Pop-up shops and experiences create surprise, engagement, and unique experiences. By their nature, they are intended to be short-lived. Pop-up shops create buzz partially because of their unique design and style and often because they are tied local culture, art, music, and media influencers. There is also an in-the-know exclusivity to the discovery and participation with a branded pop-up. They are perfect for seasonal campaigns, new product launches, and marketing testing.

PacSun, a lifestyle retail brand with roots in youth, action sports, fashion and culture unveiled a pop-up experience in New York’s Soho in the summer of 2013. The large format pop-up retailer brought brands like Volcum, Hurley, RVCA and others to SoHo with special activities featuring in-store DJs.

Brands as virtual as Seattle’s Amazon jumped into the trend. In November, 2013 Amazon opened up a San Francisco mall-based pop-up Kindle retail shop as a marketing campaign. The short-lived shop lets possible customers bridge a difficult gap, limited opportunities to try out the Kindle. Amazon also gains a marketing and public relations coup by positioning the pop-up shop right in the same camp as local Apple. And, Amazon possibly gets to test market feedback on the concept of opening its own retail stores.

These experiences are consistent with emerging demographics with significant buying power – urban cultural creative’s, technoratis, and experience seekers who favor short-lived, dynamic, and low-branded engagement. In fact, the offline is morphing with the virtual -  Facebook, Instagram, Google Docs, and Snapchat mimic this pop-up brand culture.

And, its not just consumer brands, hospitality is partnering with consumer brands to create similar pop-up experiences. In San Francisco, the W Hotel handpicked 8 brands for a pop-up store in their MIXX Lounge. The location will serve as an engagement experience with emerging local cultural brands, food, and party.

PlaceGuides embraces integration of the real and digital worlds, offline influencing on-line and vice-a-versa. PlaceGuides publishing platform, API’s, and mobile SDKs enable brands, their agencies, and any marketing admin to create a web and mobile place-based story for such pop-up brand campaigns. Its easy as 1, 2, 3. Select a location, add content and cloud media, embed and publish. Visitors engage with the PlaceGuide and share it via social media increasing the virality of the campaign.

At the crossroads of this movement is big data. PlaceGuides is able to harvest all sorts of important data about the interactions occurring on the PlaceGuide, web and mobile, for our customers. And, unlike that space-age company focusing on documenting the world, we don’t control the data intelligence, instead it’s intended for use by our customers.

“At PlaceGuides, we provide an extraordinary location-aware platform influencing extremely important consumer offline actions and behaviors” said PlaceGuides Tal Turner a business development veteran to mobile, brands and tech industry.  At the meta level, what’s interesting to PlaceGuides and to our brand customers is the knowledge we gain about culture and new emerging demographics and trends – whether retail, culinary, fashion or any other market sector.

And, we’re no big brother – we support real world culture and perservatio and enhancement of place. PlaceGuide’s mission is to enable user-created, content-rich depictions of place capable of sharing through social media. We value using technology to enable deeper connections to community, place, and culture in the physical world. Our goal is a human dialog and relationship with place.

Brands are engaging customers at real world locations with new product launches, events targeted to reach new demographics, and via brand awareness campaigns. These experiences continue to grow in complexity and production value – multiple locations, contests, and fully programmed music and entertainment activities.

Advancements in smart mobile technology, such as Apple’s iBeacon and mapping technology  such as ESRI Triggers integrated into applications offer opportunities for consumers to engage with unique, real world, branded experiences. New smart mobile technologies integrated into smart publishing platforms like PlaceGuides’ location-based marketing tied to maps offer to further integrate the on-line and off-line into immersive, interactive, and fun experiences.

In fact, real world brand engagement with mobile geo-location, map navigation, and fun interactivity is an expected experience for Millineals. This powerful demographic seeks authentic, engaging experiences with the brands they love, tied to culture and location, especially in urban markets where spending power is high. Other high income demographics with smart phone are also familiar with and expect navigational aides that are immersive and creative.

The benefit of a location-based marketing is a more-engaged visitor, opportunities for deeper brand loyalty, and expanded campaign reach. It also creates opportunities to influence on-line actions like increased e-commerce, email capture, and off-line behavior like real world purchases and participation in the actual brand event engagement. And, tying brand campaigns to map location experiences enables increased data intelligence of users’ experiences and feedback, before, during, and after the event.

Hollywood knows how to tailor messages and content based on users’ real world feedback, now brands have the power to do the same. By deploying smart location platforms like PlaceGuides and one-on-one technology like ibeacon and ESRI Triggers it’s a new game for brand engagement.

Emerging Location-based Mobile Technology

Apple iBeacon, a RFID disc physically attached to a location and data aware via Bluetooth, enables an Apple ios smartphone user to access a place-based brand experience, and/or a physical brand location, and obtain a triggered action on the users’ device directed by the user or the brand.

ESRI, one of the top three map providers in the world, recently launched geo-triggers that can be built right into applications like PlaceGuides publishing creation tool and mobile player. Geo-triggers allow any brand campaign built on PlaceGuides to be geo-fenced and geo-triggered by the brand when a user enters a designed zone, right down to a booth – all user defined during the PlaceGuide creation mode. (http://www.esri.com ).

Speaking with a national events and brand agency, PlaceGuides confirmed that agencies want to build experiences that integrate on-line, mobile, and real world. The holly grail is measurement of user interactions and performance results occurring at physical locations, such as an event booth that the agency conceived, designed, and delivered.  Agencies confirmed that “measurement of campaign performance in the real world is key to future agency success.”

Experiential campaign performance not only allows for optimization of the content and experiences, but it also allows event management companies to better compete for customers.

An Example of a Geo-fenced Brand Engagement on PlaceGuides with Smart Triggers.

Take for example a touring brand experience like an automotive or handset provider product launch campaign targeted to high net-worth attendees at professional golfers tours.  The entire location based navigation, schedule, and media rich experience can be created on the PlaceGuides’ platform and delivered via a geo-aware and branded PlaceGuides’ mobile player.

BMW at PGA

The campaign may be conceived as a path of travel, starting from the invitation to the location, arrival, through to departure with the gift bag swag. A participant visits the PlaceGuide embedded  in the campaign website and sees the mobile invitation. The PlaceGuide showcases the entire set of activities and the mobile will allow them    to discovery, engage, and participate while at the actual brand event.

The agency then delivers the arrival experience and creative engagements with physical attributes using ibeacon or triggered via the map icons. This may include calls to action from the visitors while experiencing the arrival and engaging with the activities of the campaign. When a smartphone user enters a location, opportunities exist for pushed-message notifications, such as brand story telling – history, fun facts, or transactions such a discounted programs right on the spot.

The mobile experience may even extend to other layered mobile features built by the agency on top of the PlaceGuide’s future SDK, such as contests, games, etc.  Even after the event is over, the handset provider’s campaign may have legs by utilizing PlaceGuides’ platform to automatically message their valued customers via their smartphone.

For example, a user visits other locations tied to the campaign, but extended beyond the first engagement by location or event time, e.g. later on by enjoying favorite spots during the stay in the local city or even visiting one of the professional golf stars hometown in an entirely different city. Each experience allows a geo-fenced trigger directed to the engaged customer – none of this requires a one-off expensive mobile app build, it’s all built and delivered via the PlaceGuides platform and mobile player.

How The Smartphone User Benefits

The cutting edge change for experiential branding is that smartphones will recognize the users location down to a more targeted location and the brand can deliver, via platform applications like PlaceGuides, relevant and targeted stories and actions to the consumer. With social sharing built-in, these personalized experiences are more likely to lead to social amplification. The consumer benefits by unique and limited-time offers, and messages tailored to their interests and history.

This new capability of instant two-way storytelling and extended engagement via smartphones publishing platforms enables agencies to more effectively deliver for their brands, users to share brand experiences, and for extended campaign reach.

PlaceGuides

Stay tuned – we’re a small start-up, we have a passion for location-based story telling. We completed our platform and initial product launch without outside investors. If you are interested to help take us to the next level, please contact schefsky@placeguides.com

Our Mission is to enable user-created, content-rich depictions of place capable of sharing through social media. We value using technology to enable deeper connections to community, place, and culture in the physical world. Our goal is a human dialog and relationship with place.

Accura at Sundance Film Festival

With brands increasingly becoming media and content producers at higher expected production values, they must up-their-game when it comes to location marketing. Content marketing on web and mobile requires compelling, engaging, and interactive content. When it comes to location experiences, such as brands at events, pop-up campaigns, touring national brand engagements the same production value requirements hold true.

Let’s face-it accessing the consumer is fragmented. There is a battle for eyeballs against multiple media sources such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and SnapChat. Brand websites and mobile apps are competing with fragmented media options for a consumer perusal. Yet. direct brand sites remain a very powerful location where brand engagement, content experience, and media are controlled. And, the opportunities for direct consumer relationship, feedback, and loyalty is at it’s strongest. Mobile branded apps tied to location create the same managed content experience.

Josh Duhamel & Daniel Ortiz for Pedigree @ Pedigree Booth – Sundance Film Festival

Pedigree Engagement Booth at co-branded pop-up storefront.

Consumer engagement with branded, rich media experiences at locations often involves map navigation  via web and mobile just to find the brand happening.

Location experiences offer a new type of engagement and data intelligence not seen before for enterprises. Embedding location-based experiences in the brand’s website or mobile app is a marketing opportunity of high-value. Data intelligence can be gleaned, such as click-through habits and navigation interactions of high-value to brands. Brands can hone their messages, improve content offerings, and convert consumers.

We are not talking about wiz-bang augmented reality. Rather, we are referring to known form factors such as interactive media, map navigation, cloud content channels, and social virality. Integration of cloud channels like Instagram, Vimeo, and Soundcloud is already occurring in marketing campaigns. Cloud channel integration should also be considered for location-based map marketing experiences. Where mobile users are involved, interactive, rich media, with sharing features is an expected functionality particularly amongst millennials and younger. That interactive content exists as a layer over a map is a natural form factor for these users and can lead to rapid adoption and viral engagement.

Volvo Experiential Engagement Campaign

Virtualized experiences to real locations on maps were implemented years ago in-car navigation applications (telemetrics) such as TomTom and Garmin. Virtual location experiences for their own virtual existence is the realm of on-line games as early as SimCity.  An enhanced location marketing experience for brands and enterprises is a combination of the two, an immersive virtual experience yet to a real location. To achieve such location experience on web and mobile has typically required expensive code skills and map api integration – often resulting in a one-off web and mobile builds. These have been typical low production value and hard to maintain and scale.

Map apis were designed for cars and to cover broad distances of navigation. Google’s map approach is a data intensive, all things to all people, map API at an even bigger scale with nearly no media or content production value, contextual engagement experience, or brand control.

Maps and map apps are not marketing platforms, nor structured from the perspective of brand engagement. They are not about creating an experience and relationship with a consumer along a path of travel. Nor do they provide before, during, and after-experience feedback. They are not focused on loyalty, improvement, nor customer retention.

PlaceGuides marketing platform for location-based experiences addresses this virtualization layer over a map. It enables users to create a marketing experience tied to locations that serves brand objectives while meeting the content and media expectations of consumers. Web and creative agencies, marketers, and creatives can do without the cost and time associated with map app creation and coding. PlaceGuide’s goal is to free the creative’s whether a marketing team, agency, or designer and allow them to focus on the design, content, story, and engagement and not the platform.

PlaceGuide NBA Brand Engagement at Carnival SF

Brands can benefit by location-based experiences well beyond geo-location ad placement. Consumers engaging with map layers allow contextual tie-in and outbound linkage to sales and marketing automation tools. Data intelligence of the user actions on the marketing layer, owned and managed by the brand, enables a feedback loop of high-value that leads to improved products, experiences, and enhanced after-experience loyalty.

It is in this new category of location-based experience and content marketing that agencies, brands, retailers, hospitality and others are being increasingly requested to deliver, including with offline map experiences. PlaceGuides’ platform allows agencies and marketeers to focus on the message, design, creative, and content and not the medium of delivery or coding. This increases speed of execution for marketing campaigns and improves results. And, when it comes to advertising reach, performance is often overlooked in real world campaigns. With a marketing layer over a map, accessible via mobile – we enable performance metrics not seen before.

More efficient and intelligent location-based marketing is a win-win for brands and consumers. Brands can better identify demographic and behavioral trends that inform their products and services. They can also improve their products and messages. For consumers, it means a more informed and efficient pre and post arrival navigation and experience and more informed transaction.

PlaceGuides is a SanFrancisco start-up http://placeguides.com

For further information contact schefsky@placeguides.com

Brand and location have merged into an online and offline set of place-based experiences tied to lifestyle, culture, and commence. Apparel, culinary, and other product manufacturers are bringing their products and brand identity to the places where people live, work, and play. They are creating immersive, authentic experiences integrated together with culture (art, culinary, and music gatherings), technology (web, mobile, social), and location (festivals, events, pop-up stores, and in-store activities).

RVCA In-store Art Event

Those brands who think in terms of “we need to do something mobile” or “what’s our social strategy?” may be asking the wrong questions and are behind the curve. The successful brands instead are embracing and integrating technology, whether mobile, social, or marketing platforms in a way that is an authentic extension of their target demographic lifestyle.

RVCA Artist Advocate with Instagram Integration

Open, distributed, and cloud-based technology allows software providers to more easily develop interconnections between themselves. For example, SoundCloud, a social music site with public API’s, has integrated Instagram, itself another social site around photo community. This allows musicians to upload an Instagram Photo into the SoundCloud Album Art for their song. Yet, each internet provider has their own communities and offer their own independent websites, mobile apps, and other social interactions. The next phase of website integration for brands is media rich depictions of places tied to online and offline cultural experiences and connected to the places where brands want to reach target demographics. This offers a new category of branded, social place-based experiences that PlaceGuides is addressing with our place-based publishing platform.

Why is place important? Because stories sell and places make great stories and experiences. For some of the biggest television shows, theatrical productions, and literary stories real or fictional place is the common theme. In fact, it is human nature to explore and know your surroundings. And, place is a personification of one’s own personality and culture. Yet, sponsoring a local community event is not enough in the Web 2.0 internet age.

Nespresso Pop-up Store Engagement America’s Cup San Francisco

Brands must connect in deeper ways with compelling cultural experiences, engaging pop-up activities, and co-branded happenings. Brands have moved into the media and entertainment world because their emerging demographic increasingly engages with products via one form or another of media and entertainment in a multi-distributed mode – web, mobile, social, television, and real world, in place activities.

A recent compelling example was Nestle’s Nespresso’s US product launch via the America’s Cup sailing Race in San Francisco, depicted above. A multi-million dollar online and at-event campaign with a highly designed pop-up store situated in the Marina Green with optimum viewing of the race. Nespresso created not just an engagement campaign, but they also published a lifestyle magazine, offered live streaming race results, mobile tie-in, and engaging activities at their pop-up booth. In the new social place-engagement model of PlaceGuides, here is the Nespresso event created via the easy drag and drop annotation and embed using PlaceGuides publishing platform – PlaceGuides/Nespresso-AC

Photo by PlaceGuides – pop-up engagement

A recent compelling example was Nestle’s Nespresso’s US product launch via the America’s Cup sailing Race in San Francisco, depicted above. A multi-million dollar online and at-event campaign with a highly designed pop-up store situated in the Marina Green with optimum viewing of the race. Nespresso created not just an engagement campaign, but they also published a lifestyle magazine, offered live streaming race results, mobile tie-in, and engaging activities at their pop-up booth. In the new social place-engagement model of PlaceGuides, here is the Nespresso event created via the easy drag and drop annotation and embed using PlaceGuides publishing platform – PlaceGuides/Nespresso-AC

Emirates Team New Zealand, Nespresso, Camper co-branding America’s Cup

Nespresso realized that they needed to be both a brand, product, and provider of content in order to reach the modern consumer. They executed this via a multiplicity of mediums, which included a pop-up store, Instagram upload contest to their website, and print publication.

Nespresso, RVCA, and many others are bringing their brand into the web 2.0 age with increasingly new, engaging, and high production value place-based experiences. The successful brands are doing it with authentic tie-in to local culture and the lifestyle of the target demographics they wish to reach.

PlaceGuides authoring platform for place-based brand experience and user engagement is built in the social web 2.0 environment. As we move toward our V2 launch, we welcome connecting to the cultural leading edge brands of the future. Those like RVCA and Nespresso who understand that great brands of the 21st century not only make great products, are place-makers, but are also compelling story tellers.

In our next post, we will outline 5 Keys to Branding through Place & Cultural Association.

Newsom challenged California agencies to become leaders in open data, cloud computing, and overall integration of technology. That California, a leader in technologically innovation seems to have a state government infrastructure that is trapped in tar pits is indicative of the shortcomings of big laborious government.

Lt. Governor Newsom’s clarion call is endorsed and confirmed by Carlos Ramos, Director of California Department of Technology. Notably, Ramos referenced that the State of California received national awards for its geo portal, which enables access to GIS datasets. Open city and state geo-spatial GIS data is not a new concept and is of high value to both research and innovation.

Yet, opening up all data as proposed by the esteemed Lt. Governor raises concerns itself. Instead, government needs to be more strategic and entrepreneurial by monetizing its own assets vs. relying on a declining tax base. Opening up government data may be a form of throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of transparency. The policy in practice may prove to be a shortsighted strategy. Google and Facebook are good examples of the value data has for seemingly innocuous actions such as  search and social interactions.

PlaceGuides Inc. http://placeguides.com/stories, a scrappy, bootstrap start-up in San Francisco has benefited from GIS, open data. As a result, it has lead to the potential for innovation, job creation, and in turn growing tax base for local and state government. PlaceGuides was able to innovate a new media type, a place-based marketing platform tied to and about place. We did this because of open data – public source maps from the City of San Francisco obtained without complex map licenses.

Yet, PlaceGuides proposes something different than “open data” as a concept of transparency for government. Instead, we propose that technology enterprises contracting with state government must allow government access to its own data, including data intelligence – let’s call it Derived Data Access. Data, whether big data-mining, targeted unstructured data such as social actions, interactions and other relations between the constituency and government are of value to government both economically and for improved responsiveness to its constituency. It is the data derived from these actions and interactions that is high value to government. Where the source of the derived data itself is a government asset, such as interactions with government data repositories (e.g. DMV, locations such as GIS map sets and even government websites), then government contracts should mandate data grant-back or raw data access.

At PlaceGuides, we put this policy into action by building out our platform in a converse methodology to companies like Google. We enable account-specific data intelligence to the interactions occurring on our marketing layer over maps of any type or even graphic image files. This means that for government customers, they will be able to access their own data-intelligence dashboard and eventually the data itself.

PlaceGuides supports a win-win between open data access for innovation and private data grant-back access to government. We welcome government contracting modifications similar to the intent of Lt. Governor’s clarion call that both opens and protects government data.

PlaceGuides is a San Francisco based start-up that enables a customer, including a city agency, to tell a media rich story of a place, facility, community activity, or any destination experience and embed it right into their website. PlaceGuides has both a public benefit (community access to place-based information, such as history, practical dynamic information) and commercial marketing approach (opportunities to drive government revenue through place-based marketing – e.g. leasing, reserving, ticketing, and other quasi-commercial transactions that occur with government locations).

Influencing reach and behavior in the real world – that’s where the rubber meets the road for much of on-line and off-line marketing budgets. That’s exactly the need PlaceGuides is addressing. PlaceGuides makes it easy for customers, visitors, or participants to experience, engage, and share stories about locations and location experiences in the real world.

Locations

Civic and Community locations and activities include parks, streets, plazas; ports, bases, posts, armories, and barracks; historic civic buildings like mayor-houses, museums, and urban parks; and purely commercial locations tied to the community and culture such as sporting arenas, theaters, and performance venues and many others. These are locations associated with large public assembly and civic or cultural functions.

Community organizers and facilities operators use PlaceGuides to provide expanded visitor engagement and awareness to the location, features, and activities occurring there.

A national movement tied to local businesses, brands, and partners

Sunday Streets, San Francisco’s Mission District

For example, users can tell marketing stories that build public awareness of the operations of the entity, the history of the facility or location, and available commercial, revenue-generating opportunities such as commercial, retail, and leasing; wedding facilities leasing; and other entertainment activities occurring on site.

PlaceGuide Examples (Civic & Facilities)

Sunday Streets – www.sundaystreetssf.com/past-events/

Asia Week Foundation - http://asianfairsf.com/events/celebrationguide/

Carnaval San Francisco – http://www.carnavalsanfrancisco.org/carnaval_placeguides_2013.html

Presidio Weddings – http://events.placeguides.com/viewer/52083eba7b426e2008000010

Port of SF/Pier27 – http://events.placeguides.com/viewer/52266f6d7b426e846a000001

SF Center for the Book – http://sfcb.org/events/roadworks/roadworks-2013-map

How it Works

PlaceGuides is easy as Select, Create, Embed. You just select a location and drag and drop icons, such as tents, booths, VIP lounges, information, programming, emergency access, and parking onto our neighborhood maps or our customer’s own graphic image files uploaded to our platform – that’s right your own illustration or map image.

 A PlaceGuide comes alive with playable icons – video, photo, sound, and written content from cloud-based media channels that you add from YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr channels. It’s all accessed right form our application tool. An interactive map and directory is auto-generated for your visitors to see. Icons can also be scheduled individually e.g. for music performances, speakers, or other information. No api’s to learn, you don’t need to know graphic design tools, it’s super-duper easy.

The PlaceGuide embeds into your website, right where you want your visitors discovering and engaging with your media and functions. And, its social, visitors can share the PlaceGuide thumbnail to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs – the story of the location can truly go viral. 

Benefits

Creating a PlaceGuide helps you create and extend the stories you make right form the locations you are responsible for. This builds excitement and deeper engagement with all your partners, stakeholders, and participants.

Brands, advertisers, sponsors, and other commercial vendors who pay to be at these locations in a digital and real world way, either through ad placement or at-location engagement, can be added to the PlaceGuide and obtain story updates directly from the PlaceGuide.

Carnaval San Francisco with NBA/Nation Sprint Partner Icon Activated by Visitor

PlaceGuides is useful for engaging, extending reach, and retaining key stakeholders who can access, embed and share the information:

• Community & commercial partners
• Civic associations and affiliates
• Benefactors and contributors
• Brands appearing at the location

We welcome the opportunity to tell you more about location-based marketing from PlaceGuides. Stay tuned for more posts here on our blog or contact us at social@placeguides.com to learn more.

]]> http://placeguides.com/placeguides-for-civic-community/feed/ 0 http://placeguides.com/5-keys-to-place-based-branding/ http://placeguides.com/5-keys-to-place-based-branding/#respond Thu, 07 Nov 2013 16:00:34 +0000 http://placeguides.com/?p=61 1.0   Establish a strategic branding plan that identifies the following:

o   target demographics

o   places where your demographic lives, works, and plays

o   cultural activities in those locations

2.0   Partner with cultural institutions, influencers, activities and other cultural brands in the locations and community identified; cross-market these relationships through social media and social engagement tools.

3.0   Associate your brand with complementary cultural experiences via imagery, video, and place-based activities. Leverage imagery on social channels such as Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram, and integrate the channels directly into your website or via place-based experiential branding tools like PlaceGuides.

4.0   Budget financial resources toward the creation and maintenance of place-based branding and cultural engagement.

 5.0   Have a consistent and long-term approach to places identified, avoid contrived place-based events that risk backlash.