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,... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

[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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Back from another year at CES and the word of the show is incremental. Everyone I spoke to at CES mainly said the same thing. Nothing really blew them away, in a good way at any rate, and everything was just a little better than last year. I still always see some great technology that I think is better out of the home, but TV Let me start with this heresy, I'm not a fan of 8K for the house. Sure, it's awesomely pretty and the colors are amazing, but I don't see it being a big winner for the... Continue reading

A recent article in Verge, Virtual creators aren’t AI — but AI is coming for them, talked about the rise of AI influencer, like Lil Miquela: One of Instagram’s hottest influencers is a 19-year-old intelligent robot. Lil Miquela’s 1.5 million followers watch her eat sherbet on the beach, visit her favorite art galleries, and hang out with other robot models. Except, Lil Miquela isn’t really an artificially intelligent being. She’s also not a robot. According to the article, there's a lot of VC money going into this space, which I guess is how the world works these days. But, can... Continue reading

Facebook's data issues have been in the headlines the last couple of weeks and honestly, I'm not sure it's going away any time soon. Just today, they announced new rules to try and combat the issues that they've been having with fake news and outside entities being involved in US politics. Although we've known about the issue of Facebook using our data and building larger databases by "letting" us use their login information across a wide section of the internet, we are still surprised by just how much data they have allowed to leak out of Facebook for such a... Continue reading

L.L. Bean made some pretty big news when they announced that they were ending their lifetime warranty on their products. This was a cornerstone of their customer experience since they started and I would guess a driver of why people shopped at Bean. It also spoke of why retail needs to be a relationship between the stores and the customers. Both sides have an obligation to be respectful of each other and when it gets out of balance, things like this happen. I would certainly be interested in knowing how much they were losing on these returns, but let's give... Continue reading

The good folks at Propelify have done a great job putting together a highlight of the presentations from the 2017 event over at their Dispatch. I think they did a great job (typo in my name not withstanding!) taking my talk and turning it into a nice, easy to watch, 4 minute video. I was at my first volunteer planning meeting this week and I'm looking forward to seeing how I can make the 2018 event even better! I've included a brief overview of the piece here and you can read the full piece at Stop Thinking Killer Apps -... Continue reading

It's sometimes fun to look back at pieces I wrote some time ago and see what came true and what didn't. I think that this was originally written in 2006 and what's interesting is that some of these predictions happened, went away and have come back again. For example, Second Life was very popular at the time, but hasn't been as popular for a few years. However, they are now getting ready to launch a whole new experience Project Sansar. Podcasting started to get hot, went a little into a decline and today is hotter than ever. Now clearly not... Continue reading

I’ve just returned from CES, the annual gather of all things technical in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 companies will present their wears, from the largest companies in the industry all the way down to new start-ups being shown in Eureka Park. Last year, almost 190,000 people attended over the several days of the event, all looking to see what trends they should be following. This year, there seem to be a number of key trends being discussed, that for me bring up some interesting future discussions for the advertising industry. They include 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of... Continue reading

Ten years ago, I was in Poland doing an AudienceGames installation for Orange and had an experience that I think illustrates the future of information. We had a free afternoon and decided to walk into the old section of Warsaw to do some exploring. On the way, we passed a large, Catholic cathedral. Since everything was in Polish, we didn't really know what the church was or anything about its history, but it was a beautiful church to explore. Towards the front of the church, was a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes (and probably my... Continue reading

Take a look at the video from our panel during Advertising Week on the how we can move VR forward. Great group of folks and an excellent discussion! Virtual reality enables you to step into another world – a stimulated environment brought to life by a marketer’s control and imagination. Once there, consumers can suspend belief, interact, move, and be totally surrounded by a brand. That’s what makes it irresistible to advertisers. Yet, it’s a solitary experience that’s costly to create and consume with specific hardware requirements needed by the end user. So, when should you initiate a VR project?... Continue reading

I had a chance to sit down with Don Bennion from Adobe during Advertising Week to talk about what makes a great experience, the value of data and the importance of authenticity! Continue reading

Our friends over at VirtualAPT created a great 360 video tour of the recent Advertising Week TechX. Click here to see the full video and take your tour of TechX! Continue reading

Love what Baaria Chaudhary and Marjorie Wang did with Pawn VR at #AWTechX #AWNewYork. They 3D scanned attendees to turn them into chess pieces in a new, immersive chess game experience. What makes it even cooler is that the entire experience was created live during Advertising Week. Thrilled to have them participate! You can now click here to download the full experience! Continue reading

Earlier this year, I had the chance to bring my thoughts on Stop Thinking Killer App, Think Killer Experience to life at Propelify 2017. My presentation covered several key thoughts: Stop with the limitations. We need to stop focusing on the limitations. Everyone knows they exist, but we still need to make great content. I've had so many conversations with friends who were doing VR/AR 10 or 20 years ago and they were all doing awesome, cool things, even with all of the limitations we had back then. Add the other senses. We're slowly starting to see more experiments with... Continue reading

A few months back, I had coffee with Mari Kim Novak, who was about to start as president of Advertising Week, the annual celebration of the advertising indstry that happens in NYC. She wanted to create a new experience for Advertising Week, something that focused on the emerging technologies everyone's talking about, like VR, AR, AI, voice and others. Having taken my tours at CES several times, she also wanted something that would be curated and, just as importantly, contextualized so that attendees would understand why we were talking about these technologies, not just what they are. As Mari Kim... Continue reading

Very excited to announce that I have been brought in, along with a partner VentureFuel, to create a unique, tech experience for Advertising Week 2017. As you may know, Advertising Week is the premiere ad industry event, with 100,000 attendees and dozens of co-located industry events over the four days. The event runs September 25th - 28th and you the location we have secured is on Times Square at 43rd Street. We are taking over a 12,000 sf space right on Times Square for this experience, creating tremendous visibility for all of our participants. We're looking for emerging tech companies,... Continue reading

This is a special guest post, written by my daughter, Sydney (16) As a Gen Z-er, I don’t usually think about what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I don’t analyze my shopping pattern (there isn’t anything to analyze) or question how my friends and I will impact the economy as we get older. Since I’ve started speaking at conferences, that has started to change. This summer I went with my school on a service trip to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana to help the Indians (yes, they told us to call them that). We spent just over a... Continue reading