James DeJulio kicking off the inaugural Tongal Brand Lab.
The big idea for our inaugural Tongal Brand Lab (March 2, 2016), was to bring the various friends of Tongal into one cozy space, stir briskly, and see if we could generate the kind of conversation that sticks with you for several weeks…months...maybe even longer.
So the first order of business was to invite a wide variety of different speakers, covering the ever-broadening range of topics marketers find themselves interested in – and, increasingly, find themselves responsible-for within their organizations.
I kicked things off -- and just a few minutes later my slides followed along. What I was hoping to convey was a keen sense of opportunity – because everyone gathered in that room with us is on the leading edge of a transformation. Together, we’re seeing how abundance and access is altering the terms of engagement for innovation, storytelling, and entertainment. It’s happening in the sciences, in the arts, and of course in business. I hope that the broad canvas gave you a sense of the reach and scope of this phenomenon.
Key Takeaway: Everyone attending Tongal Brand Lab is in early on the sea-change taking place in the relationships between brands, audiences, and creative. You have a front row seat -- now you just need to make the most of it!
Jason Crusan from NASA Collaborative Innovation Center followed, with an eloquent testimony to the efficacy of NASA’s innovation, engineering, and content-development initiatives. The numbers of participants and the variety of solutions sought (and found!) are remarkable. (I still have a slide with about 100 different hand-rail clamp designs dancing around in my head – though I seem to recall they received almost 500 of them. Crazy.) When it comes to asking for creative thinking for engineering problems, let’s just say NASA’s brand has very broad appeal.
Key Takeaway: You never know what kinds of creative challenges will create massive interest and turn-out -- but the more often you open your creative doors to people, the more people will begin to camp-out near those doors.
Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School hosted a lively panel about integrating external innovation resources (like Tongal) within a mature marketing organization. Maureen Ahmad from Lenovo and Brenda Wu from Johnson & Johnson talked about their respective organizations’ needs for fresh, diverse perspectives, and a deeper talent pool, to meet the escalating demand for engaging content. Vaughan Emsley, an alumnus from Saatchi & Saatchi, talked about the difficulties traditional agencies are facing from disruptors and increased demand.
Key Takeaway: Cultural adjustment is just as important as process adjustment -- and some adjustment is necessary to bring in creative from new sources. Also: different companies will do this differently -- and that's probably how it should be.
Guido Voltolina of Nokia demonstrated Virtual Reality films throughout the day, including one of our own that we’re VERY excited about -- about which, more to come. I hope everyone reading this gets a chance soon to experience VR for themselves, but the picture below says it all about how much fun this technology can be:
Crystal Ponzio of Netflix is all smiles as she checks out Virtual Reality at Tongal Brand Lab, courtesy Nokia.
Key Takeaway: VR is going to be big. It already is -- and it's bringing an entirely different order of engagement. If you tried the demo out -- I don't need to tell you, you can just refer to your own experience with it!
Eric Oldrin of Instagram then gave a keynote on "Storytelling At Scale." He offered a variety of different elements of imagery and narration to “play with” in order to earn an audience. We’ll unpack his discussion in greater detail in a future blog post. There was a lot of great insight for Instagram, Facebook, and other social channels in his presentation.
Key Takeaway: Visual storytelling on platforms like Instagram is just beginning to develop as an art form and as a marketing craft. It will pay dividends for your business if you think of it in those terms!
Tongal Co-Founder Mark Burrell then led a panel with David Anderson of UTA, Rob Bencal from Mattel/American Girl, and Nicholas Ferrall of White Horse Pictures. Under the heading “Earning Attention: The Elements of Successful Content” this conversation became an exploration of the increasingly permeable boundary dividing entertainment and marketing content. This is another rich discussion we’ll take some time to parse in more detail in a future post.
Key Takeaway: The lines between entertainment, information, and marketing have always been a tad hazy. They may get hazier yet. You may benefit by thinking -- as creatively as possible -- about a world where those lines don't even exist anymore -- where the only audience you can get is one you've made for yourself.
Tongal CEO Rob Salvatore closed the day and helped attendees shift gears into celebratory mode with some closing remarks about the opportunity (at our Tongies III awards party) for Brand Lab attendees to meet and get to know the “best of the best” in our creative community.
Watch this space for more pictures, fun, and insight from Brand Lab and from our Tongies Awards ceremony. Talk to you again soon…
