizations as diverse as Tommy Hilfiger and the Philadelphia 76ers.

What I Read

You may have noticed that I keep a pretty long "What I Read" list here on this blog and that some of them are kind of old and out of date. Every now and then, I start to go through them all, to eliminate ones that don't exist any more and I always get stuck. It's easy to cut the ones that actually don't exist any more. It's the ones that are still there, with their posts from years ago still up to read, that I have a hard time deleting. It's like having a time capsule that I can look at and go back into a window in time.

Maybe I need to put them in new categories so people can see the current from the nostalgic. But the bigger problem is the time suck that I get into reading those old blogs, remembering the people, the times we met, etc. So, it stays as it is, a window into today and the past. It is kind of fun!

Our First Member - Jisp!

We're very excited to introduce Jisp, our first member of the Brand Experience Lab here in Jersey City. jispGO is a secure solution for friction free shopping via mobile - customers are able to browse and shop spaces physically and digitally, completing their purchases within jisp, negating the need for lines and front end cash wraps. Think of it as a way to bring the experience of "Amazon Go" to any retailer. A recent report from Omico Group found:

Most Americans are willing to only wait up to eight minutes in line before abandoning their cart of potential purchases. The report also noted that 77% of consumers are less likely to shop at the retail store again if they experience a long wait in checkout lines. With customers leaving empty handed, retailers have a problem and are losing an estimated $38 billion in potential sales.

jisp solves that problem using NFC and cell phones, eliminating the huge capital expenditure usually needed to deploy a system for cashierless stores. Using NFC also means that everything can be controlled from a central point, allowing for fast updates to prices and information that the consumer needs. It also means that promotions can be launched almost instantaneously, from a central office. With jisp, customers can shop as they go and pay through the app with no frustrating waits at the checkouts. jisp’s solutions are 4x times faster than barcode scanning and are completely adaptable. See the video below to see how it works.

I met the jisp team at a retail conference in London last fall and was very excited about what they're doing. As we started to look for members to join the Lab, they were one of the first ones I recommended. Last month, we showcased jisp at our GlobalShop booth and saw the same very positive reaction from people who saw it there that I witnessed in London when I first saw it.

"We are searching the world for the finest technology companies in retail and jisp is one of them. We are proud to have them join BEL," said Jim Ackerman, CEO of the Unified Brand Experience Lab. "Jisp combines extraordinary technology with a great team behind it that will enable us to introduce them to the US market successfully."

Julian Fisher, CEO of our very first member, jisp said, "We are thrilled to be the first to take our place inside the Brand Experience Lab showing how the simplest, fastest and most seamless route to outstanding customer service lies in the hands of every shopper, their cell phone. And with jisp it is an experience once tried you’ll never want to shop any other way. It maybe a small step for shoppers but it’s a giant leap for retail."

The purpose of the Unified Brand Experience Lab is to help retailers and brands explore the future of retail and technologies like jisp are critical to that future. Thanks to online shopping, consumers are used to instant payment options and not waiting in line. jispGO solves a significant issue for retailers while helping a create a friction-less experience for consumers. We're excited to have them as out first member! You can come visit us here in Jersey City to experience jispGO firsthand!

Want to learn more about what we're doing?

• Click here to learn how brands can use the Brand Experience Lab and create the next generation of retail and brand experiences.
• If you're developing innovative, new tech for the retail industry, click here to learn about our membership program
.

BEL provides integrated solutions for Brands and Retailers utilizing emerging technology, shopper insights and retail industry experts. We also give companies in retail, VR/AR and OOH industries a place to work, showcase and sell the technologies they’re creating.

Explore the Possible - Deliver the Practical - Lead the Future

Unified Brand Experience Lab

We've started work to transform our new home for the Unified Brand Experience Lab! The space is designed to give companies in retail, VR/AR and OOH industries a place to work, showcase and demo the technologies they’re creating. With almost 14,000 sf, we have a great space to experiment, test, hold client meetings and do larger events. It is walking distance from the Hoboken PATH station, so very convenient from the city or NJ.  

If you're looking for space for your company, drop me an email and I can give you additional information. 

You can click here for additional information.