
Interactive Minds 2018 Recap
A bit delayed as the conference was a few weeks ago but I’ve had my notebook sitting ready for me to write out my thoughts following the great Digital Summit put on by Interactive Minds again this year so I decided to go through and note down the things which still stand out to me over a month later.
Jeremiah Andrich / Executive Dir Ecommerce & VR @ HTC
Notable quotes / points from the notes:
“We don’t buy products, we buy better versions of ourselves”
The talk included some amazing unpacking of customer journey. He shared that he looked at Reddit every morning to understand how his product was going (great practice).
“Organisations have had a blueprint for customer acquisition that did not include the customer. Silos of function guided by roles and responsibilities, not be customer outcomes.”
Afterwards I got a chance to chat with Jeremiah and asked him — given that he’d just rallied against silos — how integrated product management and his marketing team were? He shared a couple examples of where product and marketing had genuinely collaborated on some features and special versions of their VR products.
Claire Austin / Content Marketing Evangelist @ LinkedIn
The core concept of her talk was that people trust people more than brands so therefore you have to understand this in sharing strategy. After her talk I spoke with her about how it would be beneficial to also cultivate a content strategy that puts the customer at the centre in terms of who they really are. I mentioned a company I think does an amazing job at this: InVision. I recall an article they put on their blog once about impostor syndrome. It had nothing to do with their product (which helps you build prototypes) but everything to do with their customer which makes them amazing.
Adam Lowry / Fuji Xerox
I thought this guy probably had a tough gig coming from a company that sold printers and talking at a digital conference. He shared a bit about Xerox’s digital artefacts for sharing information. This made me wonder why Xerox isn’t continuing to pursue the paper vector? Like there are some great companies working in paper like Cardly and Bond but are still innovative. It made me wonder if they’ve stuck to their company mission. So I looked up the company mission on their website:
“Build an environment for the creation and effective utilisation of knowledge”
The products he was showing were like a variable data video that Vodaphone used to tell people about their individual plan and usage. (sort of like those videos facebook does where they plug in your personal information).
So I guess they are sticking to their mission. It’s important for companies to know what their mission is and seriously carry it out with their products.
Peter Smyth / Facebook
The main thing I got out of this was all the different types of video and video tactics you can use on Facebook. He used video in his slides showing a feed being scrolled which was great to support his presentation. He showed examples of “to be continued” videos where companies released short series through their advertising in order to create an ongoing narrative with the prospect. He also showed “break the feed” videos — for example someone drops something in the video but it drops out of the video frame and into the feed — ofcourse it’s all video but part of it is made to look like the feed. It reminded me of all the creative stuff we did back when I had an agency doing this sort of thing.
He showed this as an example of engaging video which I really enjoyed:
