Match Wits With Sherlock Holmes In This Unique Immersive Story Experience

This Saturday you can be part of a very cool narrative experience at Lincoln Center. You will be asked to solve a crime worthy of Sherlock Holmes. This is a “Sneak Preview” of a larger experience that will be staged later this year at a major film festival.

Details:
Saturday, May 2nd
12pm, 1pm or 2pm
The Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery
Lincoln Center
165 West 65th Street (between Broadway & Amsterdam)

RSVP NOW – space is limited

Come step into a FREE collaborative storytelling experience that reimagines the world of Sherlock Holmes. This coming Saturday, May 4th during the Columbia University Film Festival, we’ll stage 3 games starting at 12pm, 1pm and 2pm. Space is limited so make sure to RSVP.

Become Sherlock Holmes and help create and solve an evolving mystery in a fun and playful setting that mixes story, gaming and design. Lincoln Center is your crime scene and you’ll have 60 minutes to create and solve a mystery.

Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things is an ongoing project from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab in partnership with the NYFF and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

For more info on this storytelling prototype from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab visit http://sherlock.digitalstorytellinglab.com

About the project
Join storytellers, game developers, makers, creative technologists, and experience designers. An experiment in co-authorship – Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things invites participants to step into a collaborative design space. Over the course of monthly meetups, participants lay the groundwork for a re-imaging of Sherlock Holmes told through a series of connected objects. The year-long experiment culminates with a special presentation at Lincoln Center during the NYFF in 2015.

 Sherlock

Marketing Management Has Become Like An Elephant Riding A Bicycle – or – What Big Data Taught Me

Here is the presentation that Professor Don Sexton and I made to the BRITE conference a couple of weeks ago.  Don made sense of the data in the first half of the presentation and I followed on with the larger implications for marketing.

Yes, the Elephant on a Bicycle is how I summarize the state of marketing management today.  The framework for marketing is like a rickety bicycle, one that was built over 30 years ago.  When you pile social media, digital OOH, mobile, the convergence of online and offline the whole contraption becomes unwieldy.  The traditional marketing approach just wasn’t built for today’s world.

It’s time to stop trying to patch up the old model.  Let the past be the past.  And move on to adopt marketing techniques that are designed specifically for today’s world.

It was truly brave of the marketers at some companies like Coca Cola, McDonald’s, VISA, etc., to admit the traditional marketing model doesn’t get you very far anymore.  Coca Cola developed their strategic storytelling model, “Liquid and Linked”.  McDonald’s under CMO Larry Light broke new ground with Brand Journalism.

This presentation is merely the tip of the iceberg of insights to be discovered in the research.   You can download the first real report of the study that was co-authored by Don and David Rogers of the Center for Global Brand Leadership at briteconference.com or from the NYAMA’s website nyama.org

Sexton and Ringer Presentation of NYAMA BRITE Study

Is your door open this Christmas?

There is something about the holidays that creates great psychological pressure on people.  In part it is the unrealistic expectations of the celebrations.  In part it is the long hours of darkness around the winter solstice (betraying my north of the equator bias).

This is a time when families often fall apart instead of coming together.  This is the time of the year when organizations such as Covenant House are keeping their doors open for young adults who are in need of help.  Originally they kept their door open as a temporary shelter.  Today they have evolved in organization that can help kids get on their feet, finish their education and find a job — when there are jobs to be found.

You help keep the doors open this season.  All you have to do is contribute time or money.  Or both.  Just click on the logo below and it will take to you a site where you can make a difference.

The renewed Covenant House

Can a brand be valued by the stock price?

Back in the dark ages of 1987 I was working at an ad agency where my clients were The Prudential and its stockbrokerage, Prudential Bache.  Our offices were on the 20th floor of 1515 Broadway, overlooking Times Square itself.  It was a glorious view from there, particularly at night.  The military recruiting station was still there.  The seedy parts of the neighborhood were still in ascendance. While we didn’t have the internet we had something even better — the news ticker on the side of the One Times Square.

One day my boss called me over the windows looking out on the square.  On the news ticker was the announcement of the stock market crashing, dropping hundreds of points.  By the end of trading the market was down about 508 points — over 22%.  It was stunning.

When we could pull ourselves away from the windows, we turned to the business of setting up a market research study for our clients to assess the impact of this drop on willingness for people to buy stocks, mutual funds and universal life insurance. Back then, a relatively small percentage of people actually owned stocks or even mutual funds.

The agency quickly rushed out new Prudential Bache advertising to reassure investors with the tagline, “Rock solid.  Market wise.”

No one was particularly thinking that the stock market collapse would have any bearing on the strength, equity and value of brands in general.  What did the stock market have to do with brand valuation?

Flash forward to 2008 when the stock market tanks.  By this time there are well established measures and indexes of brand value tied directly to stock values.  For more than a decade brand consulting companies such as Interbrand have been selling brand valuation studies showing how many billions of dollars this or that brand is worth.  This listing is published every year in a the top global brands in Business Week.

In this past 2008 ranking Citi was valued at $20 billion.  The stock market valuation of Citi today is about $14 billion.

Does that mean if you took the Citi brand away that the rest of the company is worth negative $6 billion?  

Or that the Citi brand itself is now worth a negative $6 billion?  In other words, the bank would be better off without the Citi name attached to it.  Certainly in Wednesday’s testimony the head of AIG indicated that they would be better off without their brand.  At Citi the recent advertising campaign of “Live Richly” have contributed to making the company a target.  And the same is true for Bank of America’s “Bank of Opportunity” campaign.

The standard approach to marketing, the Brand Positioning approach, would say that you cannot change the minds of people about these brands.  You need to change the brands since you cannot change minds.

So we now see two standard marketing tools failing companies today.  Brand valuation is setting up the wrong benchmark.  And Brand Positioning is directing companies to dump their brands instead of changing their marketing approach.

Rather than changing the brands, it would be more effective for the banks to change their approach to marketing.  If they reinvent marketing so that it is better integrate and aligned with the rest of the organization, then they would begin to see a change in how people perceive them.  It would not solve the underlying financial problems.  But it would go a long way to creating public sympathy instead of the current anger.