Wire Stone Labs explores new ideas, user experiences and technologies that have the potential to change the integrated marketing ecosystem at large. You can see these once-experimental technologies in our Michael Jordan, Cartier, and Boeing work, among others. Led by Fabio Matsui, Greg Rattenborg and Jason Michaels, Labs is Wire Stone’s internal commitment to inspire innovative thinking and solutions that help differentiate our clients from their competitors.
An extension of the Labs effort is our Education Outreach Program: a set of alliances between Wire Stone and top universities near our six domestic offices. We’ve found that when we work with the “next generation” of technologists, creatives, and strategists, all parties win.
Recently, wire stone teamed with BDW at the University of Colorado Boulder to lead an intensive 2-day BookLab. The challenge posed to the 15 post-graduate BookLab students was to create an omnichannel experience – retail, mobile, digital, and event – for a leading sports apparel brand. The solution needed to deliver an immersive, omni-channel user experience, solid strategy and needed to be measureable. The wire stone team – art director Erik Cox along with our chiefs – worked with BookLab students to ideate and prototype two programmatic solutions in 48 hours.
“The solution needed to include audience insights, stellar creative, and technologies that would multiply the program’s reach.”
The effort required: an integrated view of marketing and media; coordination within diverse teams; and a good deal of rapid ideation and agility. All ideas were welcome, but on Day Two, two complete presentations from the BDW teams were due.
What impressed us most was the students’ ability to organize quickly across disciplines and to then ideate in an agile, rapid manner. The teams deduced the customers’ wants and needs; translated those insights into visuals and technical requirements; and decided what it would take to bring the ideas to life. From a strategy and account planning perspective, these students dreamt big yet prioritized their solutions to be both impactful and achievable.
The solution was a combined B2C campaign that incorporated event activity for present sports fans; a mobile application for remote sports fans; a retail experience to draw in new customers; and a storefront window display using Microsoft Kinect. This was agency-scale ideation within a university setting. Very impressive.
It is clear that the next generation of students will require a stellar ability to think across media and mediums – no silos. They will organize similarly: collaboration among specialists is “built-in, “ which allows them – like Wire Stone teams – to ideate, go to market, and optimize quickly. The students at BDW certainly are prepared to contribute and lead in this omni-channel environment.
As an integrated marketing agency with a digital core, seeing this new generation of thinkers aligned to our process was exciting, but it also reinforced that great creative and technology – grounded in strategy, measured, and then optimized in near real time – is the future of the agency business.
More about BDW: http://bdw.colorado.edu/
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