Category Archives: Experiential

Blind to Homelessness? Make Them Visible!

Carl Panzcak and his crew at Reactive NYC created this gem of a charity campaign together with Silver+Partners and Smuggler. It is a social experiment and campaign for making homelessness a more visible problem. Great work by our fellow team in New York, made me quite teary actually…

Check out Reactive’s work on http://www.makethemvisible.com where you can find some beautiful portraits of real homeless people in New York. And donate to help.

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You can also read a couple of write ups on Creativity Online, Fast Company, Huffington Post and our own Reactive blog

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This project initially began through our trip to the IAB Mixx Awards in New York with The Most Powerful Arm. As part of being over there, we hosted ‘Tomorrow Evening’, an event with the Reactive NYC crew where we presented our work and thinking. This event in turn created a personal connection to indie agency Silver + Partners which led to ‘Make Them Visible‘. I think it goes to show that you can’t quite know what will come out of hosting creative events. Except that you’ll always make a few interesting connections.

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Agency: Silver + Partners
Production Company: Smuggler
Editing: Now Corporation
Audio House: Sound Lounge
Finishing/Titles: Suspect
Music: JSM 
Website: Reactive

Experience the Experience! How we digital agencies explain what we do.

So are you ready to ‘experience the experience’? Because you will quite often hear it from us digital agencies: We have to get the brand-, product- and service-experience right. The ‘customer experience’ and its special subset, the ‘digital customer experience’. Plus the one you might be more familiar with, the ‘user experience’. These three ‘experiences’ have spawned popular new job titles. They are combinations of ‘user interface’ (UI), ‘user experience’ (UX) or ‘customer experience (CX) with an appendix of -designer, -architect, -strategist or -developer. Apart from job titles, this experience work is also producing new deliverables like ‘experience maps’. Below you see a simplified example we created, describing the sometimes emotional roller coaster customers go through when buying into a brand and product.

Screen Shot 2014-02-13 at 5.55.54 PMOther examples of our digitally enhanced experience work is our The Most Powerful Arm

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or AustralianOpen’s Social Shack.

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It’s interesting to look at how agencies and digital product companies describe this ‘experience’ offering in their own marketing. Our own Reactive site throws back no less than 548 search results when you look for ‘experience’. Screen Shot 2014-02-13 at 6.30.00 PM Have a read of what other firms use to describe very similar things:

  • DT Digital – “We create Customer Experiences that connect brands with people.”
  • Razorfish AU – “The Digital Experience Marketing Agency” with their international unit of “Emerging Experiences
  • Nurun – “We apply human-centered design to help businesses thrive in a connected world”
  • Huge – “We create experiences that transform brands, grow businesses and make people’s lives better”
  • Grow – “Grow is a digital agency with a passion for big ideas, little details, and a better approach to creating world-class interactive experiences”
  • Method – “We design integrated brand, product and service experiences”
  • MercerBell – “We’re a Customer Experience Agency”
  • eConsultancy– “Customer experience is the single most exciting opportunity for 2014”
  • Adobe – “Measure and optimize digital experiences to accelerate marketing  performance”
  • Sitecore – “Sitecore is a platform for driving one-on-one engagement at every touchpoint. Know every customer. Own every experience.”

But don’t forget to get in touch with us at Reactive first, after all,  548 ‘Experience’ search results don’t lie.

Australian Open Social Shack

One of Melbourne’s prime sporting events, the ‘Australian Open’ is closing on a great two weeks of tennis with their finals. Stars like Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Li Na battled on the courts, and their fans are constantly connecting with them and amongst each other via social media, especially with the help of Twitter and the official hashtag #AusOpen.

Here’s Reactive’s Australian Open Social Shack, which is all about bringing fans and players together through social media. Check out Twitter’s global blog post on the project here.

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Below outlines each of the concepts displayed across the screens:

Tug of War – Fans could engage with the display by hashtagging their favourite player to influence the game of tug of war. Two players go head-to-head and only win by having the higher number of hashtags associated to them. Each player had multiple hashtags associated to their profile to ensure  variations of their name, e.g. #teamwilliams were captured.

Social Cheer – This idea uses live data from IBM to display graphical social ‘cheer’ throughout a match. Player vs. player would be set up for live matches and based on the social chatter for each player the graph would grow or decline. The intelligence of IBM’s data was also used by pulling through content on fastest serves, longest rally and other stats.

Social Leaderboard – This application uses multi-screen takeovers and runs through a series of leader boards based on players social media accounts.  Tracking the most followed players, who tweets and instagrams the most.

Player Profiles – Fans can see an animated feed of players which displayed all their social media accounts.

KIA’s Greatest Fan – Built upon the user journey through the Social Shack, the first two screen are displaying a feed of photos taken in the KIA media booth. Once having their photo taken the fans would move through to the Social Shack where they could view their photo on the big screen and then engage with the above  concepts.

Lastly, a giant check-in button helps track the number of visitors to the Social Shack. An iPad app  ticked over every time its button was pressed. The 3D #AUSOPEN sign, commissioned by Tennis Australia, sits out the front of the Social Shack and is a perfect and very popular photo opportunity.

Web Directions BBQ at Reactive

Web Directions South 2013 kicks off in Sydney on Thursday, October 24. And as a little social warm up, Reactive Sydney is again hosting a Web Directions BBQ on the previous Wednesday night. This is your chance to get to know fellow attendees and talk shop with some of the high-profile speakers on our sunny balcony. We might have a short speaker of our own but the main point is that we enjoy a cold one together and welcome everyone to the coming days of inspiration and innovation. Get a free ticket on the event’s Eventbrite page but be quick, as most of them have been snapped up already.

The Reactive studio is right in the middle of Crown Street in Surry Hills, so if you feel like kicking on, there are plenty of choices afterwards. As long as you make it to the conference the following morning…
See last year’s BBQ in pictures in an album on our Facebook page.

Web Directions BBQ

Web Directions BBQ at Reactive Sydney

Gold at IAB Mixx Awards

Spending a week in our Reactive New York office was crowned last night by winning a Gold at the IAB Mixx Awards. With me was Emad, Director of Creative Technology at Finch, a long time collaborator and mate.

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Here is the IAB’s award pageScreen Shot 2013-09-25 at 1.17.01 PM

Next highlight here in New York will be our Reactive night out on Thursday. It will be held at co-working space AlleyNYC near Times Square and features Farrah Bostic, my colleague Carl and yours truly. If you are in New York please drop in and say hi:

http://tomorrowevening.eventbrite.com

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