Starbucks VIA Instant Starbucks from Schneider Mike on Vimeo.

Guy Kawasaki was hanging out in the blogger’s lounge early one morning at SXSW. He had a coy smile and announced that he had something cool that we would all love. As a result, I got to try Starbucks VIA! Thanks Guy!

WTF?

At SXSW, I sat in a session with some of the brilliant minds in interactive experience creation including: Victoria Ha from Stitch Media, Phil Stuart of Preloaded, Mark Pytlik of Stink Digital and Rick Webb from the Barbarian group. They wasted a good 10 minutes of the panel discussing the classification of games versus experiential video. Is it a game? Is it a video? Stop worrying about how to classify the damn thing and put that time to good use working on the experience. Writer, researcher Martin Sarafian [God Marty, why aren't you blogging yet? At least get on twitter!] and I classified all of this stuff 10 years ago so you would not have to worry.

We Call it Non-Linear Entertainment

A vocal academic came to the microphone and offered her “perspective” on the conversation, arguing with the panel about her thesis in which she wrote 400 pages on the classifications of various mediums. Either she did not do the paper justice or she wasted a lot of time and money at Indiana University (see below for video) because I can sum it up right here. It’s called Non-Linear Entertainment (NLE). The criteria of NLE is that you have some sort of story line that requires the consumer of the video to make some kind of choice. NLE does not usually go from point A to Z in a straight line so that everyone (given 5 senses and taking perspective out of the equation) experiences the exact same content in the same way. The Dark Knight that I saw was the same as the one you saw. That was linear. This is different.

Non-Linear entertainment allows the viewer, or even the reader to make choices. These choices are influential in the way that the content is consumed. NLE includes games, ARGs, MMORPGs, RPGs, experiential videos, even choose your own adventure books. Most times NLE has alternate “plots” or even open-ended outcomes, the exception would be instances where the camera angle can be changed to give a different visual perspective, even if they do not necessarily change the plot. I still call that NLE because the user has an aspect of control. Rick Webb summed up arguing the symantics pretty well:

Non Linear Entertainment Panel at SXSW from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.

Writing a Matrixed Script is Tough

Eventually we moved onto bigger and better things. What kind of writers do I need? The answer is that you need people who understand writing matrixed scripts. These experiences are time consuming to write, shoot or develop, particularly if you want them to be particularly long. I suggest not attempting to boil the ocean in the short term. Keep your experiences to 60-180 seconds of content and limit the amount of characters because every character adds complexity. Imagine a very simple storyboard beginning, middle and end. Now lets say there are 7 controllable characters in the story and that each requires perspective. Now each character needs a beginning middle and an end.

Thank goodness we finally moved on and Victoria Ha took over and told us about their execution of an event at a comic convention that featured “hot chics” (her words, not mine) with water guns and temporary tattoos approaching nerds at the convention and asking them if they could apply the fake-ink which actually was a series of clues. So here you have a bunch of people walking around the convention with contest clues on their body which caused people to interact both on and offline. I can imagine the conversations: “Hello, I am Milton Scrathmore. I love your Frank Cho, limited edition t-shirt, can I please scan the tattoo on wrist?” Should we call that offline experiential gaming with QR codes? Nah. NLE.

Does good design come from good designers? Sort of. Good design does not even start with design. Whether for marketing, technology, product, etc it starts with a deep understanding of the needs of the consumer and the business stakeholders. If you have not worked with a next-generation agency, let me give you some insight into the process.

excerpt from the #specwork09 discussion

• Sessions begin with definition of business problems. We actually go into them hoping to define a business problem or series of problems to solve. It is not about “we want to design something” yet.
• Audience Intelligence teams learn the needs, size, segments and location of the marketplace.
• Strategists start to define the idea and the brand pillars or align the idea to current brand pillars. Design, Audience Intelligence, Media, and Analytics resources are involved to protect design interests, media availability and possibilities, and success measurement.
• Consensus on ideas is built.
• Campaigns are defined. Briefs are written.
• Analytics teams figure out how to measure success, spot trends and forecast futures.
• Now we design!
• Execute
• Measure
• Rinse
• Repeat

Through this process a connection is built between the agency and the client. The agency treats the client’s brand as their own and takes a level of responsibility for success. The designers are part of the strategy. They understand the process. They can discuss the pillars with the planners and strategists. They get true audience insight in a way that a single specification sheet cannot bring to light. They can talk to the measurement folks about how we define success. They weave themselves into the brand fabric and in some cases they follow a similar process across projects.

Your brand, your campaign, your SUCCESS depend on your experience and your marketing. The way I see it, you can pay a premium [or put together a creative model that allows an agency to be payed based on your success] for any agency that is thoughtfully integrated or you can throw it into the one-off crowdsourcing blender and hope you get a smoothie.

The Pepsi lounge at SXSW has a bar where you can try Pepsi products and a series of tents where you can go an create content. It’s a cool place to hang out and meet people, shoot video, charge your phone or talk to the folks who made it all happen. What did they make happen?

Pepsi Built a SXSW Information Command Center

Jumping right into the zeitgest stream gives you a a real-time summary of SXSW conversations. The current trend is towards eating [as it's lunch-time]. Other trending topics are arriving, drinking, connecting and partying. Messages that flow through the stream are color coded to their topic.

The “popular” feature shows the most popular words and assumes that those are also topics. Trending topics right now include Facebook, Austin and work. I would love it if this feature let me drill to the tweets so I could see what people are saying. Bigger points if I could follow the people on the fly.

The “swarm” is a geolocator that shows where tweets are coming from and who is tweeting. It’s a real-time maplication. It’s kind of cool to see people migrating to and from the convention center.

My favorite feature [and perhaps the most useful and innovative] is the party watch! Not only is it a good way to find out what is going on, you can find out how people feel about the party good/neutral/bad. I was tracking the Burlesque/Cupcakes party last night and found out that not only was there a long line, but that generally people thought it was a bust.

If we take some of the learnings from Jamie Monberg’s panel this morning which basically says that your application should be more like a pencil than a helicopter when it comes to usability. I think Pepsi has struck the right balance here. Good job Pepsi. I hope you do not let this die and figure out cool ways to use it beyond SXSW.

Julia Roy Schools the Michael Schneider on Tweety from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.

I’ve tried all of the free twitter iPhone applications only to come to the conclusion “you get what you pay for”. I left Twitteriffic for Twittelator and then for Twitterfon, but simple features like following people and tweeting from more than one account were still missing from my experience. I met Julia Roy of Undercurrents after day 1 of SXSW. She had just the thing for my iPhone twitter woes!

A good digital analyst is also part detective and while an advanced degree in forensic science from the University of Mississippi isn’t necessary, they need to go beyond the obvious metrics to tell the story. I know what you’re thinking. The digital story is direct- so it tells itself! This is not really the case. When dealing with situations where the call to action is not directly related to the bottom line, analysts have to be willing to dig. And, to make matters more complicated, they will need to understand the disciplines of their colleagues.

Campaign planning, with variables like competitive spend, weather, seasonality, trade volume, economic conditions, fashion trends, health fads, hairstyles, income levels, pets etc can be chaotic. It’s important that planners, interaction designers and analysts are aligned in their objectives. Planners use their audience intelligence insight and negotiation prowess to get the message in front of the right person at the right time. UX Jedis use the Force to create high quality experiences that make a user want to convert. How do they know if they have been successful? Enter the analyst!

Analyzing click-through, view-through and even residual data is a lot like looking at page impressions. They do not tell you what to do, only that you got someone to do something. They are however, clues that can be used to build more effective metrics. Analysts must not only create actionable metrics that are based on campaign goals, but need to tell a story to planners, interaction designers and their clients. Measurement of a digital media plan does not happen by accident, it requires collaboration, planning, testing, learning and repeating.

Start by defining campaign success. Next, build a page tagging recommendation and agree on success metrics.
Incorporate the model into reports and dashboards. Socialize metrics with marketing strategists, user experience gurus, digital media planners and client marketing analysts. Most importantly, dig into the data and your model to tell the story. The elementary metrics are not enough.

When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we’re talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data, theirs is like the grubs on Fear Factor .

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.