What if a room could react ?

What if architecture “knew” where and how inhabitants were engaging with space ?

What if that architecture could then improve those engagements, by itself ?

What if a retail store knew what you liked, and led you to it ?

What if an auto show booth could tell you how many visitors went on to buy a car, and why ?

OUR BIG IDEA

The proliferation of accurate feedback data available to digital marketing channels has fundamentally changed the economics and marketplace in commercial brand messaging.  The keepers of this information, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, along with the digital agencies that bridge those gateways to brands, offer incredibly specific consumer insights and rich targeting and metrics capability.  The result is an ultra refined prediction on ROI, message penetration, and the tracking of brand story from telling through transaction.

Until now, there has been scant attention paid to the collection and use of data from experiential channels.  Experiential communication is a premium expense. It has the power to create strong impressions and is a huge source of messaging content.

When people attend experiential installations, they opt in to an experience where they can be engaged.  This engagement comes in the form of spaces where highly programmatic experiences are crafted. If data can be collected prior to an experiential event, added to via engagement and tracking during an event, and be bridged to post event analysis and a durable contact generation, then producers of experiential can realize the same data value as the wider digital marketing economy.

MODE studios is actively developing solutions that combine app creation, onsite metrics gathering, the development of an insight generating expert system, and provision for converting data to commercial community – More than a demographic, it becomes a measurable and powerful group of ‘super fans’.  Engaged, and engaging. Providing constant insights into messaging evolution and targeting.

THE PROBLEMS

Experiential ROI has been difficult to track.  

The best practices for metrics to date have involved data tracked through personal engagement, opt in information tracking (again via direct human contact), along with some app deployment.

Hard data on tracking experience through to transaction has been difficult to gather or correctly filter.

There hasn’t yet been a way to combine a suite of approaches to generating and analyzing data from real life experience.

CONTEXT

The business of communicating marketing, messaging, and advertising changed when the rise of internet commerce and social media occurred.  The purveyors of these channels had enormous user bases, and a ubiquitous ability to track exactly what they engaged with, for how long, measurement of their behavior during engagement, and an ability to then track that through to transaction.

The ability to track to transaction is enormously valuable.  

The information environment also offered an ability to quickly measure engagement, impressions, and success of messaging content.  With an agile production and creative environment iterative messaging was enabled. This allowed for metrics to suggest incremental changaes to increase success, or to target extremely specific pyschographics.

The ability to target in this way from a messaging standpoint was parallel to an ability for the channels to select exactly the users in those psychographics to send marketing messaging to.  

This enabled media buys to be incredibly specific, to come with a highly analyzed success metric, and for the crafting of specific empathetic messaging to have robust appeal.

MODE has conducted extensive research to this premise and opportunity.  We have used reports from cultural intelligence agencies Spark & Honey, Stylus, and WBENC, along with industry analysis from AdWeek, Campaign, and Variety.  As outlined in Ken Auletta’s book, Frenemies, this availability and cultivation of data has led to revolutionary change in marketing and communication. Over 80% of the global 800 billion dollar ad spend has shifted to digital marketing as a result of this value.

Our extended experience in the available data and points of interaction with consumers in experiential settings has given MODE a unique advantage in identifying available data layers, and designing systems to collect and abstract that data.

SOLUTION

Experiential environments are inherently programmatic.  They feature timed and scheduled media, that plays in known spaces and locations.  Environmental factors like lighting and sound are also driven digitally. This yields an ability to know exactly what state an environment is in during engagement, and precisely what section or segment of media is being broadcast.  

As a result of spatial tracking innovations driven by autonomous vehicles, there is a powerful and flexible ability to deploy layers of sensing systems and intuitively organize and analyze their data to determine accurate tracking information of people in space.  Where they are moving. Which way they are facing. How kinetic they are (jumping up and down ? waving ?).  MODE is using these tools to create incredibly accurate metrics of where people congregate in space, how long they linger, which direction they are facing.  Thus, without any need for personalized opt-in, we have a complete realtime sample of inhabitant engagement in space.

Consumer engagement through mobile technologies is acknowledged.  By deploying an opt in app that adds experiential value (adds production layer, allows for bi directional engagement), and collects data uses device sensors to gather biometrics and further spatial information.

The data points from these three layers is combined into coherent matrices of data.  The data is then analyzed by two expert systems. The first uses computer vision and existing metadata to create a rich abstract of contextual information and attach it to the engagement, event, or tracking.  The second then uses comparative and self teaching algorithms to extract specific consumer insights from the data, allowing for accurate calculations of ROI.  A third AI then can programmatically alter the lighting, audio, media, contents or even structure of space to more compellingly engage with inhabitants currently in it.