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5 TAKEOUTS FROM UNBOUND: UNCOVER THE POWER OF PARTICIPATION

FRUKT recently attended the Unbound Conference, an event designed to uncover the power of innovation. A host of business and thought leaders shared their insights and thoughts about the future, and the prevailing theme was about the ever-growing shift towards participation marketing.

Media is in a phase of drastic change. Journalism is getting shorter and more bitesize. Traditional, old media such as TV is seeking ways of becoming more than a passive activity. Everyone has one eye on how to catch up with the interactive and high engagement channels such as experiential, VR and interactive digital.

FRUKT formed in reaction to the passive world of advertising, with an aim of getting people actively participating, creating in-depth engagement and lasting memories. However, new tech is bringing old media into the fold and making a more crowded and competitive space. Our job, of course, is to keep finding new ways of extending engagement and participation.

We’ve pulled five of the most interesting points that demonstrate how brands are getting their audiences to participate.

CATCH PEOPLE IN THE MOMENT

Stylus, an innovation research firm, considered how brands should aim to seamlessly integrate into consumers’ everyday lives, targeting their needs and anticipating their intentions. With 60% of advertising now considered to be clutter [Havas] marketers need to uncover new opportunities to increase engagement opportunities. We can do this by catching consumers ‘in the moment’. Stylus explained that this was “leveraging the ‘3rd or transitory space’”. Somewhere outside of the home or the office, but elsewhere, such as community spaces, parks or cafés.

Out-of-home advertising has traditionally always targeted this space, and we’re seeing increasingly smart solutions. As Elizabeth Arden, the makeup brand, exemplified in Oxford Circus, by using live digital updates to support a message.

At FRUKT, we’ve been creating ‘3rd spaces’ for a long time. Our recent Stella Artois activation for Wimbledon was about constructing a public space for people to enjoy the tennis, eat food, relax in the city and engage with the brand. It’s these moments that break the rhythm of the day and create longer lasting memories.

INITIATE AN ACTIVE, TWO-WAY CONVERSATION

AI is something we increasingly, and perhaps unknowingly, rely on. Whether it’s to find the quickest route to work, to recommend products to purchase or to connect up with friends. In the next 12 months, we’re expected to see an explosion of innovation in nascent AI, bots, voice assistants and context-aware tech.

An intelligent, personalised, two-way conversation with a brand is another powerful tool to target the transitory. It’s expected to increase customer acquisition as it stirs an emotional response by adapting to consumer needs in real time. Devices such as IBM’s Watson, Google’s Home or Amazon’s Alexa are going to help these conversations by ordering your next meal, helping you find your next pair of shoes - bringing humanity and technology ever closer.

DIGITAL PARTICIPATION

Gone are the days of digital metrics being dominated by traffic and page views. Eye balls are no longer the only thing that matter. ‘Swipe’, ‘vote’, ‘twist’, ‘interact’ these are the new methods of measuring our consumer’s engagement. Tinder’s famous ‘swipe’, brought this into the limelight and actively showed what it meant to have an engaged app user.

FRUKT’s recent digital build for O2, ‘Relive The Night’, aims to bring the live gig experience back to life by providing music-goers with interesting, post-gig content that they can interact with. Whether it’s photos of the bands that they can swipe through, voting on their favourite track of the night or visualising how loud they cheered as a crowd in decibels. Each element is designed to draw the consumer’s participation, remind them of a previous physical experience and stir that emotion once again.

TV GETS YOU TO CONTRIBUTE

Netflix is attempting to make TV a more active experience and is starting with their kids shows. To some extent, subscriptions and video-on-demand have enabled audiences to interact and pick what they want to watch and when. But now we’re seeing a new realm of possibilities for digital TV, by allowing users to make decisions about the storyline along the way, picking one route or another, taking it beyond a linear narrative. As Netflix say “It’s innovating on storytelling…And it’s another way for us to put control into the members’ hands.” For Puss in Boots they’ve created 13 different decision points, together this create thousands of permutations for the story. Pretty cool! Next stop Westworld.

MOVIE CHARACTERS ARE BROUGHT TO LIFE

If you’ve never heard of Beat Bugs before (I hadn’t) it’s an Australian-Canadian children's cartoon and is a hugely successful Netflix original series.

Chirp, a UK tech company, spoke about how they’d partnered with toy company Hijinx to create special, technological toys for Beat Bugs. The idea is to make products that extend the show out into the physical world by reacting to the music-centric TV show.

Interestingly enough this isn’t a clever Internet of Things device. Since it’s a child’s toy, safety precautions ensure that it’s not connected to the internet. Chirp’s patented technology encodes data into a series of pitches and tones that form a sonic barcode, which then activates the toy to do all manner of amusing things. We’re on hold right now, before passing judgment on how annoying this will get in reality.