Grapevine Consulting

I attended Iris’s 2nd annual Under the Influence event last week. I spent my afternoon mainly camped out at the sessions held in  ”The Dive Inn” aka The George Inn near Borough Market listening to speakers from Iris Experiential, Contagious Magazine, Frukt and Poke.

For my round-up of their “best bits” I’ve written a few posts on the speakers.

Ian Tait, Poke

It’s odd when a company gets mentioned once to you and then suddenly you feel like everyone’s talking about them and you want to find out more about what they do. I wish I was measuring Poke’s WOM buzz right now because it seems they’re generating a few conversations, and rightly so. Ian gave a unique and insightful presentation on how to capture people’s attention with brand campaigns.

I don’t feel I can do justice in summing up his talk but the premise was you need to find the “magic” of a campaign to impress people and capture their attention; and he didn’t just reference this in a vague kind of a way but looked at the mechanics of what achieves feelings of wonder and emotional engagement in people.

Ian broke it into three core parts:

1. Where’s your magic? - i.e. what is your proposition
2. Is it real or just illusion? - i.e. can the audience get involved and start to use it
3. Does it give super-power? - This is the enabling part, by allowing people to use it to create something themselves and not just experience it passively

If you’re wondering how this works in real world application I guess the examples would be; Point 1. just creating a website, Point 2. Would be building some kind of interactivity to it, Point 3. would allow you to take something from that site like a widget, game, or tool bar which enables you to do your own thing. I hope I’ve understood it right, it did make a great deal of sense when i was there.

Anyway, the talk certainly worked its magic on the crowd with people enthusiastically discussing it when the sessions concluded.

Under the Influence: Part 1, The event

Paul Kemp-Robertson, Contagious Magazine