1AmongMany

As Court TV made a shift to embrace their new prime-time identity - truTV - they came to us with a mission. The brief was simple: “Agency X is handling our branding. Agency Y is building our website. We want you to tell us what’s missing.” So we presented them with a recipe that would change the world of television forever.

Outlined in a 100-page handbook, we gave truTV an instruction manual for the creation of the first-ever “open sourced” TV network. The manual includes two primary strategic ideas, both intended to embrace the brand’s ideal of capturing truth and actuality, coupled with a new business model that would redefine the role of a TV network in today’s digital landscape. The first strategy allows truTV to bring their audience into every step of the creation process, from ideation and script-writing to casting and distribution, creating an entirely new show based on the unbelievable moments of “actuality” that truTV viewers have experienced in their everyday lives.

The second idea was born from the insight that each “character” on truTV is also a real person – they most likely have a life online just like the rest of us. So we envisioned a digital toolkit  - a socially connected search engine that would allow truTV fans to visualize, add to, and share trails of information related to their favorite show (and anything else they find online). Essentially, it’s equal parts social network, browser plugin, search engine, and SEO optimization platform. This tool would allow people to share video content, notes, links, and swap live images as well as visualize and search the “breadcrumbs” of ideas as they connect and overlap across the internet. And, in turn, it would associate all of these tagged datapoints with the truTV brand based on the trail each breadcrumb relates to, thereby building the brand’s SEO footprint. Not even Google can do that…

Want to know more? Grab the .pdf here.

We were commissioned by Tauck World Discovery to help envision and realize of a new kind of travel company. One that focuses on experience-driven travel where you don’t just hear about the field Cezanne painted in, you paint in it yourself. One where each destination package is curated by an experience-minded tour-guide. One designed for people craving a more dynamic, hands-on, and immersive style of travel. That company is Culturious.

In order to help potential travelers understand what Culturious has to offer, we designed a web experience that embodies, and grows with, every adventure Culturious travelers take. Instead of the usual top-down structure that most travel sites use – one in which the marketing department fills in the information about each destination as they see fit – we created a site that grows from the bottom-up. A site that will utilize the experiences and social connectivity that every traveler has come to expect in our digital age to create a robust repository of information and experiences about each destination in the Culturious portfolio.

Sure, the site begins with a description of the trips that Culturious offers (the section of the site that’s currently live). But the tour directors who create the trips, and the travelers who experience them will continue to add to the content on Culturious.com. Each tour director is responsible for keeping fresh, interesting information flowing onto the pages of the Culturious site dedicated to their destination. And each traveler will have their own travelog where, from the moment they sign up, they can begin to meet and interact with the other travelers in their group. During the trip, each traveler has the ability to add their own thoughts, photos, and stories about the places they visit to create their own personal “memory book” on the fly.

Culturious will then collect these stories and use them (with permission, of course) to continue populating their trip description pages so that each potential traveler who visits Culturious.com can learn about the trips directly from other travelers who have already visited the destination.

For the holiday season, we set out to create a “holiday greeting” that would be a bit more exciting and engaging than the standard card or funky video. We’ve all seen those. They’re fun – for about two minutes. Then they’re just boring.

Obviously social interaction on the web is a big part of what we do and what we talk about at POKE, so that was a prerequisite for whatever we created. After much concepting and discussion, we decided to put our own twist on a holiday tradition by creating the Global Naughty or Nice List. Add your friends and vote them naughty or nice for the holiday - then send their profile around and let everyone else contribute as well! To help the idea along, we also included a Twitter component to allow people to tie their profiles to their Twitter accounts.

And, the Global Naughty or Nice List was voted “the best agency holiday greeting card” by Mediabistro in 2008!

agency: POKE NY

How can a brand tell you what “sexy” should mean? Is it the perfect bedroom, with the curtains drawn just so? Can you narrow it down to a hair color or a specific body type? No. “Sexy” is personal – and something that only you can define. Keep Life Sexy gives everyone a chance to stand up and shout to the world: “SEXY IS _____!” This site marked a new beginning for K-Y – an effort to reach out to the world and redefine what “sexy is” on everyone’s terms. This is what it looks like when a brand stops shouting and starts listening.

After viewers submit their thoughts on what “sexy is” to the Keep Life Sexy site, they can sort through the data by age and gender, allowing them to gain a narrower perspective on what men and women in specific age groups believe sexy is. Of course, this also becomes a wealth of information for the K-Y brand to use in its development of new products and messaging. The Keep Life Sexy site is a social experiment that doubles as a research project for the brand, and its value to the end user keeps people coming back to continually add to, and explore, what sexy is.

agency: POKE NY

How do you make a digital purchase experience that feels as close to a physical experience as possible? For Teroforma, a new tableware company that brings together designers and craftsmen from around the world, the answer was simple: the table. Teroforma has designed a line of distinctive tableware created through a marriage of new ideas and age-old traditions. They’ve partnered innovative young designers with skilled craftsmen to bring you mouth-blown glass from Bohemia, silverware from Portugal, and bone china from, not surprisingly, China.

And, of course, if you’re buying dishes, isn’t the table exactly where you want to see them? You want to be able to mix and match, see this plate next to that mug and decide whether the blue or the green linens work better with that pattern you love. At Teroforma, that’s exactly how you shop.

Teroforma was a finalist at the One Show.

Launched in June of 2006, the Nike+ system has been called one of the most successful social experience sites on the internet. The Nike+ website offers users a method to track their personal running progress, but more importantly, it creates an outlet for people to connect around their passion.

In July 2007, I participated in the Nike+ Summit at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. I and eleven other runners from across the US were selected because we were knowledgeable, savvy, early adopters of the Nike+ system. We met with product developers and designers from Nike, Apple, and R/GA to share our insights about the positive elements and the flaws in the system. Based on my professional background, and my familiarity with the Nike+ system, I was uniquely positioned within the group to speak for Nike+ users in general, and the under 30 market in particular.

During the summit, the Nike+ team expressed an interest in becoming more relevant in the digital space, especially among the youth market. With those interests in mind, I put together a strategic document outlining a series of ideas and tactics that I believe would strengthen the presence of Nike+ in the youth market. A copy of the presentation is available for download in .pdf format here.