Behind The Experience

Sense Group Welcomes New Business Director and Creative Director, Pioneering "Experience Reimagined"

Mark Bennedick — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 04:23:10 GMT

Sense Group, Australia's leading experience design agency, is delighted to introduce Cameron Zoglmeyer-Ross as Business Director and Jordana Johnson as a new Creative Director. Their strategic and creative expertise will propel Sense Group's commitment to delivering immersive experiences that seamlessly merge the physical, digital, and virtual worlds, bringing their newly revealed mantra "Experience Reimagined" to life.

Cameron Zoglmeyer-Ross joins Sense Group as Business Director, bringing a wealth of experience from his previous role at global creative agency Imagination, where he worked with high-profile brands such as Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, Samsung, and Mastercard. With his strategic business acumen and deep understanding of the digital landscape, Cameron will play a crucial role in shaping Sense Group's focus on crafting world-class experiences. His appointment exemplifies the company's commitment to attracting top talent to drive a future-forward approach to experience design.

Jordana Johnson assumes the role of Creative Director at Sense Group, harnessing her expertise in brand experience and narrative driven film production having worked with notable clients in her previous roles such as Stan, Amazon Prime, Adobe & Nike. Johnson's unique combination of talents for storytelling, art and design will elevate Sense Group's creative capabilities across its range of experience design services. Her broad creative lens of experience will enable the agency to create captivating brand stories as the connective thread for holistic experiences that unite the physical, digital and virtual worlds.

"We are thrilled to welcome both Cameron and JJ to the Sense team," expressed Mark Bennedick, Director of Sense Group. “As part of the company’s evolution, these appointments will really help us deliver on our new approach ‘Experience Reimagined’. We want to unlock value for businesses by building and engaging B2B and B2C communities through the production of spaces, moments, worlds and content to reposition brands for growth in the extended world.” said Bennedick.

"Cameron's strategic acumen and infectious enthusiasm, combined with Jordana's exceptional storytelling prowess, will enable us to push the boundaries of experience design. Together, they will play a pivotal role in making sure our clients don’t get left behind as audiences increasingly fragment and challenge their expectations around engaging with brands."

The combined expertise of Cameron and Jordana will empower Sense Group to deliver immersive experiences that resonate with today's digital-native audiences, breaking new ground in the world of brand experiences.

"I am honoured to join Sense Group, a company renowned for its innovative experience marketing solutions and commitment to client success," said Cameron Zoglmeyer-Ross. "I firmly believe the power of experience is the key to unlocking the brand’s full potential. I look forward to working closely with the talented team at Sense Group to push boundaries and deliver extraordinary experiences."

"As a Creative Director, I am always excited to collaborate with the talented people to reimagine the possibilities of experience design," stated Jordana Johnson. "Working with Sense to deliver what is a totally new way of thinking about how we can reimagine experience is an amazing challenge for me. I think we’re going to enable brands to connect with audiences on a whole new level across all the places people now live in both the physical, digital and even virtual worlds."

Sense Group has worked with and continues to deliver experiences for renowned companies such as Google, Uber, YouTube, Giant, and PlayStation.

#7 David Zolkwer | Creative Director, Executive Producer, Writer, Consultant

Mark Bennedick — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 07:37:21 GMT

David Zolkwer is a creative director, executive producer, writer, consultant, and speaker with over 30 years in the experience industry. In this episode of ‘Behind The Experience’ we discuss the brand ideas and concepts that are emerging from the crisis, particularly in the Australian marketplace.

“Perhaps we'll see a move away from that kind of nationalistic or brand chest-beating, indulgent displays of features and benefits of places and products and how awesome things are. That move away I think is happening anyway, but we might see a more meaningful focus on the why of what brands do more than the how and the what. The why... our purpose. That's what we'll emotionally connect with.”

Listen to this episode on your preferred platform here.

To learn more about our COVID-19 Events & Brand Experience Hub, see here.

To find out more about David Zolkwer and his work, see here.

Read the full interview below.

Mark Bennedick:
Thanks for tuning in to Behind The Experience. I'm your host, Mark Bennedick, co-founder and director of Sense Group here in Sydney. Today's podcast is part of our series dedicated to our COVID toolkit. The toolkit curates global experts, data analytics, and creative ideas to help brands come out the other side of this crisis stronger than ever, through the power of brand experience. For more information on that, you can visit our website at Sensegroup.com.au.

And look, for today's podcast, we're joined by the wonderful David Zolkwer. David is a creative director, executive producer, writer, consultant, and speaker with over 30 years in the experience industry. He's worked on incredible global, live, and broadcast projects, ranging from the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, four Commonwealth Games, including Melbourne in 2006, and the Gold Coast in 2018, and the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, through to royal weddings, and over 10 years directing London's New Year's Eve celebrations.

David also spends a lot of his time working on events and experiences in the corporate world, with many well known brands and agencies. He splits his time between Australia and the UK, and is currently working on projects in Sydney, Doha, Dubai, and Shanghai. David, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk today.

David Zolkwer:
Hey, Mark. Thank you.

Mark Bennedick:
Where do we find you in the world today? You're obviously doing lots of great projects all over the place at the moment. Where do we find you today?

David Zolkwer:
Right now I'm in lockdown glory in Edinburgh in Scotland.

Mark Bennedick:
Well look, maybe just a first off, just to start us off, for people that don't know you David, I mean, do you want to just give us a very brief rundown on your working career in events and experiences? And maybe just touch on the things that attracted you to the world of events.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah, for sure. I think you covered the kind of projects I've worked on in your introduction. And to be honest, I can't really claim to have set out with any particular plan or roadmap, but I guess like most of us, if I look back, it all somehow makes sense. I think the common theme to everything I've done, what really makes my day, on a good day at least, is the idea of storytelling. I think that's probably something I get from my dad, and my general upbringing.

Now, if you add into the mix the opportunity to create immersive experiences and the opportunity to, or the ambition to deliver them with beauty and meaning and skill, and if you add into the mix the idea of creating an event or being part of an event that transports audiences and perhaps transforms them in some way too, so that something is different after the experience, and if you add into the mix simply the opportunity to work with some wonderful people and extraordinary talents from all walks of life, all over the world.

Of course, it's not all like that, not by a long shot, but in very sweeping terms, and these are the kind of aspects of the work I've been lucky to do, both in the public domain and in the corporate domain, that really attract me and keep me excited about the new project, too.

Mark Bennedick:

Have you always worked in the creative field within events, or previous to that? I wonder just how have you gained that creative hat that you've been able to apply to so many amazing events around the world? Because some of these events that you've worked on are obviously global events with huge audiences, and then corporate events normally have a smaller audience, more internal facing I guess you might say. But has creativity always been part of who you are and what you've done?

David Zolkwer:

It is. But it's a large one, Mark. I guess I'm kind of... I was going to say kind of hybrid. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. When I was in education, I went to drama school for a couple of years and I did technical management. And then I went to university and studied theatre and film and literature. The idea there was that I would have a couple of years of practical training, and then three years of academic training, and I would come out of it ready to direct anything. That was the closest to a plan I've ever had.

I guess I've always been engaged in the creative process and I've always loved the process of making theatre and telling stories. But then when I turned professional, I dabbled in many aspects of theatre in particular, but also a little bit in television, working on crews, working on the technical side of life, working as an assistant or associate director, working as a show caller, working as a designer. All sorts of things that I wasn't necessarily qualified to do but it was at a time when people allowed you to give it a go and try it.

It evolved over time, and then when I went into the corporate side of life and the agency side of life, I started off as a producer and then I ... Actually, I started off as a show caller, then a coordinator, and then a producer. And then the role became a creative producer, and then it became creative director, and then sometimes it was called the artistic director. And it changes, it changes from project to project. I don't think that's unusual in our industry, so I'm not a creative in the sense that I sit down and draw or design or film.

I vacillate between being a hands-on on stage director, but also a curator as well. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned being able to work with extraordinary talents. It's an odd one. I just enjoyed the creative process, but I never found it easy to pigeonhole myself in any particular place.

Mark Bennedick:
But I think what's great about that is that you have managed to touch so many aspects of the industry that when you are coming up with ideas for things or doing show directing, I guess you have a somewhat of a grounding, a foundation and understanding of how things work. Because I think of it maybe the analogy of an architect and a builder with a house or something like that. There's always that gap in the middle between execution and the concept, and I would imagine that having then done a lot of those kinds of roles gives you the ability to come up with ideas that you know will generally kind of work.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah. To be honest, Mark, I think sometimes that works for me and for the process and sometimes not. When I'm collaborating with other creatives, I'm always trying to encourage them to not worry about practicalities. Because I think as an industry, we're great, we're really great at overcoming obstacles to delivery of realisation. I'm always keen to liberate the creatives from having to worry about the how. The what and the why are much more illusive, if you like.

So, sometimes if I'm in a meeting and someone says, "Hey, how about? Oh, no, we couldn't do that." I'm kind of concerned that we never heard what the idea was, and that there were other people around the room, creative in their own right, who love the challenge of overcoming the obstacles, whether that be physical or commercial or whatever those obstacles are.

Sometimes having that knowledge can be an encumbrance, and other times you're right, it can help the sale of an idea if you know that what you're suggesting is deliverable. If you're sharing it with people that might be cynical or skeptical.

Mark Bennedick:
What's your thinking, your motto in a way, as a creative? This podcast is part of our COVID-19 learning series and we're talking about some of the key challenges that marketers and agencies or experience designers face, and in my opinion, I guess creativity I think is going to be incredibly important moving forward. It's always been incredibly important but I think even more so in this post-COVID landscape I guess, where people might have to be doing more with less or we're having to be creative with just the way in which we can gather together. What do you think is the role of creativity during and even after COVID, and is it going to be any different do you think from before?

David Zolkwer:
Well, I think you're right. The creative process is always important, and to be honest, I think ideally the work we do is always about creativity. It always has been, whether we're talking before, during, or after COVID. I certainly find projects that I've been part of, that have been explicitly created and driven have not only incidentally been the happiest projects, but they've also been the most effective and the most successful by most criteria. My approach is, I think it's going to be important in the future. My approach has always been that everyone on the team has influence and impact on the creative.

It may not necessarily be responsible for ideation, they may not be tasked with coming up with or delivering obviously creative elements, but I would gently argue that most team members have the ability, intentionally or unintentionally, to affect the realisation of the creative vision. If you take a traditional event team structure, large or small, made up of a bunch of departments or individual roles like the technical team, production, ops team, commercial logistics and so on, the only one audiences or consumers would be interested in is creative, or at least the creative output. I think that's quite right, too.

That's a long winded way of saying yeah, creativity is going to be really important. I'm going to digress for a moment and you can cut this out of the final recording, but many years ago, I went to see Terry Gillian, the film director, Terry Gillian, who was being interviewed [inaudible] and I was lucky enough to get tickets to see him. One of the questions he was asked was when he felt he'd been the most creative. The story he told I thought was very illuminating and it stayed with me for many, many years. He was describing one of the first films he worked on which was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the reason the Monty Python team wanted to make the film, one of the reasons was they all wanted to get dressed up in armour [inaudible] by playing knights, just like they did when they were kids.

Mark Bennedick:
As you do.

David Zolkwer:
When it came to making the film, they didn't have the budget for the horses. One of the team came up with the idea of the coconut shells, if you recall the coconut shells in the [crosstalk]. He looked at the audience and he said, "You tell me which was the better idea." It was a really strong, recurring laugh, and a defining characteristic of this real film. It all came about because they had a problem. The idea of without generally not wanting to sound trite or insensitive, but the idea of the situation we're in now, being the mother of creative invention in the future, I think is a real one.

Mark Bennedick:
I mean, I would hazard to guess, too, the amount of creative ideas and innovation that comes through hardship over time, I would imagine is huge. I can't name one off the top of my head, but I'm just thinking of that scene, and I'm thinking it's got to be true. It is true.

David Zolkwer:
It is true. And I think as an industry, we're good at demonstrating that. Certainly I look at projects I've worked on where inevitably, certainly when you're working in the public events domain, you're constantly coming across major obstacles and setbacks and ideas that have run and run and then they get dropped for whatever reason and so on. By and large, I don't think it's just my experience but by and large, you usually end up with a solution that you kind of think, "Do you know what? It's better than it was going to be, because of this problem."

But I think the other thing I would say, and this is something I've been grappling with all the time when I'm looking at my own creative work, and taking stock, if you like, there's some sort of dynamic tension between the relationship between curating and creating. I wonder whether it's not always easy to find our own original thoughts and ideas. Often what we're doing, to genuinely think and create for ourselves, and I certainly find that I'm constantly being bombarded and challenged to curate and appropriate the views, the ideas, the systems, the toolboxes, the experiences, the work of others.

Every time we stand up with a board in front of a client and say, "Here are found images of other things like what we're talking about," we're kind of in a curatorial process. I don't think that [inaudible] inclination. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying that right now we have to grapple with this bombardment of people offering solutions and ideas and technology and so on. It could be that [inaudible] in terms of these existing opinions and advice and all the things I've talked about, in order to find a sense of security right now, makes absolute sense. Certainly in the short term.

But as we recover, and as we reconvene, as we come back together, I wonder if long lasting, meaningful change, and meaningful connection with audiences and consumers, I wonder whether it's going to demand some more deep and genuinely original thinking beyond what's on trend. The other challenge in all that is that I think that quest for ... All I'm talking about is when we talk about [inaudible] original creativity, that ambition if you like, and that necessity has to also be shared and demanded and supported and nurtured by the commissioners and the clients, too. They have to demand it in order for creatives and agencies and producers to deliver it.

Mark Bennedick:
I think what you're saying there is right, and as you're saying that, I'm thinking about some of the articles that I've written towards the end of last year about purpose and authenticity with brands, and there was and still is a rising trend in that area. Obviously the bushfires here in Australia gave rise to a lot of brands thinking about how we can help the people that have been through these crises? And then I think COVID has now accelerated that even further again, with a whole other set of challenges that people have been facing. I think it's only natural for brands or audiences to be looking for some sort of assurance or trust or comfort or help, because a lot of people are out there hurting not only financially, but psychologically and their businesses have stopped and all sorts of permutations of different things that have happened to different people in different ways.

I think what you're saying there is about original ideas, and I would almost connect that also to authenticity and brand purpose and it might give rise to a whole lot of creative ideas which are a little bit more deeper, not just about sell, sell, sell a product. There's a bit more behind it, and I think that's a general trend that I think the world needs to go down and is going down anyway. I mean, that's an interesting area as to how that might flourish and come to life in the next couple of months, six months, couple of years.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah, I think you're right. It's interesting. In the last, I think maybe even just yesterday, there was a poll or some research released in the UK from the Charisma Index, and that indicates that how brands have behaved during the lockdown really matters to consumers, and over, I think ... Forgive me, I haven't got the data in front of me, but I think it was over 75% of UK consumers said that how brands behave now will affect their purchasing habits in the future.

People are actually just talking about good old fashioned good behaviour and bad behaviour, and that there are hero brands who are perceived to [inaudible] integrity and they're not seen to be exploiting the prices or patronising their audience. The early indications, and who knows how it'll pan out, but the early indications are that they'll be rewarded for their good behaviour which [crosstalk] it's interesting.

Mark Bennedick:
And look, and then we've got the Black Lives Matter thing happening at the moment, too, and there's gosh, any number of crises that are happening all at the same time globally at the moment. I don't recall there being such a time where it's been like this at all. I mean, what do you think are going to be some of the key themes around creativity and experience going forward? You touched on then obviously deeper and more meaningful creativity and I'm thinking in my mind about authenticity and purpose, but you've probably spent a lot of time in lockdown with your brain ticking over. I mean, what are the things that you've been thinking about coming out the other side of this?

David Zolkwer:
I think one of the interesting challenges of the lockdown experience and interesting is perhaps too slight a word, is that many of us have found ourselves with time to look within. I don't mean that in a worthy way, just that we're spending time with ourselves, and we can perhaps hear the voices of our head more clearly and with less distraction than we normally do.

But to answer your question about themes moving forward, I think you're right. A lot depends on context and the messaging from our client storytellers, if you like. In broad terms, especially in the world of the kind of mega and hallmark events, but also in corporate communications as well.

I think and I hope there'll be less talk about the delivery mechanism, because I think that's not a problem for us. I think as an industry, we're great at delivering. I think right now, delivery is a short term preoccupation because we're having to find new ways of engaging with the audience or fast tracking new ways of engaging with audiences. But I think what the thoughts that trigger in your introduction to this particular theme was the idea that we might just need to think about rekindling our sense of purpose, and that looking at our mission, is our mission going to be to offer escapism? Like, the Hollywood spectaculars born of the Great Depression.

Or, will audiences crave more in the way of reflection and short term catharsis and connection? Perhaps now is a time where we might further explore the relationship between the obvious value of events and brands, and their fundamental purpose. Because I think audiences might now be, and I think this is correct, this is what you're saying, I think audiences might now be even more interested in that purpose, that good behaviour, that contribution.

Perhaps we'll see a move away from that kind of nationalistic or brand chest beating, indulgent displays of features and benefits of places and products and how awesome things are. That move away I think is happening anyway, but we might see a more meaningful focus on the why of what brands do more than the how and the what. The why, our purpose. That's what we'll emotionally connect with.

Mark Bennedick:
I think it's always, when you say context, it's always a very timely experience. Normally there is obviously creativity that can span generational time frames I guess, but quite a lot of awesome creative can be very timely as well and can live for a short period of time. When you talk about escapism too, I think escapism is actually an interesting one. Because I only saw something today about the level of gambling that had gone up in Australia, which had gone up by quite a significant percentage. I just thought about that when you said escapism. There's a lot of people out there trying to escape what's going on for something like gambling to go up.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah. It's interesting. It is interesting that that need for escapism isn't necessarily a healthy process. Psychologists are talking about the fact that people should allow themselves to feel awful about what's going on and that ultimately is going to be a part of the healing process. If we run away, if we hide, if we put on a brave face, if we distract ourselves from it too much, not all together, but too much, that might have mental health repercussions down the line.

It's an interesting one, because we often don't do the healthiest thing when we're trying to get away from unpleasant experiences and feelings. But I think you're right. I think when I'm feeling optimistic, I think that we'll see a desire to sustain the deeper sort of compassionate connection that has emerged across the world in recent weeks. Not just because of COVID, but also because of the other sources of unrest and disease that you've described, that have emerged as the world looks into the mirror and struggles with what it sees.

David Zolkwer:
I think you're right, that proof and authenticity and relatability and compassion and respect, good old fashioned values, good old fashioned good behaviour, these I think or at least I hope might be some of the themes preoccupying many people in the months to come. I think so, and that includes the creative world.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. It'd be interesting to see, I think ... I mean, I have a lot of discussions with Anthony, my business partner, we talk a lot about how much we'll come back to being the way it was before. How do we transition our business or tweak it a little bit in different direction, or things like that. We obviously face the questions that we face to ourselves, we come up with ourselves, is like well, is it going to be a permanent change? Or are people just going to snap back into normal life again, given the restrictions are lifted, so to speak, because I think the restrictions to some extent will be around for a little while. At the same time, people are very easy, or quick to forget as well.

Mark Bennedick:
It's going to be a really interesting next six months, to see how the nation and people's psyche changes, and whether they are able to forget and get on with it, or whether some of these permanent changes stay on with people's lives.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah. That's a huge existential problem for all of us, I think, is... I was watching something on television a few days ago, and it was a comedy sketch show. The first scene was at a funeral, and there was a group of people together, obviously a kind of estranged family that had all gathered for the funeral and the conversation soon came around to, "It makes you think, doesn't it? Why is it we only meet at funerals? Why don't we get together and get to know each other, and come together for the celebrations and see ourselves on good days?" And everyone nods, and of course, at the end of the funeral, they all go home and then the next scene is the next funeral, and they're all a little bit older and they have the same conversation. And it goes through time. I think there were half a dozen scenes before there were just two of them left.

I think there's some of that in what you're saying, is that somehow when people are under duress, is there a danger that it somehow brings out, as we've seen, it brings out the awesome best in people in so many ways, of random acts of kindness and compassion, and all of those sort of things. And then somehow is there a craving... Is the mission to get back to normal? As in, the way it was. Or, is it about learning from the experience and reassessing values? Which makes me sound like an old fart when I say that, but just reassessing values or the lack of values in the world.

And learning from it, and growing as a result of that. And initiating change. At the moment, it feels like anything is possible, that change is afoot, and that people are horrified by injustice and unkindness, and exploitation, and all of those sort of things. And how wonderful it would be if there was some sort of positive, if we could find some sort of positive legacy in this unprecedented experience, that as a result of it ... I don't know. I hesitate to say, "Hey, the world will be a better place and we'll all sing Kumbaya."

But there is opportunity in all of this. Again, without meaning to sound insensitive to how awful it is for so many people. There is opportunity, and it will be interesting to see whether we make the most of that opportunity or whether the mission is to get back to business as usual. And you know when you were talking before, we've been talking about our role as creatives and as agencies and so on, but actually the other... Behind anything we do there's going to be a client. So, we all need to... share the same agenda. I know that behind every great project, there's usually a great client relationship and an affinity and an alignment. We've all done projects despite clients who aren't necessarily onboard, but the really great ones, however ambitious and awesome we think we've been, there's been a client that has been ambitious and awesome to enable that to happen. I think our relationship with clients and their brands and the stories they want to tell is obviously a critical factor here. We can't unilaterally... Very few of us anyway, can unilaterally do any of the things we're talking about.

Mark Bennedick:
When you say that, I mean I previously have spoken with a lovely lady, Verity Bell, at Atlassian. She's a client that we do some work with and one of the most interesting things that she brought up actually, was that this COVID has given them the opportunity to really take some risks. The opportunity for them has been able to do things that they may not normally do, in terms of the way in which they have been motivating their staff and implementing programs for staff working at home.

And then you were saying there as well about behind every great outcome or event or experience is a great client. I guess a lot of the time I'm always thinking with clients, "How do we get them to take that risk? How do we get them to try this different path which could be so great?" But a lot of the time they can be hamstrung by look, the politics or the fear perhaps, of just doing something that may not work. What do you think about that? Is it maybe an exciting time to be a creative. You might have the opportunity to get ideas through that may not normally in other circumstances.

David Zolkwer:
I really love the optimism and positivity of that thinking. I think it's a fantastic impulse for the creative process. I think it's a fantastic impulse for every process, for all of those, on a personal and professional level. That idea that change is afoot and there's never been a time when audiences and consumers have been more open to change, even hungry for change, I think is... Again, I'm struggling to sound too effusive because I'm mindful of the awfulness of the situation, but there is a wonderful opportunity there.

Of course I feel a sense of loss for the industry and like everyone, I feel a concern for an uncertain future. But I do feel there is opportunity in the changes to come and I'm excited about the idea of all of us shaping a new normal that's informed by, and as we talked about earlier, that is really meaningfully benefits from the lessons we've learned these past few weeks. A new normal that doesn't feel abnormal.

And I tell you, the other thing that strikes me as I hear you speak, is actually, I like to think I'm [crosstalk] open to the new and the experimental and the original and all of those sort of things, but funny enough, I think the Australian marketplace in particular will be a great testing ground for that kind of thinking, for that kind of open and agile response to the situation. Because I think that agility's going to be very important to the recovery process, but I think the Australian marketplace is a great testing ground for that thinking.

Mark Bennedick:
Why do you say that? Why do you say the Australian marketplace?

David Zolkwer:
Because I don't think it's set in its ways. If I think about some of the clients I've worked with there, there is humility. I don't mean a sense of I'm not worthiness, but a humility that suggests I might not know the answers and I don't come to the table knowing all the answers. And therefore I'm open to listening to the thoughts and ideas of other people, of new talents outside the industry, within the industry. I think it's more eclectic. Is it a real word to say it's sort of polymathic?

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. Look, I mean, and on just the purely practical side of things I guess as well, I think luckily we're going to be one of the first countries to come out of it hopefully. I know myself, I've been looking to China who's one of the earlier countries, to see what they've been doing to try and I guess gain some insight into potentially the future in a way. There might be some interesting cases to be looking at around the world, to some of these countries that are opening up and seeing how they're managing and handling things.

Hopefully as a country, Australia does hold some of those values that you're talking about, and I think that does hold it in good stead for the uncertain nature of things, to not be too wed to tradition in a way. We're adaptable and happy for change.

David Zolkwer:
Yeah. I hope so.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, that's good.

David Zolkwer:
As I say, I know I sound quite gushy and it's because I enjoy working in Australia. But I think all the things we've talked about in this conversation, whether it's about ... I think Australia is a microcosm of what's going on in the world. The experiences that have happened across Australia in recent years, much of it is biblical. Whether it's the fire and the pandemic and Black Lives Matter and so many deep and profound issues and challenges. I just feel that when we've talked about how can we take something positive from this experience and how can we learn from it, and re-evaluate what matters, and live by a set of values, and communicate in our world, then to convene crowds and to create events, whether it's corporate or commercial or cultural or festivals or product experiences and so on. I think Australia is a wonderful testing ground for whether we mean anything we've been talking about, or whether we'll just go back to the old ways of thinking and doing.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. It will be a very interesting, interesting time. David, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chat to me, and I'm really interested to hear some of the things you've been talking about there today. And obviously hugely impressed with all the work that you've done around the globe and the work here in Australia, and will we get you back here anytime soon?

David Zolkwer:
Yeah, hopefully as soon as restrictions are lifted, I am due to be back in Sydney actually, as soon as possible. Yes, I’ll be back there.

Mark Bennedick:
Oh, good. Good, good. Look forward to seeing you. Well, thanks again, and look, don't forget to follow or subscribe to Behind The Experience. If you'd like to know more about Sense and what we do, head to SenseGroup.com.au, and where can people catch you, David, if they want to see some of your work?

David Zolkwer:
I would suggest in the first instance, just look me up on LinkedIn.

Mark Bennedick:
Yep. David Zolkwer on LinkedIn. Look, we'll provide all the links and the show notes for the episode, and thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you next time on Behind The Experience.

David Zolkwer:
Thanks, Mark.

#6 Verity Bell Atlassian Global Head Of Events & Engagement

Mark Bennedick — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 02:01:28 GMT

As more people work remotely due to COVID-19, businesses are being challenged to stay productive, engaged, and foster a digital community. In this episode of 'Behind The Experience,' we speak with Verity Bell, the global head of events and engagement at Atlassian, a leading project management software company, about employee engagement strategies during and beyond COVID-19.

“We spend a lot of time and focus on connection points and where can we add value by connecting Atlassian's together so that they have a lot of those incidental conversations or shared experience and shared memories...”

This episode is a part of our COVID-19 Events & Brand Experience Hub, a selection of resources and insights our team has curated to help your brand navigate your way through events and brand experiences.

Learn more about Verity Bell and Atlassian here:

https://www.atlassian.com/

Read the full interview below.

Mark Bennedick:

Thanks for tuning in to Behind The Experience. I'm your host, Mark Bennedick, co-founder and director of Sense Group here in Sydney. Today's podcast is part of our series dedicated to our COVID toolkit. The toolkit curates global experts, data analytics, and creative ideas to help brands come out the other side of this crisis stronger than ever through the power of brand experiences. So for more information on that, you can visit our website at sensegroup.com.au.

Now, look, for today, today's guest works for one of Australia's most well-known technology industry success stories, Atlassian, co-founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. Atlassian makes products to help teams all over the planet advance humanity through the power of software and their mission is to help unleash the potential of every team. So, their products literally help teams stay connected and manage projects. I really wanted to know how a company like Atlassian manages their own teams in times like this.

I'm really excited today to be talking with Verity Bell, the global head of events and engagement at Atlassian. Verity has over nine years of experience working directly for Atlassian, and is responsible for ensuring the global consistency of events across eight Atlassian offices and offers support to the Sydney experience team and events teams globally. She's also responsible for championing Atlassian values to staff and just simply executing awesome events and experiences. So Verity, thank you very much for taking the time to join us today on the show.

Verity Bell:

Thanks so much for the chat.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah. Really looking forward to it. And obviously, being a tech company, we have a lot of tech companies in the work that we do particularly. So I'm really interested to see how you guys are doing and hear of some of the interesting things that you have been doing since lockdown has begun.

I think Atlassian is a really well-regarded company in Australia. So, and having that almost, I guess, pressure of having to manage teams remotely and having programs and software that does that, I think a lot of people will be interested to see how a company like yourselves are sort of managing right now. So I guess for people who don't know you, or don't know a lot about Atlassian, do you want to just give us a little bit of a background on yourself and your day-to-day role at the company?

Verity Bell:

Sure. So I am part of the workplace experience team at Atlassian. So our team broadly sort of encompasses everything that Atlassian sort of touch from our buildings and real estate through to guest services, reception, our kitchens. And my part of that puzzle is the events and engagement side. So I produce events and activities and activations for Atlassian staff. And we do that sort of to keep the community together, to help Atlassian's feel at home and find sort of a belonging at work as well, so that they can do the best work with their teams by having sort of strong social connections as well.

Mark Bennedick:

How many teams or how many people are there actually in Atlassian these days? Because it started off, I guess, in Australia, but you're across eight offices.

Verity Bell:

Yeah. So we're still Sydney based and we've got our HQ in Sydney with all our other offices as well. Sydney is still our biggest site at the moment. We're at about two and a half thousand people, I think, and we're heading towards 5,000 globally.

Mark Bennedick:

Wow.

Verity Bell:

So that's sort of where we're steering our ship at the moment is to 5,000 Atlassian's and what that looks like.

Mark Bennedick:

Wow. So you've got 5,000 people with opinions about the kind of stuff that you're doing within the office.

Verity Bell:

Oh, yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

That sounds like a tough gig.

Verity Bell:

Well, one of our key values of our company is open company, no bullshit. And we definitely have an open company and there's not a lot of bullshit with people's opinions sometimes, too.

Mark Bennedick:

Well, that's a good thing. You're getting direct feedback.

Verity Bell:

We get lots of good feedback. Yes, we do.

Mark Bennedick:

I mean, tell me how has the COVID-19, the coronavirus, affected the Atlassian business from your perspective, I guess in terms of the things that you're doing for the team. And I imagine being in the tech industry, there was a certain proportion of your staff that perhaps worked remotely already. But I mean, what's been sort of the key things that has really changed for you guys?

Verity Bell:

I think we were pretty lucky. We were sort of set up for success in a lot more ways than a lot of companies in regards to remote working. We already had a fairly large remote contingency and we are quite a flexible workplace anyway. So even myself personally, I work from home at least once a week and our platform is web-based and made for collaboration. So great. We already had the tools in place and we're used to that. It's still been a big change for us, though, to not have that physical office.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah.

Verity Bell:

And I think we've had to have a lot of empathy for everybody's unique and sort of individual situation. Everybody's sort of dealing with this larger crisis in different ways. And especially because we're global as well, it's hitting different people in different countries in different ways as well. So we sort of had to adapt to be more flexible, not just in working, but also in our personal life as well.

Mark Bennedick:

Well, that's interesting what you mentioned there about empathy, too. I think that's a really keyword because there's a lot of brands these days talking about coming out the other side and perhaps having that empathetic view of how they market to consumers. But at the same time, I guess, internally having that empathy for your staff and having to understand everyone's individual situations, particularly working from home, some people have kids, some people don't. So everyone's got a unique set of challenges going on. Have you found that that sort of filtered through into some of the systems or initiatives you've had to put in place, like really having to think about the multitude of situations and how you deal with that?

Verity Bell:

Yeah, absolutely. Even just down to sort of, we have a program of events that would normally be on site, workshops, activities, social things. And we found that the sort of topics and things that we're exploring in our workshops and our talks have naturally skewed towards things like resilience and working with your partner from home and sort of how to manage anxiety. So we've been focusing in on that.

There's a week coming up called Resilience Week where we're focusing on helping Atlassian's build resistance, not resistance, sorry, Atlassian's build resilience and cope with all of those sort of stresses and anxieties and things like that. So we're doing webinars and a whole bunch of programs to support Atlassian's in mindfulness and just looking after ourselves and that's coming from the exec level down, which is beautiful. We're very much as a company aware of the increased stress and anxiety on our staff at this time. So a lot of what we've been doing has been honing in on that and sort of helping everybody find that right balance. Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

And did you do much of that kind of initiatives before as well, or are these sort of totally new?

Verity Bell:

No, we definitely did. They've sort of always been there. We've always had yoga and yoga classes and different health and wellness initiatives that focus around that. But I think it's just a lot more powerful now and there's a larger focus and a larger need. People are sort of reaching out for that type of thing, as well, at the moment so it's very front of mind.

But it has been brilliant being part of the company at this time, in regards to that empathy piece. We've had updates from our founders where their kids have interrupted them in the middle of sort of talking to a few thousand. One said, "You know what? I'm just going to leave that in the cart. This is life." And so I think that gives people, they sort of feel comfortable that if that happens to me, that's okay. I was in a team meeting with our global team yesterday and I think we saw at least three or four kids on that call as they sort of jumped in or people said goodbye to them on their way out to daycare or whatever that happened to be.

Mark Bennedick:

Previously, I remember there was a thing on TV, don't quote me on it, but I think it was ABC or a CNN reporter or someone like that who was doing a live cast from their home and their kid walked in and it went viral because of the kind of crazed reaction that the interviewer had. But then these days I think that same reaction probably wouldn't have happened because it was unique at the time.

Verity Bell:

And now it's just every day. I've been saying like my one-year-old has been on that many conference calls and things that she should know by this point, she feels like she's contributing.

Mark Bennedick:

Definitely, definitely. Well, take me back to the officers. Because I know Atlassian's has a pretty unique culture and you talked about the no bullshit and having experienced that, I think it's a great actual value to have as a company, cuts through the PR speak, in a way. Everyone just says what they think. Take us back to sort of typical Atlassian week to week, what are the kinds of things that you were doing in the office to kind of create that workplace experience for employees before these changes?

Verity Bell:

So we're very conscious of connection points for each other. So for example, we're very lucky to have a lunchroom where we have catered lunches, but we have one area for that. We don't have food and things in our kitchen, it's along the floors of our building to bring people together to that one space, to sort of make sure that we have a community feel.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah.

Verity Bell:

And events wise, we run workshops, we call them skilleries, but it's sort of everything from knitting to building things or different craft bits and pieces, so Atlassian's with sort of similar interests can sort of find their tribe amongst the wider community and not just the people that they work with. Obviously, we have like a global town hall weekly that streams to the lounge areas or the kitchen areas of each office. So as you spin around the world, you can see all the Atlassian's hanging out, watching that together. But it's just, we spend a lot of time and focus on connection points and where can we add value by connecting Atlassian's together so that they have a lot of those incidental conversations or shared experience and shared memories and that sort of thing.

We've got Friday night drinks, that's often themed and a fun thing where you can bring a friend or your family members, and we'll get to all hang out together. We have some larger events. So we have a large team building day, each year, a holiday party to sort of celebrate our achievements and look back over the year towards the end.

And we have a big friends and family day where we invite all our friends and family to a big carnival that's sort of in the middle of the city at a big park. There's rides and different, exciting things as a thank you to those people near to us who have contributed to Atlassian even if they're not paid by Atlassian, but just by making, when we have a late meeting or covering for us, or just listening to our stresses when we need to vent after a hard day, so sort of a give back to them as well. Lots of opportunity, luckily, to chat with each other and sort of form those bonds that make work enjoyable. Yeah, just sort of a nice place to be because you spend more time at work than anywhere else.

Mark Bennedick:

It's crazy, isn't it? I'm thinking in terms of, while you're saying all of that is that connection points is obviously great for the culture and finding your tribe. Especially in a big company where there's so many people, some people could feel lost within a big company of that sort.

Verity Bell:

Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

Do you find that it also has helped spur ideas or from a work perspective providing those environments for people to connect has led to things that are business benefits as well, as opposed to, well, not as opposed to, I guess, even just in addition to cultural and relationships and having people sort of find their tribe?

Verity Bell:

Yeah, definitely. I don't know about you, but I have great sessions of sort of creative and problem-solving sessions when I can bounce off people. And that doesn't necessarily work for me when I'm sitting in a meeting room and I have between 12:00 and 12:30 to knock that out.

Mark Bennedick:

Under the pressure, the pressure of having to do it.

Verity Bell:

Exactly, but to have a chat over lunch with food in front of you, where that conversation sort of finds its natural path and discover things that way that you wouldn't necessarily discover in a structured format. Or maybe it is sort of playing table tennis for half an hour and your hands are active, but your mind has the capacity to wander into different places. So I think that's really important, too. It's a different mechanism for problem-solving and finding creative approaches to different things, I think, than necessarily just having time to put post-its on a wall or use Confluence to put points down on a screen. So, yeah, I think just having, and then a lot of it is also about trust and knowing the people that you're working with. You know just...

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, feeling comfortable to put yourself out there, put your ideas out there.

Verity Bell:

Exactly. Because you know about them and you have a personal connection as well, so there's trust and respect there beyond just, "You're my boss," or "You're my colleague." It's like, "No, you're my friend and you have my back. And I know that you're having a hard time because something's going on in your personal life because we have that banter. That means that I know when to sort of help you out and then you'll reciprocate and help me out when I need it." And there's just sort of a different working dynamic and everything that my team does is about supporting that, as well.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah. It's very true. How do you think that's going to play out in the next six months, because for ourselves, I guess, as producers of experiences, we're very much on board with the idea of the physical connection and you can't replace that in its entirety online. And a lot of what you previously did, I guess, did rely on that sort of physical connection in the office.

How do you think that's going to play out in the next six months? Because I guess we've been forced to trial some of these online ideas at the moment, which are awesome and having some great success by the sounds of it, but I wonder how the balance will play out, do you think, in the future? Because I've seen a lot of companies out there as well at the moment saying "You're welcome to work at home for forever," or say, at your choice of how much, or they might have only 25% of people back in the office for quite a long time. I'm wondering, do you have any thoughts on how that might play out with yourselves at Atlassian or even if you have a plan at this point, I don't know. It would be interesting to know what your thoughts are on that.

Verity Bell:

It's a hard one, isn't it? And we're sort of navigating that as we go. There's no rule book for this. I think you're right. I think even when we get to a place where it resembles more of what we're used to, that this idea of opening up our events and experiences to remote workers or online or digital, I don't think that's going away. I think that sort of the result of this is that we'll still have a greater presence. So I think there's definitely going to be more of our remote experience as a remote events program in place for us even going forward off the back of this. And just because I think more people would just be working from home more regularly anyway.

Mark Bennedick:

For a while.

Verity Bell:

Yeah. Even if they weren't remote workers as such before this, I think there's a balance, but yeah, it's a hard one. Some things that worked in the office are just not quite resonating in the digital world. And then there are some things that we can do now that we never were able to do when we were defined by our walls and our physical space.

We have access to so much content and so many great creatives and producers of content because now everyone's on an even playing field. You join your Zoom link and it doesn't matter if you're from India or America or wherever, now we have the same access to that as people in those areas do. That's a brilliant opportunity that we can utilize. I think carving deliberate space for this type of experience is really important in the office. You can sort of stumble across things happening or they find an organic sort of way where it builds because someone starts and then someone else joins and it kind of finds its organic. Whereas when we're doing everything virtually, we've got to be a lot more considered in structuring that time to connect and those rituals become really important as well and just ensuring that there's consistency.

Mark Bennedick:

I mean, tell me about that. What are some of the ones that have been working really well online over the last six to eight weeks? Or have there been some that have surprised you where you thought, because I mean, I'm looking at some of the things that you guys have been doing and there's organizing your fridge and freezer. There's knitting. There have been music concerts. There's been, I mean, an awesome array of all sorts of things, a virtual game night. I mean, yeah. What are the ones that have been really surprisingly successful?

Verity Bell:

Well, not surprisingly successful for a tech company, but we did a whole program based on Star Wars for May the fourth. And that was very well received, obviously, because it's Star Wars and a whole heap of people like Star Wars. But what it did was sort of, it was like this really niche kind of topic and conversation starter and people were drawn to that niche. One of the other sort of ones that popped up was we had a music marathon for one of our hackathons called ShipIt. And we put on a whole bunch of artists and different musical acts throughout that 24-hour hackathon. And the killer lineup for that one was actually Disney tunes. But you know what? Hey, I was there. I love Disney tunes.

Mark Bennedick:

You're singing alone and you know what? You surprisingly would know all the words.

Verity Bell:

Absolutely.

Mark Bennedick:

Well, maybe not surprising.

Verity Bell:

It was just a real, strong niche of people who love Disney tunes. So cool, that brought it in. We're sort of used to trying to work quite broadly and try to find themes that appeal to a really large audience. We've actually found, I think, with this online digital offering, that where you may have a smaller group of people watching Disney tunes, but the attraction over that shared passion, over that topic, is really strong. There's lots of banter and conversation. And so for those events that dive into something fairly particular, we get a smaller, but a stronger, more engaged and more interactive band of people. And then we've got a DJ on Friday nights, and that sounds great. She's got a great set up and she plays great music and it's a great end to the week.

But what's happened there is, week over week, we've got a really strong band of people where that's now part of their routine. It's definitely part of mine. And now we know that it's kind of created some stories and some memories and some community around that. Because as the weeks have gone past, well, you know what? Vincent who I have never met him. He's a remote worker normally. I know that he has the best song requests. And now it's a little like in joke for us that Vincent's there on the Friday, basically being DJ number two, right? My daughter loves to get in front of the camera and dance. So now if she doesn't pop up during that session, I'm getting hit up by a message, "Where's the dancing baby? Where is she?" And little in jokes and things that have developed in sort of that group of people who really dig that DJ on a Friday.

Mark Bennedick:

So it's interesting. I mean, so it almost seems like a wider variety of niche ideas that have sort of uncovered some sort of secret passions of people almost, but then also people need a little bit of structure. And that's what I always think of the office environment. It provides that structure in your day or in your headspace where you come into the office and that's the place to work. And I guess when people are at home that those lines are blurred.

Verity Bell:

Yes.

Mark Bennedick:

But this structure, having some of these things booked in in your week probably does help people to sort of try and maintain a little bit of that structure. Otherwise, it's very easy to just wander around and come in and out. And it's hard to, I guess, keep focused in your working day.

Verity Bell:

And our longer form sort of events, like four weeks of learning guitar or six weeks of Spanish lessons, where it's consistent and you're exactly right, that time is carved out and you dedicate it and it becomes part of your routine and your habits. We found a lot of success with that probably and then they find their little community and their little gathering within that sort of subject. Yeah.

It's been interesting. Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

There's one other thing I do want to touch on, which is the Atlassian summit, which happens in Las Vegas. It's probably one of the bigger events that Atlassian or the biggest event that Atlassian does each year. And that got affected by coronavirus and couldn't take place. And from what I understand you haven't sort of been directly involved with this one in terms of the organization, but it went online, or turned into a webinar series. Is that right? A webinar series?

Verity Bell:

Yeah, that's right. So it was actually on track to be the largest Atlassian event to date. And then sort of the COVID pandemic situation started to ramp up and they had to make a really difficult decision about whether they cancelled that live event or they move it to a digital platform or what they do with it. So they made the decision to keep the program. They kept it on the original program dates but instead of doing the three days that they normally do, they created two days of content. They did a very quick pivot, I think from memory, that was sort of mid, well, maybe late February coming into March or around that time. And then the remote summit was actually on the 1st of April. So they had to completely turn that around on its head.

Mark Bennedick:

And how did it go? Has there been any kind of anecdotal sort of results or success of how that went, like, did many people or more people than perhaps would have normally attended view that online? Or how did that go? Do you know anything about that?

Verity Bell:

Yeah, so they had around close to 30,000 registrations for that event, which is significantly larger than what they were expecting to have at their live sessions in Las Vegas. They had really great conversion rates of how many registrations, actual participants, and they did a lot of sessions so that they did talks, which is sort of traditional summit, as well. But they also kept the chat aspect of it as the sponsor hall, product and practice hubs and things like that. And they had a real success from those as well. So based off sort of industry average view time sessions and stuff, they saw a big increase on that. So overall, it was very well received. Everyone thought the content and the quality was great. And I think people were just really grateful for the effort that was put into changing it and that it-

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, because it's a huge undertaking to do that at the last minute.

Verity Bell:

Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

It's a big effort. It's interesting because I've chatted with many clients before, too, about do we have an online component to an event? And a lot of the time there's always been that question in their minds of will people still turn up to the event. And I think those lines are going to be blurred even more so in the future. And people have started to see the online component, but then obviously also starting to understand the shortcomings of online versus face-to-face. And the two of them, I think, can coexist and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other. And they can actually perhaps working together be more beneficial.

Verity Bell:

Yeah. I agree with you. I don't think digital will replace face-to-face. That's sort of an innate human need to find people in that physical way. And you get sort of different things out of it, I think, by dedicating the day to go into the conference or something, and that clears out that space to really dive into that particular information or topic or whatever it is. Whereas, it's harder in a digital world to pull away from all of the notifications and email things and bits and pieces. But then at the same time, by putting it online, you've got the whole world who can access and join you and not just people in this case who can fly to Las Vegas for that exact timeframe. You've suddenly opened up your content and your experience to the world. And that's special in itself.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, is there anything else, I guess, from all the work that you've been doing, and I congratulate you, I guess, on the quick pivot that you guys have done internally to take everything online, as well, from your day-to-day world. Is there anything, any learnings or any sort of last thoughts that you might have for people that are having to face that similar situation or when perhaps they've come back to the office and have to then deal with remote workers where they're not used to doing that? I mean, are there any sort of last thoughts or learnings that you think are worth making note of?

Verity Bell:

I think the biggest thing that's come out of it is not the success of our events or how popular they were, but how it made people feel just by giving it a go and we haven't always got it right. And some things we try and they bomb. Some things are great and we'll find a spot, but the overwhelming response from Atlassian's for us putting in the effort to do it, is that they feel cared for and they feel valued and they feel looked after. And in a time where everything's sort of so hectic and a bit dangerous, it sort of makes them feel safe and looked after. There's so much more than just how many people are attending. The reach for the efforts are actually much broader than just the number of attendees. And it promotes them feeling like they belong to a really caring community as well.

Mark Bennedick:

I guess you've also got, sorry. I was just going to say, I think you've also got that leniency at the moment, to take a few risks and showing that you actually have empathy and care for your staff and giving them a great experience as best you can is fantastic. And then at the same time, you can have a little bit of fun with it and try out some new things and might even discover some things that you never thought were going to take off.

Verity Bell:

Yeah, I think you're right. Because we have been forced into a world of change, I think we've grown a tolerance for things changing that perhaps would be a little bit harder to maneuver sort of in, I don't know what I need to call it, the real world, the old world?

Mark Bennedick:

The new normal is what everyone's calling it because they can't think of a better way to say it yet. There'll be something that'll come up.

Verity Bell:

So everyone's sort of embracing change because we've been forced to. And so there's a real window of opportunity here to experiment and try different things and make changes. And people are more, I think, accepting of that. And they're going along with the ride because there's an understanding that it has to, and it's going to. So trying to make the most of that opportunity and just try all the things, make all the errors, find the sweet spots while everyone's just sort of very tolerant of that exploring and the experimentation.

Mark Bennedick:

Totally. Well look, Verity, it's been really great talking to you. Thanks for coming on and sharing some of your wisdom and some of your successes... and things that you've done in the last six to eight weeks. I mean, I think it's a tribute to you guys and it's really great to see the way in which people are showing that flexibility and that ability to change. And even if we're being forced to do it, and perhaps even a lot of people don't like change, but I think the long run, I guess, of all of this, is it's going to create innovation and creativity and hopefully lead us through to a more interesting and diverse kind of work-life balance in the future. That's I guess the positive spin, I think, on the whole thing.

Verity Bell:

I totally agree. I'm looking forward to what that looks like. I think we'll land in a better place.

Mark Bennedick:

Exactly. Well, look, thanks again, Verity and look, for everyone out there joining us today, be sure to check out the online resources we're providing to help brands emerge from the crisis stronger than before, via our website, sensegroup.com.au. We've got a great range of articles there, presentations, these COVID series podcasts, and also linking to some of the government websites, especially curated for marketing and experienced design professionals. All the links you can see in the show notes and look, stay safe, stay connected, and we'll see you next time on Behind The Experience.

#5 Momo Vassilev | Health & Safety, and New Event Strategies for COVID-19

Mark Bennedick — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 02:25:51 GMT

With heightened risk, we require heightened safety measures and strategies. In this episode of ‘Behind The Experience’ we take a look at how COVID-19 has impacted the health and safety approach to events and brand experiences. Our guest, Momtchill ‘Momo’ Vassilev walks us through the changing environment for event health and safety and shares his opinion of what the near future may hold for events in Australia.

Momo is an experienced Risk and Safety Manager with over 15 years continued service with Avert Assure. Lean in as we discuss how these new circumstances may impact our approach to events moving forward.

“...since awareness has grown, now the demand for planning documents such as risk assessments has increased, certainly exponentially...”

This is a part of our digital toolkit Sense Group is curating to help brands emerge from the crisis stronger than before. For more information and resources head to www.sensegroup.com.au

Learn more about Momo Vassilev and Avert Assure here:

http://www.avertrisk.com.au/

Read the full interview below.

Mark Bennedick:

Thanks for tuning to Behind the Experience. I'm your host, Mark Bennedick, co-founder and director of Sense Group here in Sydney. And if you joined us on our last episode with behavioural scientist Kristen Berman you'll know that we're currently curating a COVID toolkit to help brands come out the other side of this crisis stronger than before with the power of brand experiences and events. So for more information on that, you can visit our website sensegroup.com.au, but look for today, today's guest is a very well known expert here in Sydney in the event and brand experience field.

Momo Vassilev is a very experienced risk and safety manager with over 15 years continued service with Avert Assure. Momo is very highly respected in the industry for his extensive safety risk management knowledge, his passionate approach to practical risk and safety management, and for building a collaborative safe culture. Welcome to the show, Momo.

Momo Vassilev:

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Bennedick:

Look Momo, for those people out there that don't know you or who haven't worked directly in the industry before, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your background and where you come from and the work that you do with Avert Assure?

Momo Vassilev:

Oh yes, sure. So I worked with the mother company before I started with Assure Avert, which is called ACES security and an opportunity came by in the early two thousands to get qualified and get into our safety wing, which is strongly focused on the events' industry. After doing some courses, I got the exposure to start working in the events industry, which initially was not easy. And from the first day I found that it does give its very specific challenges and demands, but it's been a pleasant journey for nearly 15 years, as you said.

Assure Avert works with any kind of events. So I've been involved with outdoor live music events, stadium shows, or outdoor festivals, corporate functions, motor racing elements and shows like Monster Jam and so on and so forth. The business has expanded as compliance requirements from event management and so on grows over the years. We initially worked with risk assessments on basic safety plans, and now approvals are required by emergency management, traffic management, specific crowd plans, and so on.

So things have become a bit more complex on the administration side of the planning for events, but that is in a nutshell.

Mark Bennedick:

Obviously the business itself has expanded into different areas, but have you seen over time risk and occupational health and safety become more prevalent in the event world? Is it something that people are taking a lot more seriously and dedicate a lot more time towards these days than they used to, say 15 years ago?

Momo Vassilev:

Yes, for me. They have a need. It's an interesting phenomenon that I've been observing. I wouldn't necessarily say it's linked to legislation. Although governments and regulators have changed legislation. Usually it's on a 10 year cyclic, that laws get updated on about 15 years. However, I wouldn't necessarily say it was driven by law, but it is definitely propagated. There's more awareness now as of the actual legal environment that people are operating.

And now it has become more prevalent as you said that since awareness has grown, now the demand for planning documents such as risk assessments has increased certainly exponentially. However, at the same time if there's no guarantee as of how clients look how people in the industry take these risk assessments, those documents, because within them there is advice that can actually change the way that things are done, but at the same time ... as you can imagine, there's never a guaranteed connection that we as the company can act as an auditor and pursue our clients to ensure that they've done every single thing that is prescribed, in a way that the onus is on the event manager to take some ownership of the event and actually see how they're going to manage it.

But it's definitely growing up. My last comment is more based on the volume of work we do rather than... I will not necessarily say that I'm suspicious or I doubt people's commitments to safety, but because of such huge volume of say risk assessments that we work with, it is hard to predict how many of them will be actually enacted or into to what extent.

Mark Bennedick:

Yes. Yeah. And that makes sense. I mean, I know as a company. In our company, we use you guys to do a lot of the risk assessment work for us, for the events that we do. And I guess for people listening, what you're saying is true, is you provide the recommendations and the framework for which a company like ourselves, as producers need to implement and make that an actual implemented mechanism within the projects that we're creating.

You're not there on the ground, although you potentially could be, but with us, from our experience, you're not there on the ground making sure we do what you've asked us to do. There is an onus on the production company to implement those recommendations. Isn't there?

Momo Vassilev:

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, to at least agree with your team, but I did have a little bit more exposure. With some clients, we do find the time or we kind of reach to meet or interact, or for someone from our company to come and visit one of your sites and whatnot. So with your team I have a little bit more interaction than with similar clients. So I would say my observations with your team is that they put a pretty, pretty decent effort to implement everything.

Plus, as you know, we work fairly regularly, but we're having terms with clients, which makes it a one-off event, or it's something that's for that particular event that has decided to engage us. And these are the ones that, although we put all efforts to explain and to prescribe and whatnot, it's still not certain. I'm not necessarily saying that it is an absolute must, but at the same time, as I said, we are based on practical solutions and on actual safe outcomes. So if in an instance, the event manager just asked for the grading, almost every single line item in that document or dismissing, then obviously, there will not be much of a change at the other end.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, definitely. Look, I'll get into maybe some of the more specific thoughts that we have around COVID and how that might change the way people think about events in the future. But I thought it would've been interesting just to go back and thinking back in your career. And obviously on the website, you've got some really huge events there, things like Taylor Swift concerts and ACDC and Ed Sheeran concerts, right down to the Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour and sculptures by the sea, the NRL grand final. There are some really huge events there. What are some of the events that stick out in your mind from ones that have been great to be involved with, or even maybe things that did go wrong? An interesting experience that you might've had working in your field.

Momo Vassilev:

Well, I mean over 15 years I've been doing it full time and living it every day. There's a fair bit to go back over. As far as events are concerned, my very intimate and interesting memories, that are imprinted forever... basically, what you mentioned with ACDC. As far as the live music acts are concerned in stadiums, two of my best experience was with ACDC and Sir Paul McCartney.

The Sydney show was with ACDC Black Ice [inaudible 00:09:10] and the Paul McCartney one at AAMI Park in Melbourne, being that over the years, I've developed iron and a ear for the show format. So the ACDC band and Paul McCartney both had a very good package of the show, all together, being audio, lighting, special effects, stage design, stage decks, and the obvious or the bands themselves.

Although I've seen many music acts with Pearl Jam and so on, these two were... everything was actually complimenting everything. So as a package, they were very, very strong... as an actual product. As far as unique events are concerned, they have safety challenges as well. I've had and still have a relationship with failed entertainments... US, which own the Monster Jam brand. So these are non-American monster trucks. This is a touring event that basically does about 150 - used to, obviously, pre-COVID, used to do 150 countries a year.

So they will have a touring show from Stockholm in Sweden to Costa Rica, to Melbourne in Australia concurrently. So motorsports, heavy-duty equipment, very quick turnaround. So everything gets put together in a week. And the other format, which was quite unique is there was a one-off production between ANZ Stadium and Stade de France in France which was called [inaudible].

So it was essentially a reenactment of many of the episodes. So to make a movie, but on the grand scale, the stadium being, the stadium pitch was covered with crushed brick and we had the chariots race around, and the slave ship with the slaves rowing a song.

Mark Bennedick:

Wow, that's cool.

Momo Vassilev:

But as far as the experiences are concerned, these are two big ones in terms of planning. So say for [inaudible 00:11:31], for example, the critical show component was to have forklift operators driving during the show, night after night after night... driving into the field. And a particular model of a telehandler machine was used and certified to make parts of the galley ship for the scene. So sort of the big argument there was the people who had the expertise to do this work were French teams because the show was put by Stade de France in Paris.

The big stumble there was compliance because, although it's part of the show, these people were supposed to operate an industrial machine, which in our Australian world is strictly regulated. So the only way to do this was to get these French people to actually do the course. So they arrived a little bit earlier and we put them on our course and they actually did a very quick crash course in Australia, but they did it legitimately and was certified to our rules and were allowed to join.

On the other hand, say with the Monster Jam show format, a practical solution as I said, but in that particular one, there's a fair bit of interaction between very big machines, including earthmoving machines, bulldozers, and so on and people. So a lot of what's being done there was in theory administrative, but because of the safety culture and the fact that people stuck with it and adhered to it and complied with it for many years now, it has actually been effective. And that is very particular rules about separation between people and machines in all stages.

So during the bumping, during the shows, and so on. In practice and theory, it usually doesn't work because you expect workers and others to do the right thing. But in that instance, there was some reliability and some monitoring. In that it does work because it was an overall culture of very good discipline. Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:

So these kind of guys which are doing night after night shows around the world, it's big business and there's a lot of logistics going on in the background. How do you think these companies are? And have you been speaking to these kinds of companies? I'd be interested to get your thoughts on, how are these guys planning for the future? Because these large scale shows are probably going to be, I imagine one of the last types of events to come back into existence. Again, with social distancing rules and the numbers of people allowed in a certain one area at a certain time, how are these guys sort of dealing with the challenges at the moment, of when they think they can get back to business?

Momo Vassilev:

Look, it is a difficult question to answer because, as you can imagine, with COVID and our events industry, we were very heavily impacted. So a lot of the changes that have been made and decisions that have been made in many businesses related to the events' industry were first very critical for the business and were taken on a very high level. As far as say some of our American clients that come to us are concerned, I wouldn't have to speculate because the decisions that are taken on there are basically pretty much on apex level, on our board of directors on its own.

So my context is mainly being with high ranking touring, and global touring and whatnot managers, but even they themselves are not completely in the clear because of the decisions they're taking right up in the boardroom. What I know from the outdoor is that the impact was very high. So European... I had some interaction with some of my colleagues in Poland last week. Poland for example had a very, very strong events' industry, particularly outdoor festivals in the summer.

They were working on the format of their heads, on average of 90 festivals in the summer of the size of our big day out, back in the days. So there was about three, four festivals every weekend on top of each other. Probably about 70% of the events companies, so service providers like lighting, audio, whatever could pretty much shut shop, gone in liquidation. Some of the most highly regarded event people were discussing now whether the Dutch event industry will be able to recover now. I know some American operators have downsized by about 90%, as of laid-off people or stood down stuff... These actions were taken across the board. So we're not talking on grassroots workers, but all the way, including some of the presidents and vice presidents of divisions and so on for the bigger structures, across the board.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah. Yeah, look it is a crazy time, isn't it? It's impacting these guys at a very deep level. I mean, there's not much a business can do if there is no revenue available for a particular industry. There's not much you can do about it. Is there? I mean, some of these guys, do you think they are in the process of planning towards a post COVID approach or do you think they're just sitting and relaxing at the moment?

Momo Vassilev:

I think they are planning. I mean, I'll have to keep things discrete, but I kind of kept communications with government representatives in Australia, for example, in our state in New South Wales, that a lot of events are now being discussed actively and the fact that bigger events that we have in Sydney. As you know, Vivid was cancelled for this year for sure.

Certainly people that are being away, our colleagues, it might be government employees but their job is also events. They are definitely looking at basically styling and planning for the future. A lot of events are being conceptualised. A lot of what's going on at the moment. I have worked over the last few weeks on this. As you know, the early planning stages, but for a lot of events, the concept work and the sound, the theoretical notions and whatever can be run out in advance.

So there's a lot of consultation going on and whatnot for events the future. In my view, with humans being social creatures, we can not have events, the million-dollar question will be, in what form they'll return. I do believe in nature, even in human structures and functions. So I believe society and our industry will basically find its way. I don't believe anyone would necessarily lead the way. Actually, the government, obviously, because they're the ones that actually regulate things.

But I do believe events will happen again. At the moment, the question is when, and I compare our state government, our Australian government... federal, and I could... I'm volunteering in some European and some us States actions. And in terms of timeframe, somewhere, their goal at the moment for many Europeans, they aim to open. Some of them have started already opening up on social sections, but I would say for events, it's very hard for them, whether it will be July, whether August, whether September, whether October, and whatnot. But I would believe that it is highly unlikely that we would not have events before the New Years Eve.

Mark Bennedick:

Okay. Well, that's an interesting point. I mean, I think we probably have a similar mindset that, I think in our minds, working from a very conservative position, we have factored that 2020 is almost a write off in terms of the industry. If we can get some events in the 2020 calendar year, then I think that we'd consider that almost a bonus from our point of view.

And then in terms of ... I mean, the other thing we have in our minds as a company is bringing people back to live events. There might be a job to do there to assure audiences that it is safe for them to do so. I'm talking to a lot of chief marketing officers at companies, particularly in the corporate world or within corporate events and something that does seem to be top of mind and coming up time and time again is that they do need to provide a duty of care to their audiences and make sure that they feel safe in actually attending their event.

They don't want to be the next company or event responsible for a cluster of infections that might arise. Are there things in your mind that you've been looking at? And I imagine you've been probably learning a whole lot of new information with lots of new legislation coming on board recently. Are there some key areas that you think need to be thought about post-COVID as to how we create events? Is it about social distancing measures? Is it about having occupational health and safety officers on site all the time monitoring the way things are being done? I mean, what are some of the key things that you think these guys need to be thinking about? That we can help our clients think about towards global events.

Momo Vassilev:

Yes for sure.

As I mentioned, as a key message, I've been monitoring, I've been reading a lot of publications, particularly focused on the COVID affair, but even if we zoom out of COVID, basically a virus that went global. So in any such scenario, one important lesson from this is that this might repeat as of not necessarily COVID, but now as many people thought that potentially things can not go that bad or particularly something like this can not have such an impact on our industry, then now we know that it can.

Mark Bennedick:

Yes, it definitely can.

Momo Vassilev:

But the two core elements that are coming from everywhere. I looked. It's basically two. One of them is the crowd capacity as of the patron capacity, which is as you said, the social distancing element. And then the other one is hygiene. Then sanitisation is on. The reason I put hygiene on the second point is because I don't believe that we've been performing poorly in Australia. And so we have good hygiene standards or good amenities, and so on food preparation.

So I believe the social distancing is the one that has the impact because social distancing obviously, at the moment we still have certain restrictions. But let's say you open events, the current rules in New South Wales, but they're pretty much national, and we're still stuck with the 1.5 meters between people.

Let's say our new South Wales workplace regulates and so forth. They advise also that for workers at the workplace, they shouldn't socialize in groups of more than two. So let's say if you have a factory and whatever the case, and have the workers when they go on a break or whatnot, or the smoko as they call it, there should be no more than two workers together, still 1.5 meters apart. So if you projected that all on to events... if you are targeting an event patronage, you would say 500 or a thousand people, then obviously with the pure spatial situation turn around, that's if you are planning an event of a thousand people, then you need 4,000 square meters because the current tools are saying that you must get one person per four square meters. So it's a full fold effect.

So our typical event industry format... one person per one square meter is a very, very comfortable density. Then you have two people and so on. This actually reverses the scale and it goes that you can only put one human being in four square meters. As a practical example, if you have a function for a thousand people, even without considering your infrastructure for the event or bars or whatever, to meet the current requirements, you're better off putting them in the holding pavilion which has the capacity of over 5000 in order to meet that rule.

Mark Bennedick:

So it's going to really affect obviously crowd sizes within spaces, which is going to affect the experience, be it a concert or a corporate event, or if you're in a venue. And then I guess as well, the idea of... things that come to mind when I think about that, is clients are going to be thinking how much return on investment are we're going to be getting from this particular event when we can have a smaller patronage or a smaller audience, plus at the same time having to balance that out against a larger venue, because obviously no one wants to spend more money than it's necessary on a larger venue than is required.

But that's also highly impacts the experience of that person in the event. I think particularly about things like concerts, where the energy of a crowd and being within a crowd fairly tightly knit is part of that experience. So it's going to really put a lot of emphasis on people like us, I guess, when we're dealing with our clients to try and come up with ways in which we can still create that emotional connection with people and brands, particularly.

They're talking about trying to achieve objectives with these events. How do we still achieve these objectives through connection? It's going to be a real challenge. I think it's going to affect the format of events, and the way in which we do things quite profoundly in the short term until that potentially changes.

Have you been hearing around the traps how much that role will apply to events, the four square meters, or will that come down at any time or stage in the future? Or do you think that's the way it is for now? In the foreseeable future.

Momo Vassilev:

I would say it's in the foreseeable. I mean there's no indication whether it will be sustained or not, but essentially that's the current format and it is not a pleasant one. But yet again, it's not catastrophic if events... as you've said, there will be challenges, but as long as events open up and we can actually put people together, we need to start. But yeah, it's the thing in the moment, it's not very clear whether they'll sustain it.

Challenges will be there, but as you said, that's a very good comment. That's how I see it. If you go one person per four square meters, you immediately arrive at the challenge with venue size and so on. Return on investment, as you said, then immediately the concept comes well, aren't we better off if we have a target audience X to really work hard on an online platform and do some kind of an online party or something, rather than hiring a physical venue and doing it the traditional way. I believe that just based on... and perhaps for our industry's case forward, perhaps if these rules do continue, we will end up either naturally observing some social phenomenon of our event patrons breaching that rules, or possibly we can have some specialists in social psychology and whatever step in and say, "Look, we have to change this because it's actually now having an observable impact on people's minds."

At the moment, I believe it's manageable but as you said, for the public events of the scale of say New Year’s Eve in Sydney, or Vivid or whatnot, I believe it's quite bearable because what has to happen, they use very simple crowd control and panning to meet the tool. So once the capacity is given, and we already know the capacities of men in public areas in Sydney, all we do is just downsize how many people are allow in. And then help people interact within that space. We're not robots and you can't really police that as much, but it's definitely becoming ... would have an impact on the corporate events. But yet again, we got to consider the source. These distancing conditions and so on are all based on the COVID threats and the way it was analyzed, the way that its impact was analyzed.

So as the COVID threat goes down, lowers it will be hard to continue to hold the argument for the social distancing. So I believe as the echoes diffuse, not only in Australia, but around the world, one would hope that the argument for these restrictions and the social distancing will also start getting weaker and weaker. So we can hopefully go back to absolute normal. What will happen? That's obviously what the basic lessons are. We have to have the hand sanitizers, the more frequent amenities, checks and cleanups and whatnot, and these obvious things. But as I said before, I don't think Australia would be doing too bad with hygiene. We just have to be seen to do more for the patrons and so on. But my few days that a lot of people, especially the broader public will be very keen to hear that.

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, look, I think you're on the money there. Exactly. I think there are processes that get put in place with events that are already there it's an adjustment to some of the new rulings. So it's not like we're creating a whole lot of work out of nothing. We're very used to implementing these kinds of things already. It just changes the game a little bit. So if people wanted to work with you in the future and work with Avert Risk and Avert Assure, what's the best way to contact you?

Momo Vassilev:

We are reachable through our website, which is a avert risk and assure safety. It's very easy to find. I mean, we don't have any other names or competitors with names that are close to. Our main service for Avert Risk is just simply called services@avertrisk.com.au. It is a team of us. I am the one that is more senior, worked for the longest, I do also have peers and colleagues that work me like Simon Clark and a few others. Then also, I often discuss the industry and so on with one of our directors, Sandra, who is very well known in the industry. So yeah, my personal email is momo@avertrisk.com.au, just in small case. Anyone that wants to reach out, they can find this on the website.

Mark Bennedick:

Well, look Momo, thank you very much for joining me today on this. It's a great thing for us to be talking about at the moment. Not something that people generally see at events, but there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that they are in safe places to be to experience and enjoy. So I really appreciate the time this morning and put some of your thoughts towards some of this COVID toolkit that we're building online for event professionals and for brands to help understand how to deal with this as we come through it. So for people out there, be sure to check out that online resource, which can be found through our website, which is sensegroup.com.au, and we'll provide the links in the show notes for the podcast and look, stay safe. Stay connected. Momo, thanks again. And we'll see you next time on behind the experience.

#4 | Kristen Berman, Behavioural Science & Answers For Trying Times

Mark Bennedick — Tue, 12 May 2020 23:00:00 GMT

Have you ever considered behavioural science and economics as a resource for events and brand experiences? In this episode of 'Behind The Experience' we take a deep look at how human behaviour is affected by change with behavioural scientist Kristen Berman.

Kristen spotlights how COVID-19 could provide your business with a new opportunity or solution and discusses how there are many answers to be found in observing human behaviour through digital and physical experiences.

“...the opportunity for companies and brands and people is to take advantage of what's happening right now. Which is we're all changing our environments.”

This is a part of our digital toolkit Sense Group is curating to help brands emerge from the crisis stronger than before. For more information and resources head to www.sensegroup.com.au

Learn more about Kristen Berman and Irrational Labs here:

https://irrationallabs.com/

Read the full interview.

Mark Bennedick:
Thanks for tuning into Behind The Experience. I'm your host, Mark Bennedick, co-founder and director of Sense Group, here in Sydney. And, we're doing things a little bit differently at the moment. As you all well know, the event and brand experience industry is seeing a complete disruption from the current health crisis, and while this has shaken up the industry a little bit, it's also a really good opportunity for innovation and positive change. So, at the moment, we're curating a toolkit to help brands come out the other side of the crisis stronger than before. And today, I'm really excited to talk to you today about our guest, today's guest.

Kristen Berman is a behavioural scientist, based out of San Francisco. She co-founded Irrational Labs in 2013, a behavioural research and consulting company, and she's the co founder and principal at Common Sense Lab, a Duke University initiative dedicated to improving the financial wellbeing for low to middle Americans and was a member of the founding team for the behavioural economics group at Google. And has previously hosted one of the top behavioural change conferences globally, Startuponomics. Kristen has also co-authored a series of workbooks with Dan Ariely, called Hacking Human Nature for Good: A Practical Guide to Changing Human Behaviour. There's a lot of things to get through there, Kristen. How are you?

Kristen Berman:
Good. Thanks for having me, great to be here.

Mark Bennedick:
Pleasure, pleasure. Well, thanks for coming on and spending the time today. We came into contact with you through some of your interesting work and had a look at the work you're doing with Irrational Labs and we particularly thought it would be really good to talk to someone like yourself who works really heavily in researching and understanding human behaviour. And this is obviously a massive change going on in the world at the moment with corona and what businesses and people are going to be doing on, or during, and also I guess after this passes. Do you want to give us a bit of a background just on exactly what a behavioural scientist does, or economist does? Just for some of the people who maybe don't realise the kind of work that you do in that field?

Kristen Berman:
Sure, of course. So behavioural economics is basically called the science of decision making. In a typical economics world we make decisions based purely on utility or time and money and we're really rational. So you can imagine if you buy a cup of coffee for $3, the rational person thinks about all the places that $3 could otherwise have been used and then makes the decision to buy the coffee. More likely than not that's not how most of us make our decisions to buy coffee or not. We just get up in the morning and we see if the line is too long. And so we take these decision shortcuts all the time. And the behavioural economics world basically studies those kinds of decision shortcuts that we take.

And many times the finding is that we're influenced by what we say is the environment of decision making. So how something is designed. What's going on in our environment may have more impact than the attitudes and beliefs. So I may really want the coffee but if the line is too long, or maybe actually if there is no line at the coffee shop because it implies nobody else likes the coffee, I may not go in. So the field of behavioural economics studies these types of decisions and then we make or try to make small tweaks in the environment to help people behave in a way that they ideally want to behave.

So if you want to save money, try to get you to save more. If you want to eat healthy, try to eat more. Or not eat more, eat less.

Mark Bennedick:
Well it's an interesting dynamic because you're dealing with people who probably consider themselves to be quite rational but their behaviours and their actions probably say something totally the opposite. Do you find patterns in there? Are there a set of rules to go by which seem to work in most cases? Or is every challenge or problem you deal with starting from a clean slate?

Kristen Berman:
A little bit of both. So basically, the main premise of this field is that the environment impacts our decision making. So most of the time we do end up studying the environment of decision making in every small detail to figure out how to change it. But there are a few principles.

More often than not, people take the path of least resistance which means we do the easiest thing. It doesn't mean we're lazy, it just means we're basically very busy people. Lots on our mind, a lot of things to pay attention to. And so we're looking for the path of least resistance.

You can imagine if it's hard, we won't do it. If it's easy, we may do it. And that's one of the main, very simple principles that drives the field.

Mark Bennedick:
That makes sense. I think that would make sense for most people for sure.

Kristen Berman:
Yeah, it doesn't mean anything about... We can design something that everybody loves and really likes, but if it's too difficult to do... And by the way, by too difficult I mean, just an empty field that you ask people to fill in. Like our level of attempting to take the path of least resistance is probably one of the more surprising things that I see every day that humans do. And I'm acutely aware of it. So, you can never make things easy enough for us.

Mark Bennedick:
Do you find that happens for yourself? Are you more aware than the average person, do you think, working in the field? Or do you find yourself or catch yourself doing those things as well?

Kristen Berman:
No, that's kind of the beauty of it. I do. So most of our decisions are made quickly. We're emotional beings and we're making very quick decisions. So as much as I know decision making, I still make mistakes. The opportunity that I have knowing that mistakes are made is when I can slow down and think about the decision. And take a minute and weigh the options. And we think about small and big decisions. It's hard to intervene at small decisions. What type of camera do you want to buy? What type of iPhone do you want to buy? Maybe smaller decisions, where we're making them based on emotion and heuristics. "What kind of job do I want? Who do I marry? What house do I buy?" All of those are bigger decisions, and we have more time.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, that makes sense. There's decisions that really cross the spectrum of time from longer term to short term in the moment.

Across the world right now there's all sorts of things going on in business and change and probably more of a change than most people have ever experienced before in their lifetimes. What do you see as some of the opportunities or even challenges right now, for individuals or for brands, as we’re working through this pandemic or coming out the other side? What are some of the things that you think might really change? What might be different to the way things have been previously?

Kristen Berman:
Great question. So basically going back, the premise of behavioural science is that our environment can change behaviour. And other than that it's very difficult. It's very difficult to pick up a new habit. If anyone's tried meditating they may understand this very closely but it's very difficult except if you change your environment. And I think the opportunity for companies and brands and people is to take advantage of what's happening right now. Which is we're all changing our environments. We're staying at home and working from home. We aren't going out to eat as much. We're looking at our finances in a different way.

So that is really the time for behaviour change. There was a nice study done that looked at people right after they relocated, right after they moved and tried to nudge them to do some specific behaviours. This was around sustainability; getting you to turn off the lights, maybe walk instead of take a car. And what they found is that people were most receptive to those nudges within three months of moving.

They compared people who didn't move to people who did move and then tracked them over time. And the thought is when you move, you really change your environment. You're changing it up. Most of life is very similar. So I think in COVID times I think brands can really understand that they can talk to their customers differently. People may be much more receptive to change and to trying something new, doing something different than we've ever done before.

Mark Bennedick:
So, do you think that there is almost a window of mental availability where there's that opportunity to create habit change or change purchasing decisions when it comes to brands or things like that? Or can we create those windows for people?

Kristen Berman:
I think we can help create those windows for people, but I think what's happening right now in COVID is a real window where we're much more open to doing things differently because our whole lives are shaken up. And so, there's a real opportunity right now to do it but then when people come back online, they're also going to be going back to this, maybe a different environment. Whether they've changed jobs or they've changed their routines with their families given the last few months. So I think when people come back it is also a time to realize that routines are changing, habits are changing. And we may be more open to new things that we would not have otherwise said yes to.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, there's a lot of debate I think, out there at the moment, too, as to how the whole working environment is going to be, post. Are a lot of people going to be still working from home? What's the employee experience, working for companies? How do we instil that company culture within people working for the company if a lot more working away from the typical office space?

I mean how do you think that's all going to play out? Because I think part of our company here, where we're based in Sydney… obviously, we're a creative company, and we're building brand experiences for corporates and a lot of that energy and that incidental conversation that happens around the water cooler and the creative chit-chat, is part of the way in which we build ideas and solutions.

So it's interesting to me within my own business how we might be able to maintain and facilitate that, if we stick with a model which could be part office or part from home, or a lot more at home, work. I'm interested to know what your thoughts are on that and whether you think this is a habit that might stick, ultimately, for business? Is it going to be potentially still a successful model for a lot of businesses?

Kristen Berman:
Yeah. I may have a contrarian viewpoint here. I think the answer we'd like to hear is, "we can make it work," by working... Working remotely has its own benefits and we can improve on it and still maintain creativity and relationships. I think that it will be very tough to maintain this remote work environment and still have the level of relationships maybe needed and accountability needed to really be, I think, happy at work. I'll give you a few examples.

Well, maybe not a few examples but the idea of personal habit change. We all probably acknowledge it's difficult, right? You may want to, as I said, meditate. Or you may want to eat better, you may want to run every day, and more likely than not, we've all struggled with that. Work is fascinating in that we take on really big projects and we take on tasks every day. And more often than not, we don't struggle. We get crazy amounts of stuff done; launch big projects, put on big events. And it's not like you go into the office and say, "I just kind of didn't want to do that today, and I kind of forgot."

So there's [something] really special about working with other people, and having that public visibility of our behaviour that going into a workplace really does for us. And I think it's, sure, it's achievable in remote work but it's really special when you're working amongst a group of people doing something together. Everybody's holding each other accountable for pretty big, hairy, audacious goals. And one of the reasons you can reach them is because you feel really bad if you let your teammate down and you really want to work hard together with them.

So yeah, I worry about moving to fully remote. We lose some of that special sauce of what makes it easy to get work done, and move more into the private sector, which is, we all struggle with personal habits. We don't really want to struggle with our work, in that same way.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a tendency, part of me I think definitely agrees with you on that one. I think just knowing the way that it works within our space and the way you do need that energy from people. And that works in all sorts of different ways. As a company we've been having virtual drinks on a Thursday and it's great and it's awesome to catch up with people. But you imagine the difference between that and say, being down at the local bar or pub. There is a need for people to have human contact, and there's sort of a... I guess, there's an energy that you just don't get, digitally.

And that's one component of it and then the other component you're talking about there is just that accountability and that social pressure, almost, that encourages people to get things done, that maybe they wouldn't be able to discipline themselves to do otherwise. It would be interesting to look at, say some of the industries that have successfully worked off a work from home model and see the kinds of things and tools that they're putting in place or how they get around some of those challenges because I think that there's going to be a lot of people out there thinking about this at the moment and wondering, will it work?

What do you think as well about some of the things that people... other things that people might need to be thinking about? Maybe from a brand perspective, might be good to think about. What are the kinds of things do you think brands are going to need to think about when they're talking to their consumers or their audiences coming out of the back of this?

I know you mentioned before, there's a window for these brands to be able to talk to people in a different way. Is it going to be a more empathetic approach, or what do you think, first, from your point of view, [what] is going to be important for brands to think about?

Kristen Berman:
Yeah, it's hard to say generally, for all brands. I think, playing off this point that people are maybe in a different mindset. We use the word, mental model. People probably had a mental model of what the brand meant, how it worked, the relationship to it. And I think the opportunity is for the brand to assess what that is, and then figure out if they want to change it. Because, now is the time. Now is the time to change it, if there ever was one, because people are saying, "Okay, my life has changed, and I could be open to re establishing a new relationship with a brand." So what that could look like is relaunching something, or reinventing yourself, or renaming something. Getting people to really re meet you in a different way because their minds are more open. But I think that's [crosstalk 00:16:22] and tactically, that's looking at your old mental model, and seeing how it could change.

Dan Ariely, who's a professor at Duke, and we've done a lot of work together started this insurance company that is called Lemonade. And it's fairly popular, but one of the things that they really did is to say, "What is the model of insurance companies? What's the mental model of insurance companies?" And after looking internally and we now may know this, we don't trust them as much as we trust other types of companies. We think that maybe if you submit a claim, maybe it won't get approved. There's lots of work.

And so they said, "How would we change that mental model?" And they released Lemonade, which is basically using some of the insurance premiums towards charity. So they're signaling that they are a different mental model than what people are used to from an insurance company and trying to get people to think about them as somebody different. And likely, it's possible that brands can kind of use this moment in time to assess what they're currently doing and signal that they're changing.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. That's cool. I like that premise. It's, I see what you're talking about with the mental model. It's really just a lot of people talk about it in businesses, in trying to provide a unique selling point. Or what makes you different from somebody else? And coming at it from your perspective and your approach, changing a mental model is somewhat similar in that way too. But using a certain... your world of behavioural economics, like that framework. Which allows you to answer these kinds of questions and give these different answers, and come up with a company like that. I think that's really, really interesting.

How do you apply that to an instantaneous world? Like, say something like a brand experience where we've got people coming into a space or exhibiting something for the first time. And they're doing it in a very short period and timeframe. And I guess, you haven't had a lot of opportunity in the past to test and learn and apply any learnings to optimise an experience. What's a better way for people like us, to be able to try and get it right, more often than we get it wrong?

Kristen Berman:
That's a great question. I think you hint on it a little bit, to think about a testing and experimental mindset. Most of the premise of behavioural economics is around not trusting our intuition and really, that things are not as they always seem. And so many times we make assumptions about what people do, what they want. And very frequently, those are wrong. And it's only really with an experiment or a test, that you can figure out that they're counterfactual, right? If you just do something one way, you'll never find out what happens if you do it another way.

Yeah. And I think sometimes, we get too scared, right? "Will customers get confused? Will they not like it? What's the downside?" And we forget the upside. That by going with the first thing you thought about, you're making an implicit assumption that this is the best thing. That this is the maximum, that you've hit it on round one. And that's just likely not true. And so thinking about the stuff that you're doing and the types of small experiences that are being created as learning opportunities versus "Did you nail it?" seems much more practical and on point.

And, some of that may be, we just did an experiment with no smalltalk cards, which is basically one of the insights on conversations is, we mostly go to the lowest common denominator of conversation, which is small talk. And reasonably, it's easy to do, and you can connect with people at a surface level. But, our hypothesis was that it's not good for relationships. If you really want to connect with somebody, talking about more vulnerable topics is better.

And the other hypothesis was that it's very difficult for people to do that. If I started this conversation and said "Hello, what's your deepest fear?" That's kind of weird. And so our hypothesis was that we'd have to help people do this. We'd have to give the social norm that this is not only permissible, but that's what's expected. So we have these cards, we pass them out, we tell them for the next 30 minutes, please use the cards. Talk to your neighbour.

And what happens is that people use the cards. And they veer away from what's most comfortable; which is our weather, our sports, our vacations, and dive a lot deeper. And so our experiment there was to figure out, do people become more connected with these cards? And we found out, over two different experiments, that yes, that diving deeper actually does help people. A, they like it when it's with cards. They get very nervous and don't like it when we just say, "Hey, talk about something vulnerable."

But, they do need the crutch. We need the crutch of the cards, to do it. [crosstalk 00:21:51] And so, it's that type of experimental mindset that says, "We could be wrong. Maybe the cards are overwhelming, and weird and, in and of themselves. But let's try it, and measure, and see if we can create a better experience by trying something out of the norm."

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. That's cool. So I guess what I wound up taking from that is data is important to take out the assumptions that one might have when putting together ideas. And I guess that test and learn pattern can be applied across a range of things, rather than having it exist in a silo. That sounds to me, and I'm thinking about the kinds of things that we do and the kinds of frameworks that we might try and work towards, to try and get that mindset across all of the work over a period of time.

Thinking too, just with the work that you've done in the past, and what have been some of your most memorable projects that you've worked on? Or, maybe even some of the projects that sort of surprised you, when you got involved and challenged your assumptions on the topic as well. I know you've worked with a bunch of different brands in the technology world and not for profits and all sorts of things. What are some of the things that stand out for you so far?

Kristen Berman:
Yeah, great question. We just completed an experiment with West Texas University, which is a university in the states, and a company, a tech company called AdmitHub. And we were trying to help in the US college which is obviously very expensive. And there is financial aid available but a lot of people, around two million people, just don't take the aid. Which is surprising, given it's free money. And we completed an experiment and found that, by changing how we ask the question to get people to complete or to submit their financial aid form we could increase the number of students who applied for the aid. Now, this is very interesting because it's free money. So why would just changing how we asked the question change the outcome?

But what we did is reduce the perception of friction involved in applying. So instead of saying, "Do you want to fill out this very long application? Please click here to do it. Here's a reminder, when it's due by." We said, "It's just part of the process. It's part of the process of applying for, or going to, this college, is filling out this form." And what that does is just change the mindset on, "Oh, do I do it? Do I not? When do I do it? Should I do it? Maybe I won't qualify," to, "It's a lot of work in order to do it," and say, "Okay, this is the next step in the process, and I'm going to continue."

So we took away a decision that somebody had to make and instead we just made it the path of least resistance to continue. And what I really like about that is, it's a small change. We sent out a text message and then we sent out one reminder and if it was rolled out to all of the US we'd have around 200,000 more applications from students with just very small changes.

Mark Bennedick:
Wow.

Kristen Berman:
Yeah. So I think sometimes people rely too much on big strategies and big pushes when much of life is lived in the small details.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. Right. And that's a really great example. That's a very small change and really, costs nothing to implement. It's just really thinking through how do we get rid of the friction.

Kristen Berman:
Exactly. Yeah. And that's going back to one of the insights of behavioural science in general it's really about helping people take the path of least resistance in ways that help them achieve what they want to. And very small things can get in our way to prevent us from taking action. So [inaudible 00:25:54].

Mark Bennedick:
[crosstalk 00:25:59] design. I said, we're very fickle creatures.

Kristen Berman:
Yes, we are.

Mark Bennedick:
One thing I read of yours as well which I thought was a really interesting piece was Burning Man Festival. Because that's, for people who don't know about Burning Man Festival, it is a very well known festival in the US and it's essentially a counterculture festival where people are able to go and live out almost a utopian existence or an alternative existence as to how society operates. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience of doing that and what you got out of that?

Kristen Berman:
Yeah, for sure. So if you have not been to Burning Man, I highly suggest it. I think it may not be for most people. It may feel like something you wouldn't do. But in reality there's not many things in life that completely flip most of the paradigms that we have on our head. Burning Man creates a new city and the interesting thing about the city is that it's participatory, which means most people who attend contribute something.

And so you really couldn't imagine a place by which people could do more work for something. So many times when we're creating events or activities, we want to have very small amounts of work that we require our attendees to do. And the interesting thing about, well there's many interesting things about Burning Man, but one of them is that really people kind of create. They create art, they create experiences, they create their themed camps. Everyone who attends is participating in the whole event.

So I think you can ask more things of participants and it will get them more ownership and more involvement in the event. So that's one thing about Burning Man is, everybody who attends is part of it.

Mark Bennedick:
And it's amazing how much effort people will go to in their own spare time. Obviously these people are not being paid or they're using their own money to create some of their sculptures or their cars that they drive around in. It's all, it's all off their own back back, isn't it?

Kristen Berman:
Yeah. It's incredible. It really is.

And the other frame is giving. So I think one principle of happiness is, is not that necessarily, we are happy when we get more things. Or consumerism will make us optimally happy. We actually quite enjoy giving things to people. And Burning Man is based on this principle, where the art that you're creating is made for people to experience it. The experiences different groups of people who do these camps do, is designed so people experience it. You actually have little small marketers yelling for people to come and experience whatever they've built. It's all free. But you really, no one gets any money for you experiencing their art, but everybody really wants you to, because it feels so good to give.

And so I think the Burning Man has designed a lot of things from First Principles of Happiness, which is, meaning and purpose. Which is, everyone is creating something there or creating something [that] gives us meaning and purpose and happiness which is a lot from giving to other people. And probably more events and things could be designed from these types of first principles, of living.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. What is it about Burning Man do you think that has enabled such a strong following? Because from what I know and I haven't been to Burning Man, but one day, I'll get there... What is it about the culture that they've created that has really drawn people into, to be, to put their belief and to put their effort and their own funds behind it? Do you think it is some of those things that you're talking about, like purpose and meaning and happiness? Or is it a void, do you think in society that is being filled which people don't get to play out in their normal lives, or...

Kristen Berman:
All of that… you have engineers at Google who go to Burning Man and they are creators of art. And where and when would they have an opportunity to do this in another setting? And so, Burning Man creates the place in time for people to be a little bit more creative than the normal 9:00 to 5:00 work that we do. And it creates a lot of opportunities for people to have different roles. Whether, I plan the opening ceremony for our theme camp, right? Where I'm in no world would I be doing that in a normal scene and setting, planning an opening ceremony for a group of people to start off a week.

And it's quite entertaining, and I get a lot of joy from it. And so, people really lean into the things and create the roles for themselves. Nobody's giving - nobody gave me that role. You're creating the opportunity to try something out yourself. And in a work environment context, many times people give you the role. And you say, "Okay, I will do the role."

And Burning Man hacks that and hacks the mental model we have of work. Is that, "It could be enjoyable. We want to do it."

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Definitely interested to get there one day. We'll look, Kristen, we're pretty much on time, at the moment. Is there anything else you want to add? I mean, I'm just thinking [about]anyone out there who's interested in behavioural economics, or behavioural science, who maybe hasn't looked at it, or doesn't understand the value that it could have for them as a person or for a brand or a business? What's, maybe any misconceptions, or anything that you think people would need to know about, to start that trail of understanding how it can be valued differently?

Kristen Berman:
Great question. So I think two things. One is, really thinking about if given the first point is the environment of decision making influences our decisions more than we realize. Many times we feel like, if we don't, people may feel like if you change the environment, you may be manipulating people. Or, getting them to do something different.

We instead find it offensive if somebody... Inaction is the same thing as action. If you aren't changing the environment of decision making and imagine that it's in the US unemployment forms are extremely long and hard. People could say, "If you change it, you may be incorrectly forcing people to do something, or not." But the reality is, if you don't change it, many people won't apply or get confused because it's just so hard and long. And so inaction is many times the same as action. And we forget that. I think people, people forget that.

And we should look at our environments and think about how we change them to serve our purposes. And by our purposes I mean like, how do you go home and change your refrigerator so you may not [eat] the thing that you don't want to eat, right? We have control of our environments, in very specific ways, from personal and professional.

And then the second thing is, we do online boot camps, by which people can dip their toe into the field. And, I'm obviously biased, but I think these are great practical ways to learn the principles, and then try to apply them to your area of work.

Mark Bennedick:
Well, that's fantastic advice. And look, thank you very much for coming on and chatting today, Kristen. I really appreciate it and I think it's a really interesting field that you're in. And also personally interesting to myself being in the work that we do. We do tend to try and apply these principles, albeit in a less formal way than I think you're going right down deep into these behaviours and changes and systems and processes.

And look, if anyone wants to find out more about Kristen and her work you can go to irrationallabs.com and of course if you want to find out more about what we do here at Sense, head to sensegroup.com.au. And also be sure to check some of the resources we're providing to help brands emerge from the crisis stronger than before. So look, stay safe, stay connected, and we'll see you next time on Behind the Experienc

#3 | Clare Cahill, Adobe Summit & Technology Enhanced Experiences

Mark Bennedick — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT

In this episode of ‘Behind The Experience’ we dive into the world of experience marketing with Clare Cahill, Head of Experience Marketing, APAC at Adobe. Clare shares how to enhance experiences with technology, explores the relationship between digital and physical experiences, and defines that value of both.

“I think the beauty of digital, the absolute beauty of digital is that breadth and volume, but also the personalisation now is becoming so much better. Especially in the B2B space, we're really starting to be able to craft how you talk to your customer.”

This interview was recorded prior to COVID-19 impacting the event industry. Key learnings can taken from Clare's insight into the relationship between live and digital experiences and the strategies that drive them.

Listen to 'Behind The Experience' on all available platforms here.

Learn more about Adobe here:
https://www.adobe.com/au/

Make sure to check out more from Sense at www.sensegroup.com.au

Read the full interview.

Mark Bennedick:
Thanks for tuning into Behind the Experience. I'm your host, Mark Bennedick, co-founder and director of Sense Group here in Sydney, and today, we're incredibly excited to be joined by Claire Cahill, head of experience marketing APAC at Adobe. Welcome to the show, Clare.

Clare Cahill:
Thanks. It's great to be here, Mark.

Mark Bennedick:
Great to have you, and thanks for just taking the opportunity to talk to us. We're really excited. Clare made her start in experiences in the UK, where she worked in the technology sector, and Clare moved into consultancy, where she worked with brands such as Fuji Xerox, EFI, WatchGuard, and, more recently, Adobe.

Having been at Adobe for the past 14 years, Clare's brought countless value to their APAC team, and even awarded marketer of the year at the software company three times during her time with them. Three times, Clare.

Clare Cahill:
Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
What's going on there?

Clare Cahill:
Oh, well, it's all at different points in my career, where I was doing different things, and I've actually worked across many teams. So, yeah, it's been a great opportunity and great recognition and very humbling to get that award each year that I have.

Mark Bennedick:
Well, you're obviously doing something right there. You've always been drawn to both tech, having started in that industry and still in that industry, and experiences. I mean, what is it about that combination that you love or feel drawn to?

Clare Cahill:
Yeah, I found my love of tech when I got my first VIC-20 computer when I was about 13 and started a bit of coding. So I'm a little bit of a geek.

Mark Bennedick:
Oh, wow. You've even got the developer skills in there as well.

Clare Cahill:
Well, not so much these days. But I think the beauty of where we are with technology today and certainly over the last few years and experiences is that you can enhance the overall experience with technology and really cause some amazing experiences today. I mean, I feel like we're on this trajectory with experiences with technology right now that we wouldn't have had when I started back 20, 25 years ago.

Mark Bennedick:
It's interesting as well that, these days, experience is so much about getting people away from their technology and having human contact, but then subsequently technology is then also now being used to enhance the experience.

It's kind of this strange full circle almost, isn't it, in a way?

Clare Cahill:
It is. It is a bit of both. I think that the in-person experience, the face-to-face, there's a visceral connection that happens that you don't get when you're in the digital space. So we run our events both in the digital space and in a physical space like a Symposium, but, human to human, there's an oxytocin thing that happens when you connect with people.

Mark Bennedick:
Chemistry.

Clare Cahill:
You get the chemistry, right, that you just ... You can't replicate that if you're just in pure digital, but you can leverage digital as part of the experience to really cause more of an interaction and a chemical interaction as well.

Mark Bennedick:
So tell me about what's your day-to-day at Adobe as the head of experience?

Clare Cahill:
Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
What are you doing? You walk in the door. What's your typical day like there?

Clare Cahill:
There'll be a lot of meetings, as most people these days, but I think we are ... My team basically own the strategy for experience for the region. So under that sits our flagship events, such as Symposium, and a couple of other events that we run or are responsible for delegations to.

Clare Cahill:
A lot of it's about the planning, to make sure that everything happens and it happens well, and the customer experience is actually central to that every time.

So every time we're working through that, we're looking back to see how it's going to affect the customer and what they're going to think, feel, and do as part of that. So a lot of that time in those meetings is by just getting that right every time.

Mark Bennedick:
Getting that right?

Clare Cahill:
Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
Because Adobe is, I guess, essentially born out of a creative thought… Initially, with a lot of those creative programs, which people typically think about with Adobe, like Photoshop and all these types of things as well.

Then I guess they're very tech-based, and it's amazing how the company seems to sort of have adapted lately to some newer platforms and things like that. Then Symposium, obviously, is a very well-known event in the tech world. Well, I mean, maybe it's worth explaining what Symposium is, maybe for some people that don't know what Symposium is all about and what that means for Adobe and what that brings, I guess, to the business or also even just to the customers or the people that come to that event.

Clare Cahill:
So I might just start off by just pointing back to something you said earlier. So Adobe's products are born out of experience. If we look back to Illustrator, Illustrator as a product was created by Chuck and John because John's wife was a graphic designer and she kept breaking her pens when she was drawing on [inaudible 00:04:57]. In the old days, some people may remember this, they used to explode.

So that's how Illustrator was born. It was born out of love for his wife and her frustration with having to hand-draw things. If we take it back to how we are today and how we create experiences with things like Symposium, Symposium has been our flagship event in region. We run a few of these around the region. They're run globally, and they're events that basically allow us to take our technology and our customer voices out to the wider market and let people see how the technology can help and enhance their experiences for their customers, for our digital experience part of the business.

Clare Cahill:
So that's all about helping marketers to create more personalised real-time experiences for their customers. So I'm creating an event. As a marketer, I'm creating an event for marketers to help them be better marketers using technology. So it's a lot about showcase. It's a lot about show and tell. We like to have a bit of a sizzle in there from showing some of the future product that may come out through a session called Sneaks which is super cool, which is stuff that comes out of the Adobe labs in the US or in India, and then, basically, people internally pitch in. Then we show about five or six potentially future technologies that can or may end up in the product. They don't always, but I always love that session.

Mark Bennedick:
People always like to be seeing what's the latest and greatest.

What do you think are the benefits that the audience gets out of that experience or event that you can't provide through other channels? What are the things that you think ... You probably get some feedback, I guess, from these guys, and this is what we love about it, but I wonder, what do you think is the thing that can't be replicated, that is the reason why you do these types of events and experiences?

Clare Cahill:
So this will be my third year of running this program. It's about seven years old, maybe eight. So when I took the program on, I worked with another lady, also called Clare. That's super confusing. We basically went back, and we did lots of focus groups and talked to the customers about what they wanted to see.

We re-created the event in region so that it was a customer-focused event that basically delivered what the customers needed to see, and they wanted to see inspirations.

They wanted to hear big name speakers. They wanted to hear case studies about how to do it. So there was a lot in the rebuilding of the event, which is about the customer getting the why's of the golden circle of Simon Sinek of why people do what they do.

So we also wanted to take that from stage onto the show floor. So we have these great inspiration speakers and these pieces where the technology is shown, some of that around innovation, some of that around [inaudible 00:07:46], but then take it onto the show floor as well. So the beauty and always the beauty of having a physical event is the customer-to-Adobe interaction. We get to speak with our customers. They get to ask us questions.

When you send a campaign, which is our digital platforms, we send campaigns out to our customers, and we target them very specifically based on where we think their need is. But when you're talking to them face-to-face you can really get to understand what they actually need a lot better. So it provides a platform for our customers to meet with us, our teams, and really get to know them and their needs and wants and all that.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. They really get to sort of ask the burning questions that they have...

Clare Cahill:
They do, yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
... for their business that affects them. I guess they can get that instant response, which you might not get any other way, talking to an expert or a specialist at Adobe and get that kind of information back, because I think, yeah, a lot of people do want to hear the generic things that they need to know about, about whatever that product is or business or whatever it might be, but then they always have a specific use case or something going on with their world that they have to kind of challenge what that product can do and learn in that way, I guess.

Clare Cahill:
Absolutely. I think marketing, we always market to them based on where we think they are within their maturity or their life cycle or, we think, the product they might need next but you can't beat that understanding the customer need and you can really do that face-to-face.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we find that when we talk to... Being in the industry, I guess, well, we've talked to a lot of businesses, and some of the challenges that that they face in putting on events sometimes as well is the investment that they have to make. We face it a lot, talking to clients, having to help them build a case for the investment in events as well and experiences, because what I think I've noticed over my time in the industry, pushing 20 years now as well, is that there was that real transition in marketing channels towards digital, because it was… Obviously, it's a new, shiny toy, and you can be amazingly analytical. There's so much data to be collected from it. In data, it's obviously your best friend when it comes to proving your business case.

You've got to show the numbers. But then, at the same time, sort of the mental shift took away from sort of human experience and the importance of that. I think now it feels like it's started to turn back the other way again, where they realise digital can have some amazing benefits and will always will be part of it, but sort of not to forget, I guess, as well that the human component is very important.

I went to the launch of the LinkedIn B2B Institute. It was a week before last.

Clare Cahill:
Yeah, I couldn't get to that. I was very disappointed.

Mark Bennedick:
Oh, you were going to go?

Clare Cahill:
Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
It was actually a really great event, actually, and they had some amazing insights, some of the insights around, obviously, the balance between brand and more tactical marketing and trying to get that balance right, but then also about how to talk to the CFO as a marketer to try and build that case to them to either retain your budget or be it to gain a larger budget or whatever it might be. Do you have, I guess, any of those kinds of challenges internally, how to justify, therefore measuring the event, and how you justify it and all these types of things?

Clare Cahill:
So, obviously, we use our own technology. So we're like customers there when it comes to digital marketing.

So we actually measure efficiency of spend and the return on investment as well. So there's the two sides. So I think one shouldn't replace the other.

They're an integrated marketing campaign and events. They should partner together, and one can fade at different parts of the life cycle as well. So if you think about awareness, really, a lot of that now is in the digital space. But for us, we measure at different points, and we use different types of events as well experiences for the customers to try and basically push a deal along during that sort of sales cycle as well. So, for example, we have... Part of our agreement in our team is we have an event, an executive experience program, which is all about targeting that C-suite.

We know by targeting the C-suite as part of the overall sales cycle that you speed up the sales cycle. You can increase the deal size as well. So that's a really great example of your return on investment. We actually measure that, and we know by having IT in at certain points that that's really important, as much as having a CMO involved as well. So we're really expanding that C-suite that we have involved in that program.

Mark Bennedick:
So you're actually integrating that into your CRM or into your processes?

Clare Cahill:
Yes, yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
You can really see the tangible difference that that channel makes?

Clare Cahill:
We sure can. I mean, I think the beauty of digital, the absolute beauty of digital is that breadth and volume, but also the personalisation now is becoming so much better. Especially in the B2B space, we're really starting to be able to craft how you talk to your customer. So we do that, too, right?

Mark Bennedick:
Right.

Clare Cahill:
In the B2C, I mean, I've worked in both sides of the business with Adobe. On the B2C side, when you're selling a product that's not as expensive as an enterprise product the efficiency in digital's obviously where you want to be. So you'll probably do a lot less events, and if you do, you want to keep them in the digital space. You want to have those experiences through podcasts or live broadcasts, incurring the same costs.

But I'm thinking, still seeing the efficiency of spend, we still know it's more expensive to run a Symposium or a Summit or something like that for Adobe. However, we know that there's a value, an intangible value, that we get from face-to-face. So as soon as we can actually have our technology, I know they're right there, and I would love to integrate it where you can measure the emotional connection caused by the experience to your brand. That would be a great thing to show to your CFO and say, "We are causing stickiness with our brand through this experience that you cannot do through digital."

So digital could be the breadth. So when you do your brand studies, people know your brand.

But if you can measure that emotional connection, and I think for Adobe, our customers are very emotionally connected to our brand, especially in our B2C side, people using Photoshop and Creative Cloud and using those products for a long time.

Mark Bennedick:
These creative industries.

Clare Cahill:
They love the brand. We have more brand work to do on our digital experience side, but that's really exciting for us as well, because I think that's somewhere where we can accelerate over the next couple of years and actually use technology as part of that event experience to really make sure that the customer's already getting sticky with the brand. We've been playing a bit in that space as well.

Mark Bennedick:
That's an exciting area, because I think that would be a little bit of a Holy Grail moment, I think, to be able to capture that emotional sentiment or whatever it might be to really understand. Obviously, anecdotally, you can look around a room and see people's faces, hear the feedback, all that type of thing, but to able to actually put, I guess, some sort of a tracking or a measurement to that emotional component, which is such a big part of the whole experience, it makes me think a little bit it's like a parallel of brand versus short-term marketing. So brand is a little bit less tangible than, say, the short-term tactical marketing, which can be a little bit more measurable, but it has that longer term view or vision that it kind of provides for the company.

Some of that interesting research that actually came out of that LinkedIn event, too, was that it has an increased sort of net value over your customer over time by ensuring that balance of brand is right. So if you do too little of that, then that has a negative effect as well. So it's an interesting piece, I think, of the whole puzzle as well.

Another thing I just saw recently, Adobe Symposium has been changed to a different - What's all that about? What's the new ...

Clare Cahill:
Super exciting. Yeah. So we've had the privilege of having Symposium in Sydney upgraded to Summit, and it'll be Summit for the APAC region. So we only have two other Summits in the world, and they have both been there since back in the Omniture days, before we bought the company. So they're very bedrock.

So it's a real privilege for us, and I think there's a couple of things I recognise. One is the investment, the ongoing investment in our region. Adobe is very committed to Asia Pacific. It's just been growing and growing, and we had a lot of the senior leadership team come down to Symposium last year.

So when we asked, they said, "Well, you guys are already running a Summit here." But in the background, that was the game we were already playing, that we were good enough to accept that.

But if I think about it as well and we look at where we are from a digital transformation in this market, Australia's a very mature market, Australia, New Zealand, and we've seen amazing stuff happening up in Asia with some of our customers as well.

So I think it's just a real recognition of where this part of the world is, from a digital transformation perspective, and that's very exciting. I think if you look to our brand and our core DNA, we're a creative company who's basically gone on this acquisition journey to acquire these companies that can really help not just create experiences, but then deliver them across many different mediums, whether it be physical in an event or through all the different platforms that we provide for our marketing customers. I think that's super exciting, and there's nobody else that can do that in this part of the world.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, yeah, which is amazing. Do you go to some of the Summits overseas to learn the ropes, so to speak, of that particular event, even though you're saying you are kind of executing it almost at that level here anyway?

Clare Cahill:
We are.

Mark Bennedick:
But is there a global consistency, I guess, in these events, or do you tailor it quite a bit for each market as well?

Clare Cahill:
Yeah. So I haven't been to London Summit yet. I'm hoping that ... It's a little bit close to another event for us this year, but hopefully I can get that on my radar for next year.

But I have been to the US one a few times, and I'm going again. It's on at the end of March, 29th of March through the 2nd of April. We do go. That event will have 22,000 people at it. Right? So it's a different volume.

Mark Bennedick:
Wow.

Clare Cahill:
I think it's super exciting. They're actually putting a new technology in that's used called Brain Date.

Mark Bennedick:
Tell me about that. It sounds like a matchmaking app.

Clare Cahill:
It's a bit like a matchmaking app, but for people who want to network at an event.

So I think there's a few problems when you go to an event. You're creating the event experience. You sort of lose your customers when you go in there, and they keep telling you they want to network more.

But when you go through the door, you lose customers a lot. So this is an app that allows you to put in a bit of a profile about things you're interested in. So you might be interested in content creation or data and analytics and a few other things, and it allows you to meet and network with people on-site.

So it should be quite fun. I've been watching this technology for a while. It's used at C2 in Montreal, which is a big creative conference.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, yeah. I know C2.

Clare Cahill:
So yeah, so I can't wait to apply to that. We might bring that into Summit here in Sydney.

Mark Bennedick:
So tell me, how does that work in practice? Now it's my event brain starting to think… "How does that actually work in practice?" Is it everyone's on the wifi network and they have to somehow... It can track where everyone is and you can find people of those similar interests?

Clare Cahill:
Correct. Yeah.

Mark Bennedick:
In a way, it almost has a little… Yeah. It's like, "This person here"...

Clare Cahill:
It actually match-makes you, from a business context.

Mark Bennedick:
Do you have a face, where you can see them? You can see that person?

Clare Cahill:
I presume so.

Mark Bennedick:
I'm getting into the weeds here, but I'm interested in it.

Clare Cahill:
I haven't seen the app in practice yet, but I believe that's how it works. I'll give you some more feedback, Mark, when I get back from the US Summit.

Mark Bennedick:
You'll have to. Well, I'll have to think about it.

Clare Cahill:
But we also picked up a technology from C2 a couple of years ago called Click. So I think the biggest problem that people in experiences have, especially when they're running a big event, I think we'll have about 5,000 plus at Summit in Sydney is you lose them the second you go through the door, right? So as soon as you check them in or register them on-site, whatever you call it, they walk through the door, and until they maybe go in and out of a session room, you sort of lose them.

So we used this technology, which was a passive tracking system, basically. So it wasn't about us knowing where our customers were. It was about us learning where our customers were. It also removed the whole process of having to scan people into rooms.

Then it worked on an algorithm around how long they were in the room, sort of to say, "Okay. They've been in there long enough to be clusters in the room." So that let us see where people were at any point during the two days, and it was fascinating to understand the customer journey on-site and where they were and map them live at any point.

Mark Bennedick:
See where they seem to be attracted to. That would be interesting.

Clare Cahill:
What content works?

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, what content.

Clare Cahill:
Are they leaving early? Are they going to all sessions on the second day? All those sort of things that you would love to know. Are they staying in the session for 90 minutes? Lots of different things. How popular was the show floor?

It all integrated the whole way through into even the exhibitor piece as well. So it was really, really interesting, and I think there is a need in experiences around this event tech stack so we do have a better understanding of customer movement on-site and their likes and dislikes and even their engagement through emotion on-site.

This is where I think a lot of the technology is going to go, and that, to me, is super exciting.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah, and so that's really cool, because we're constantly thinking about the agendas and how you create the flow and how you create peaks and troughs in energy and build a story and all these things.

A lot of that's being done off, I guess, experience, in having seen and done so many shows. But then this is a great example of what we were talking about before… about how data supports... You're not making assumptions. It's actually data in that way. So it gives you, actually, something tangible to, I guess, parallel against your assumptions and say, "Does that actually hold true, what I'm thinking, or is it just me thinking in some bizarre tangent?"

It's actual proof of your thinking there.

Clare Cahill:
It helps you as well craft, I think, a lot of your content and your flow as well, going forward. So one of the events we've used it in, we've had an argument about whether we run this last session and all, and we sort of proved that 50% of the room had left by the time we were going there, running that session.

It was quite an expensive session to run. So from that, we hope to be able to just reengineer the content a bit better so that we get the session run earlier so that customers are seeing it, because we feel it's quite important.

Mark Bennedick:
So tell me, I mean, as a company, we are always thinking about strategy, creative, digital, those kind of core components, and emotion, I guess, wrapping all of that. Do you have a system or a bit of a process that you start to think about when you start to create, either improving an old experience or creating a new one, or is it ... You mentioned Simon Sinek before, about the why.

Is there a couple of core basics that are worth sort of mentioning to people about how you guys do things and whether that's actually working for you?

Clare Cahill:
Sure. Absolutely. So we definitely start in the strategy space first. We get agreement, we get alignment, and we get sign-off by the leadership.

But we did a session this time, which I did when I reinvented the event with Clare a couple of years ago, and it was around the event ethos.

This is part of our strategy deck now. So we went. Basically, we brought everybody into the room, and we challenged them to think way beyond even their conference zones about what they wanted people to think, see, and feel around the event so that we could create this event ethos. So we then wrote that and put it into the deck, and that's actually going to form a lot of the bridge in the messaging and underpin the event experience. Then, from there, the next place we go to is building what the event experience may be. So it's that what do we want the customers to feel pre, during, and post?

So that whole experience, and what brands do we want to sort of challenge our brand to be like? So we use that as a basis for creating the event experience, and then we look back. Another piece of data we use is the NPS score on the event where people are happy or unhappy. So we use some of that to layer in what are the areas for improvement for the next year, and then when we look at the event experience, we go, "Okay, so how can we flip that from being a negative on an NPS score to being a neutral or a positive?"

That's helped us to reshape the whole event experience. I always challenge the team to bring in experiences that they love or have experienced themselves that made them stickier to other brands. Then we add that sort of context in as well.

So we do have a whole strategy around the event experience. I think it's absolutely key. I think everybody goes to "What's the strategy? What are the messaging pillars? Where is the story arc?", and they don't think about the overall event experience, which pins all of that together. I think the events that I've been to, I actually went to the... They didn't actually run it, but they did a taster of C2 in Melbourne, where they really challenged your senses. I think when you're looking at the event and any event, actually. Ironically, we're in Sense.

It's like you look at all aspects of the event. You look at how they see, feel, smell, taste, the whole music, everything. We think about the whole piece.

That, to us, is core, with the customer at the center of the whole time going, "What do we want the customer to experience?"

I think if you get that, you can always wrangle budgets and experiences that don't cost the earth but still have the customer at the core of it and then create an amazing event and an event experience.

Mark Bennedick:
Yeah. It's interesting you say that. I mean, when you said the name Sense… that's where it was born from, 13 years ago, too, where we were doing lots of events where we felt like they were quite repetitive and formulaic, and we wanted to be focused more on the actual audience and doing something that resonates with them. I think you do have to sometimes pull yourself back from the rational side, where you're thinking about messages and "What are the things I've got to get across, and what do I need them to know about?", at the same time remembering that people are there to have a good time or to learn or to connect with people. I guess that's that balance you're trying to get right, and you really do have to think about that. If you're going to get an emotional connection, it needs to be something meaningful to people. It needs to be something that they actually connect with, and, a lot of the time, that is not the rational. It's the emotional side of the brain.

I guess that opens up and allows people to then be open to the receiving of rational information or messages or to learn. That's what we've found over time as well. So it's interesting you say that and have a similar approach in that way. Think, feel, do.

That's how we label it, too, when we talk about the customer journey and what we want people to think, feel, and do at every touchpoint within that event and what they're going to be learning along the way.

Maybe going back a bit broader, I mean, you've been in this industry a long time. What's some of the highlights or things that you have experienced over time talking about C2 conferences, which is a really cool, creative, and [crosstalk 00:27:47]...

Clare Cahill:
I'd love to go to Vancouver, isn't it, or Montreal, actually?

Mark Bennedick:

Yeah, where it's born out of the Cirque du Soleil crew.

Clare Cahill:
Yeah, I think anything that I've loved or done is something where there has been a level of disruption, and I think that, whilst cookie cutter approaches are efficient, they don't necessarily allow for innovation to happen.

So some of the highlights for me have been taking over an abandoned church, which was sort of a nightclub, in Birmingham in England and causing ... We called it a bash. I used to work for a company called WAM!NET, which was a tech company before the dot com. It went with the dot com.

Then the bubble burst. But they were getting lots of funding, and we had this ridiculous party as part of a print show called IPEX. It was a nine-day show in Birmingham.

It was very hard to do a nine-day show, can I tell you.

Mark Bennedick:
That is a long show.

Clare Cahill:
It was a very long show, but this was the highlight of the event. Everybody talked about it, because we just caused the biggest party. Now, those were the days where experience was still really important, but none of us ... We probably just measured how many paper leads we got off the tracker at the time.

But we really thought about the customer experience and the customer journey for that event, right through from taking them up to this place. They didn't know where they were going which is how C2 actually do it, too. They sort of trick your mind, and then basically having them sit through the sort of early performance, and then sort of things exploded. It was very out there for the time for the industry we were in. But, more recently, I think where we got symposium to two years ago, I think is probably, again, a highlight for me in the whole overall experience, because you know you've nailed it when the only thing people can complain about is the seats.

We have a bit of an internal joke. It's called Chairgate. We have the Chairgate, because the event really disrupted how we'd done things and it took the overall experience to the next level, where everybody right up to the senior leadership was bought in, and we thought about the customer experience through every single touch point. Unfortunately, we didn't realize the seats were going to be uncomfortable, and that's just...

Mark Bennedick:
Chairgate.

Clare Cahill:
We might get a complaint about coffee or air conditioning, in my experience. Those are the three things that come up.

Mark Bennedick:
Yes. Yeah, and you have to take some of them with a grain of salt.

Clare Cahill:
You do. You take them with a grain of salt, but I think, looking at people's faces as they experienced that event, because we didn't have a measurement of the emotion people were smiling. I look back at the photographs when I've been flicking through them for different things, and there's just these faces lit by the stage lights, looking up at the content and the overall experience that we created through that event. We just thought about it everywhere. So I was super proud of what we created as a team.

Yes, we look forward to our next challenge of Summit in August.

Mark Bennedick:
We're very close to time now as well. You were saying that... Obviously, we've talked a lot about Summit and Symposium, but what are the other just broad range of work that you guys do in a day? Because I imagine that's just one thing that...

Clare Cahill:
Sure. I mean, we have a big partner channel, so companies like Deloitte and Accenture are part of our partner network, and we run an exec experience for our partners up in Bangkok, which is central for the whole region. So we have partners from India through to New Zealand basically come to Bangkok.

It was an educational experience, but we created a really Thai-themed experience around the whole event and took 40 tuk-tuks out on a tour with...

Mark Bennedick:
That could go well or not so well.

Clare Cahill:
Yeah. It actually went really well. I know. But it was a video experience, so we showed them one of our products called Rush.

We gave them gimbals. We took them out to the temples and took them out literally in rush hour traffic with a police escort. Luckily, everything went according to plan.

Mark Bennedick:
Wow.

Clare Cahill:
So that was an amazing experience.

Mark Bennedick:
Great. That's organised chaos in Bangkok.

Clare Cahill:
Organised chaos, it was. We do a lot of exec experiences from round tables through to we do these, again, education about premium photography experiences. At six-star venues across Australia and in India, those particular ones are run. That's for our C-suite customers, and they're as much about building a relationship with our really important customers through to, actually, we give them a bit of education around Photoshop and Lightroom, and these are our digital experience customers.

But everybody loves better photography. We all take photographs.

That's why we were able to pull the video in the Lightroom products into our digital experience business. So, again, it keeps us core to who we are as a creative company and it gives them an opportunity to network with our senior leadership team. So those are some of the things that our team do.

Mark Bennedick:
A range, quite a quite a range of different things then. Yeah. Well, look, Clare, thank you so much for coming on and spending some time. I'm sure you're very busy, and you've got a lot of stuff going on in your business world, but I really appreciate the time, coming in and chatting with us.

Clare Cahill:
Thank you very much.

#2 Ari Popper | Emotional AI, Privacy Ethics & The Future of Brand Experience

Mark Bennedick — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 04:59:25 GMT

Want to see what the future of brand experiences holds? In this episode of ‘Behind The Experience’ we speak with Ari Popper about the opportunities innovation and technological advances provide forward thinking brands and discuss the pros and cons of such advancements.

Ari is the Founder and CEO of SciFutures, an award-winning innovation house that uses science fiction prototyping to create preferred futures for Fortune 500 companies.

“It's really cool barring lots of companies that are there, that are helping people know themselves better and helping you get into deeper meditations, helping you have digital assistance that make your life easier and more pleasant, helping you connect with people in a more meaningful way.”

SciFutures and Sense have a partnership that allows Sense to gain access to SciFutures’ global industry trends and unique imagination, along with its expertise in emerging technologies.

Listen to 'Behind The Experience' on all available platforms here.

Learn more about Sense x SciFutures partnership:
https://www.sensegroup.com.au/scifutures

You can connect with Ari and his team via the following link:
https://www.scifutures.com/

Make sure to check out more from Sense at www.sensegroup.com.au

Read the full interview.

Mark Bennedick: Thanks for tuning in to Behind the Experience. Today we're joined by Ari Popper, founder and CEO of SciFutures. Thanks for joining us, Ari.

Ari Popper: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Bennedick: Excellent. I appreciate you dialing in all the way from LA. So it should be a fun little chat. I'm really interested to hear about some of the work you guys are doing. It's a pretty interesting field that you work in, SciFutures. Can you give us just a quick 101 on what you guys do?

Ari Popper: Sure. Yeah. We mostly help big brands and companies understand where the world's going, a little further out in the kind of five to 10 year time zone. We have over 300 science fiction writers around the world that we use to solicit ideas and their visions after we brief them, and then we use their content to help our clients identify opportunity areas for more disruptive, more far out

innovation. And then once we have those opportunity areas, what we then do is we try and help them prototype and develop solutions and meet with companies that can help them get there.

So yeah, it's really interesting work, as you say, but it's quite difficult, because every time you're doing a project it's brand new and you've got to rethink how to do things. But it definitely keeps us busy.

Mark Bennedick: Excellent. It's a very innovative and a new space that I think many people may not have heard of before. What kind of businesses are working with you in this kind of environment? Are they looking to try and plan for the future? Are they looking for disruptions that are already upon them, or are they applying this to their own workplace, or how are many of the companies using this kind of thought processing to develop?

Ari Popper: Yeah, it's usually companies that are looking for the next big thing. Not the small thing, the kind of incremental innovation, but the next big opportunity that's generally being facilitated by these really cool emerging technologies. So we're trying to give them kind of a forward thinking appreciation of what they could do, what the life of the customer could be like in five years time and what the role of their brands and their products could be in that future.

So it's quite grounded in specifics for what they need to work on today. So which technologies do they need to understand, which competencies that are needed to develop in house? Which potential partners or startups or companies out there that are pushing the boundaries on the edge do they need to get familiar with? And so we do all of that for them, because every large organisation is interested in or should be, is trying to protect their future. We've worked across many, many different industries.

We just happen to find ourselves in a bit of a niche now looking at technologies related to people's emotions and people's moods, which obviously has very important implications for events, and there's kind of a Renaissance and a kind of Cambrian explosion of technologies related to mood and emotion that's happening. People don't realise it's a really fast growing space. And so we're kind of in this niche for three different clients, really helping them understand the space and see what their competitive advantages could be in this space.

Mark Bennedick: Yeah. It is a pretty interesting space and there's a lot going on and technology really is, it's just becoming this amazing enabling tool, which I think people are really trying to navigate how do we best use this at the moment because it's moving so fast and seems somewhat disconnected, because in our lives.

I mean, tell us a bit more about that emotional AI and the emotional side of things that you're talking about there and how that's affecting people, because I think a lot of people probably go around their daily lives and businesses as well, and maybe aren't even thinking about how the emotional side of them is being affected by the technology and even again, how the technology can help them identify their own emotion. I mean, there's a pretty broad playing field to talk about here, but what maybe is the basic understanding for people out there listening, what emotional AI is?

Ari Popper: Yeah, that's a great question, Mark. When we talk about emotion AI and digital mood, what does that mean? So essentially, it's the ability to understand how people are feeling, so what their moods are, what their emotions are, in real time, and then to create interventions that enhance the mood or adjust their mood in real time as well. And so it sounds pretty Sci-Fi like and kind of farfetched, but the reality is it's actually not that difficult to do, given, as you said Mark, the proliferation of these technologies.

So for example, lots of people are wearing Fitbits today, kind of devices that are measuring their heart rate, and we know through some really great scientific research that you can tell how somebody's feeling based on their heart rate and in particular, heart rate variability, so that's the amount of variation between each heartbeat, and that is a really great predictor of someone's mood. So just from a simple Fitbit that's collecting data or a Garmin, there are amazing companies out there that are actually able to take that information and then overlay someone's mood and emotion.

So right away, you're now able to tell how anyone's feeling at any point in time. Now as you start to overlay experiences that can be quantified, whether, let's say you're interacting with different apps on your phone, you're creating a digital record and therefore that data can be overlayed and correlated with your digital mood, your digital emotion as measured by, let's say your Fitbit. So now it's a very interesting character where you're able to understand what people are feeling and then you understand why they're feeling that way or what they're doing that's causing that.

So two very big issues arise when we talk about this. The first thing is, wow, is it really possible? Is it really feasible to do? Yes, I've answered that. So that begs the question, okay, well what are the ethical and responsible ways of using this technology? And that is a very important question that I'm working with the World Economic Forum on some of the human rights issues that this is going to raise, but it can be a tremendously powerful force for good in people's lives, because mostly we were unconscious creatures. We kind of operate out of habit and instinct, and a very few of us are consciously aware of how we're feeling all the time.

But if there was a way to understand experiences or activities or behaviour that make you feel good and conversely experiences or behaviour that make you feel bad, then theoretically you could adjust your lifestyle to do more of the former and less of the latter. So like any new space, there's a lot of upside, but there's also some very scary, I think, ethical issues as well.

Mark Bennedick: Yeah. And how are you seeing that out there at the moment? You're talking about, you're talking with the World Economic Forum, the framework that exists out there at the moment to manage, I guess the human rights of this kind of a space, what stage is that at? Because when I think about how it might apply to the work we do in experience in our agency day to day with marketers, they're very conscious of data privacy and some of the big data breaches that have happened in the past with big companies, tech companies, they're very aware of it these days and they're trying to do the right thing in that space.

So how's that framework developing in a broader sense, which in my mind is a bit of an umbrella above and beyond all of these corporations. At this point, there's sort of a global human rights issue there that needs to be put in place before it can filter down into [the corporate world.].

Ari Popper: Yeah. Some days I'm kind of optimistic about it, but some days I'm pessimistic about it. I think the reality is that the big tech companies have tremendous power. They're in some ways trying to do the right thing, but in other ways they aren't. We've already seen some quite negative consequences, particularly around social media and manipulation and algorithms that have caused serious problems. Depending on the day, some days I feel like this is a disaster and people don't realise that much more needs to be done. And then there are other days where I feel maybe a little bit more hope, a little bit more positive about it.

But the reality is that this is a very important issue and it's still in its infancy, there's lot of work that needs to be done to bring people's attention to the power of this world that we're building, these technologies, and also to give people the understanding of what their rights are and what's the trade off is for them buying into these new platforms. So for example, if we bring it back to mood and emotion, there is, as I was explaining, there's a lot of benefit that you can get from these technologies. I think if consumers or customers who are using the tools are respected or given ownership of their own data and control over how their data is used and treated with only the best intentions for their goodwill, then I think it could really create a very wonderful effect on our society.

However, the flip side of that will happen. We're not naive enough to think that this technology is only going to be used for good. There are going to be instances where they're going to be used to manipulate people, and this is something that we're going to have to bring attention to and we're going to get regulators involved and we're going to have to get governments involved and we're going to have to create a policy around responsible use of these technologies.

But it's a very nascent field, it's just starting and I'm very passionate about it because I'm not a Luddite where I'm sticking my head in the sand saying, "No technology." I genuinely believe that technology can really bring out the best of our species and kind of mitigate the worst of what are as human beings, but that doesn't mean that there's going to be a lot of traps and landmines along the way that we have to raise people's attention to. So like any new field, it's going to be a challenge, but it's an exciting one.

Mark Bennedick: Yeah. I think it's great to have an optimistic viewpoint, really in that, because I think change, innovation, it's never going to stop. It's part of the human psyche. So it's about trying to navigate it in the best way possible. It makes me think back to the past too, if you think about technological innovation in the past, things like the radio, then the telephone and then the Internet and computers, everyone's had to navigate these things and come up with regulation and work out how to use them in positive ways, and the negative ways, as you're saying, are still going to come through in some instances.

I guess the difference perhaps now is maybe the pace of change and the power of computing, which has become so huge, and-

Ari Popper: Yeah, that's the issue is just how fast it's happening and how much bigger the effects are, because there's so much power in the big tech companies and owning that data is so powerful. There are barriers to entry, right? So it's not evenly distributed and people can catch up, once you have all that data and you're mining it, there's a virtuous circle for that company and they just get more powerful.

So you're right. But there is analogies like to the past, with new technologies that are invented, and they come into society, we see the impact and we regulate. But I think with these particular ones we have to really be on our toes because of the speed and the power of them. But I was just at a conference a few weeks ago called Trans-human, transformational technology conference, that was it, and this is a conference dedicated to using technology in a way that uplifts our species and benefits society. And it's really cool barring lots of companies that are there, that are helping people know themselves better and helping you get into deeper meditations, helping you have digital assistance that make your life easier and more pleasant, helping you connect with people in a more meaningful way.

I think that is what's exciting about Sense and what Sense does, it's events, it's bringing people together and these collective shared experiences that we truly have profound transformational opportunities when we connect with other people and when we socialise and when we energise each other. I think there's great promise for these technologies to maximise the likelihood of those kind of beautiful human connection moments that happen, because the last thing we want is people, which has sadly happened to some extent, is people spending a lot more time alone and away from other people and glued to their digital device or in their own world without socialising, connecting and making these real human connections.

So I think technology can actually ironically both hurt in that way, but also help by enhancing social experiences, and I'll give you an example. Let's say we're in an event and people have opted in obviously and their consent to have the emotion and their moods measured anonymously and on aggregate. But imagine if you can have a control panel where you know when people are feeling good, when groups of people connecting and feeling good and based

upon that information, that data, you know what obviously provoked or created that feeling, and then use that to either create more of that dynamically or for next time. And I think that kind of tech is available, could probably be used today, and I think that could be incredibly powerful too.

Mark Bennedick: It's an absolute game changer for our kind of industry, because I think what we do, as you say, is we get people together. And something as a company, we always say, our line I guess is we mine the frontiers of creativity and technology to create experiences that enrich people's lives. So for us, we're trying to get people together and create those meaningful conversations, but we want it to be an enriching experience. We're trying to get brands to talk to people in a way that actually provides them with some benefit. So I think people are a lot more aware of marketing, aware of brands these days, and they're looking for something to justify that moment in their lives where they should actually listen to that brand.

Why should I listen to you? You're one of the 10 billion bits of information banging against my head every day. What's going to make me take notice? And what you're saying there with the ability to actually bring that into the experience space or into an event, do you have a good example perhaps that people might be interested to hear about, about a way that that can be done today rather than the discussion we've had is about things that can happen in the future, but marketers, I think out there are pretty interested to know, what can I do today that makes this stuff valuable?

Ari Popper: Well, let me give you an example, not in events but in physical locations where I think it's really exciting.

Mark Bennedick: Sure.

Ari Popper: Obviously there are analogies here for what you do, but for what Sense does in the event space, but there are a lot of people in retirement homes that are isolated and lonely, and it may be that those emotions are known by the carers, it might be that it's not known. But in these controlled environments, there are technologies that you can deploy to measure people's emotions and feelings in real time. And so you can foresee instances where there might be somebody, let's call them the kind of emotion guardian or the kind of emotional health guardian of people who are in these retirement homes.

By using sensors, computer vision, and algorithms, the companies can do this incredibly accurately, you might be able to know when somebody is lonely or feeling isolated or sad. Some people when they're sad, they might withdraw, they might not communicate and people might not notice. But this is something that can be done today. I mean, it's done more in the physical health, but physical health and emotional health is related, anyway. And this is something that I've been trying to spread and share with some of the retirement home communities that we've spoken to is to try and implement and prototype this type of tech, because it does exist, it works.

Ari Popper: But that same analogy I think applies to events, right? You have a controlled location, physical location and you can do the same thing obviously for a different purpose, and I really like this. So that's today and then going forward, you could envision an AI, so it's basically, let's call it an emotion bot or emotion health bot, and this boss could be in real time and continuously monitoring and determining let's say, level of happiness that people are feeling or level of engagement that people are feeling, and then [program] that bot or that algorithm to either self curate new experiences or to curate alerts or interventions or notifications for the user, but also for somebody like maybe your company who can intervene as well. So this isn't farfetched, this is not 20 years out, this is four, five years out.

Mark Bennedick: You can see the health side of it is a huge one in my mind. The monitoring of people's physical condition, but a mental condition which, there is a brain-body connection, which has been proven scientifically to have effects on people's health. Just the placebo effect, one of the most commonly known things in clinical trials, people actually have a reaction to thinking their body should be doing something, which is quite amazing.

Ari Popper: That's right. It's incredible. And I'll give you some examples of some other technologies that can do that. There's a great company in Israel called Beyond Verbal, and they are able to determine someone's emotion and moods based upon their voice, but they're not doing like a Symantec text analysis, so literally taking out the words and analysing the words. They're looking at the tone that people are using and the way they're talking, the way they're speaking. So the physical act of speaking rather than the words themselves, and they've got incredibly high correlations with determining people's moods and emotions.

Ari Popper: So in events you could imagine little microphones implanted throughout events, picking up conversations and you could do a heat map of mood and emotion and see how people are feeling just using this [tech], but I think there's ways to deal with that in a responsible way.

Mark Bennedick: Yeah, that's interesting. That's another layer that we've never been able to venture into before. It's been a very analog way of measuring what's in a room. Seeing people's faces, qualitative kind of research or seeing how many items of a certain product we've given out or how many people logged in to give you their email to receive something. You're reading the room as we always do as professionals, reading the room and trying to get a feel for what's going on, but this is something measurable, which I think marketers are massive on measurement, obviously they need to be able to justify their spending and what they're doing. And there's always this long held battle between brand marketing and short term marketing.

The brand marketing obviously isn't as measurable, but I think emotion and the way in which people are reacting to your brand does have flow down effects, which eventually gets to the bottom line for companies. So being able to show some measurability in that first phase is a pretty exciting idea, not just for us in our business and you, but it's also to marketers who can justify the spend to a certain extent in that area.

Ari Popper: A hundred percent. Exactly. You might not see a short term sales effect, but you've increased somebody's engagement and overall effect related to your brand, due to a sponsorship or any event, and that pays dividends over time.

Mark Bennedick: Yeah. Yeah. And look, it's worth mentioning at this point, Ari, SciFutures and Sense have formed a partnership in Asia Pacific to help clients deliver on these kinds of ideas. Some of the work that you're doing helping brands envisage their future, there's certain instances where these brands need to then bring that to life. So is there any interesting examples of work that you've done where companies have perhaps needed to bring that future to life, be it for their stakeholders or their staff or whoever it might have been to literally experience that, have a physical incarnation of that thought processes that you go through with SciFutures with them?

Ari Popper: Yeah, definitely. A lot of the work that we do is for internal selling, like very expensive internal sales pitches. Not very expensive, but they can be.

Mark Bennedick: Highly thought through.

Ari Popper: What's that?

Mark Bennedick: I was going to say highly thought through.

Ari Popper: Yeah, but relatively expensive meaning a PowerPoint presentation as opposed to creating a physical experience. Our philosophy is that the degree to which you must [immerse] people into the future is the degree to which their behaviour will change and they'll be able to act on that potential future. And the best way of pulling people into the future is through storytelling. You can do it with video and you can do it with great stories, but there's nothing like literally building a room in the future or a vineyard of the future and getting people to act and behave as if they're a character living in the future.

And now it becomes very personal. It becomes very emotional, very tangible. And we've done this for a number of brands, particularly [internally], one of them was Visa. Working with a great company like yours we create a physical space that is an articulation of their strategy or their future strategy where these technologies are not niche, they become mainstream and people are using them every day. Just like if you like Sci-Fi, you sit in a great Sci-Fi movie, it just becomes normal. And that's a really powerful, transformative device. It's something we love doing and there are some forward thinking clients that do invest the money to do that and it pays off in spades. I wish there were more of them, but we're trying to find them.

Mark Bennedick: You know what, the communities that are doing and are thinking about it, they're the ones that you want to work with because they're the ones that are open to the process. I'd imagine if you're having to put too much effort into trying to convince companies that this is something they should be taking seriously, then they're probably not the kind of company that is going to end up transforming and eventually they probably will end up out of business.

Ari Popper: Yeah, exactly. I think so. Or they'll have to buy a startup at a premium or another company at a premium, or go out of business. But it's exciting. Like I said at the beginning of our podcast, it's definitely interesting work. It's difficult work, but it's a lot of fun and when we get it right, it's so transformative. It really is exciting to see these big companies shift.

We're super excited to be aligned with you guys and the amazing work that you do for your clients, and we'd love to find projects to collaborate on with clients who want to explore this area.

Mark Bennedick: Excellent. Well, Ari, thanks so much for dialling in today. I know you've got a long day ahead of you there in LA. Hopefully it's a good one and thanks for joining us on Behind the Experience. And for all of you tuning in, make sure you check out SciFutures, they're at scifutures.com. We'll attach the links to our websites and the social media in the show notes.

Look, great having a chat, Ari, and really appreciate the time and I hope to have you on again at some stage.

Ari Popper: Oh, for sure. I really appreciate it too, Mark. Thanks so much for having me, man. I really enjoyed it.

#1 Guy Greenstone | Gabs, Stomping Ground, The Local Taphouse

Mark Bennedick — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 04:59:04 GMT

Do you want to know what it takes to grow a successful, sustainable business? In the first episode of ‘Behind The Experience’ we speak with Guy Greenstone to find out what it took to build international businesses includes the Great Australian Beer Spectacular, Stomping Ground Brewery and The Local Taphouse. Guy shares what drives the core of his businesses and how they’re able to continually grow his brands authentically with the power of brand experiences.

“The thing that people really crave and look for these days is less about material possessions and the best car and the best gadget. What they’re really looking for is a lifetime worth of incredible experiences.”

Guy and his business partners recently sold their International venture, GABS and we find out how they maintain the integrity of the brand in this process.

Listen to 'Behind The Experience' on all available platforms here.

You can connect with Guy and his endeavours at the following places:

www.stompingground.beer

www.gabsfestival.com

www.thelocal.com.au

Read the full interview.

Mark: You’re listening to ‘Behind The Experience’ where we talk with the experience industry's best talent and interview forward-thinking leaders of innovative, purpose-driven brands making an impact with brand experiences. I’m your host Mark Bennedick, co-founder and Director of Sense Group here in Sydney. Today we’re joined by Guy Greenstone. Welcome to the show, Guy.

Guy: G’day Mark, I’m good thanks. Thanks for having me.

Mark: And great to have you on. We’re excited to talk to you about the awesome work that you’ve been doing. You’ve got a serious portfolio of achievements… plenty of more to come, I’m sure. Not only are you one of the founding directors of GABS but you also co-founded Stomping Ground Brewery which is becoming hugely popular and we’ve seen it all around the traps very much lately and The Local Taphouse in Melbourne. Don’t you think you could fit more into your day, mate?

Guy: Well, it’s a bit of a busy schedule, but luckily it’s not all about me. We’ve got lots of people that are very engaged and do their bit as well.

Mark: Tell us about your team. It seems that Stomping Ground Brewery seems to be your main focus these days but tell us about the team. Who are the people helping drive all of this behind the scenes as well as yourself?

Guy: Cheers. Yeah, you’re right. Stomping Ground is a pretty major focus as well as The Taphouse. GABS has been something we’ve been - for those of you who don’t know, the Great Australasian Beer Spectacular - something that’s been going for nine festivals, nine annual festivals, now in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland. The big news is that we actually just sold the festival, mainly so that we could just focus on Stomping Ground. We didn’t quite have the bandwidth, that you just alluded to, to do everything and it was about a seven month process. We were approached by a few people but we really kind of gelled well with the guy that actually ended up buying it. A bloke called Mike Bray who is into the event space and marketing and really got it and was passionate about the vision. So that’s something that we’ll still be involved in and it’s a relatively small team year round. That was Craig Williams and Ruta Marcinkus who go over with the company and will stay involved, hopefully for a long time and we’ll still stay engaged with for the next couple of years. That leads us onto Stomping Ground and The Local Taphouse which are effectively the same company. Stomping Ground acquired The Local Taphouse three years ago and that’s now a team of about 100… just over 100. We’re about to open a couple of new sites. You asked about what’s going to keep us busy so we’ve got two new sites opening up; one in Morrabbin at an old tobacco factory and that’ll open up towards the end of Feb and we’ve got another site that’s opening up in the airport which’ll open up late January at the Melbourne Airport at the domestic terminal, Virgin Terminal 3. Then we’ll swell to about 150-160 in the next few months and really it is something that we’re enormously proud of in terms of the team we’ve created. We couldn’t do half of the things we do without such an amazing, and engaged, and committed, hardworking team.

The people involved are my two business partners, Justin Joiner and the other one is Steve Jeffares. We’ve been working together for 12 years all three of us and from when we started The Local Taphouse to when we started GABS to when we started Stomping Ground. Then we’ve had a whole bunch of people join us since. We actually had a meeting literally a week ago where we all sat around the table with the head of each department and there were 11 people sitting around the table. It was a bit of an amazing moment for us you know. For people that had started something from nothing to look around the table and see some high caliber people talk about their leadership and their team and how engaged their team are, the challenges, the opportunities that they face in their particular department. It was I suppose a surreal experience.

Mark: That’s pretty exciting isn’t it. It’s funny you say that it’s twelve years because I know it’s exactly 12 years that Sense Group has been in business as well and the growth is exciting and seeing the people come onboard that are helping create a vision and build a vision that you have in your mind and seeing them grow and develop… it’s a pretty exciting thing. A few pinch me moments there, it sounds like for yourself. How did you actually get into the world of craft beer? How did you get into that world?

Guy: Good question. I started off… I had by beer epiphany when I was snowboarding in Canada.

Mark: A beer epiphany, I like that.

Guy: We often talk about the ‘Aha! Moment’ when you kind of all of a sudden realise when this is what you’re passionate about. I was snowboarding in Canada, visiting a friend over there and he introduced me to this thing called “microbrews” and this thing had all this flavour. We just sort of brought it in to the lodge about halfway down the mountain and he said “Oh, you gotta try this” and pulled out this really malt-driven beer. I was like, “wow this is amazing. It’s got so much flavour”. Ever since then I’ve just been seeking out some flavoursome beers and my first job out of Uni, I qualified as a chemical engineer from the University of New South Wales and my first job out of Uni was with a brewery, a massive brewery in Sydney and I was working in the brewing department as a brewing engineer, working on various parts of the process. I just fell in love with the stuff and kept on seeking out the small batch, interesting styles and at the time there wasn’t a lot going around, you know, in ‘99 from Australia anyway. There were a few but it wasn’t like it is today. I just kind of gravitated towards the stuff that had more flavour and a bit more of a story behind it and just fell in love with the stuff.

Mark: It’s interesting and it seems these days everything is about craft beer in the industry. The days VB and you, everyone had a choice of three - five beers… it’s really branched out and some of the big players are acquiring all of these smaller craft breweries as well. You just see them a lot more around on the taps of your local pubs and I guess I’m pretty interested to talk about Stomping Ground itself. You know, it’s a great brand you’ve built; the visual of the brand, the flavour of the beer, and the way in which you’re rolling it out is really unique and really interesting. Coming from an experience point of view, which is obviously where we come from as a business too, I’m interested to talk a little bit about experience and how you’ve integrated that with the brands. Are you giving your drinkers more than just what’s in the can itself?

You’ve mentioned there, you’ve got the airport business part of it opening up, your two different warehouse locations as well… talk me through some of the interesting ideas you’ve employ now one day thinking to employ with the brand itself and the way people interact with the brand.

Guy: Sure, no worries. As you’ve alluded to, experience really is a key thing and it’s a buzzword that gets bandaged around a lot when people talk about experience but experience for us and what that means… the thing that people really crave and look for these days is less about material possessions and the best car and the best gadget. What they’re really looking for is a lifetime worth of incredible experiences. As people that have come from the hospitality background, creating and developing a fantastic experience for our guests is something that has always been really important to us. When we sat around developing the Stomping Ground and what it was going to stand for and what it was all about, experience was something we spoke about a lot. It was about how do we ensure that our consumers and our customers really experience our brand in the way that we want them to experience it and furthermore how do the people that work with us as in our staff and what’s their experience working with us and with our brand and what about our suppliers and what about our customers? So consumers and customers being two different sort of groups; one being the end drinker and one being the retailer or hospitality venue that buys our beer wholesale. So experience is really a huge part of the conversation in pretty much everything we do and as you kind of alluded to it’s about every single touchpoint. For us it all started with the end use of the product. When people are sitting down and having a beer, how can we provide an exceptional experience that consistent time and time again? That kind of colours everything we really do, from the quality of the actual product and the beer and the liquid itself, which is almost table stakes, that’s part of the overall experience but another part is the packaging and what it stands for and the glass that it’s presented in, the environment, the music, the lighting, the customer service… that’s a part of the experience; someone handing it [beer] over to you with a smile, someone telling you a little bit about it, someone giving some information - not shoving it down your throat - but giving you enough information that’s as much as you’re interested in but no more. It’s really about creating an experience in every way, shape, or form that you can with each one of those groups, whether it’s your customers, consumers or staff, suppliers etc. I guess we’ve focused on really every single touchpoint trying to make each interaction as pain free as possible, as positive as possible. It really kind of informs the way you think about these things. I think, from the feedback that we got from the beer hall, the best expression of experience for us was to create a beer hall and environment that we control as much of that experience as we can. Rather than leaving it the hands of someone else we wanted to at least have one outlet where we could present the brand and the product in an environment that we really designed to the nth degree, that could really exemplify a product and the brand in its best possible light and that was really, really important to us. That’s how the concept of Stomping Ground beer hall and brewery, or brewery and beer hall came about. We really wanted to be able to provide that experience first hand ourselves.

Mark: And some of the philosophies you have there, I must say they’re quite similar to when we’re talking to multinational, huge companies as well. It’s not necessarily these big wow-song-and-dance moments, it's these small little details, every little touchpoint people can experience and have the feel of that brand… or even what you were saying, just a simple, little smile from the person handing the beer across, down to small little design notes or packaging. I think that’s a really interesting point that experience is a conglomeration of experience things, not necessarily on simple moment in time.

Guy: Completely, 100% agree. Furthermore, I just want to add to that. Having the Local Taphouse a while, see what, 12 years now and then going on to creating GABS, it’s been a common theme throughout the different businesses that we’ve had to elevate that experience and not only how to make exceptional, but how to repeat it… how to do it on an ongoing basis that’s consistent. What sort of systems and processes do you need to have in place in order to be able to achieve that high level when you’re aiming to achieve excellence time and time again because it’s no good if someone comes in and has an incredible experience one time and then they come in a second time raving about it and it falls short of expectations because it hasn’t been consistent. It informs your whole business process really as well.

You’re talking there as well, you’re saying you have then end b2b customer and then there’s you know, the man on the street consumer, the kind of two different main channels of where you sell or have your beer experience. Do you find that in the b2b world, the experience is also important? I know that there is a bit of a trend in the b2b world to focus on the fact that emotion and experience does drive success and sales in the b2b market whereas people probably traditionally thought that it was a very rational-based market, very focused on price or whatever it might be, things that are necessarily more business focused, whereas emotion still comes into the b2b audience. Has that been the same do you think in what you do or is it really more about the consumer?

Guy: No, it’s 100% what’s important. Put it this way; when… our channel is through various marketing channels so when we talk about channel and channel strategy we go through independent retailers, we go through wholesalers, through distributors, we also go direct to on premise customers, direct to independent retailers and in a small way we go direct to consumers - I mean, we do through our hospitality channel anyway. Each one of those has its wants and needs. It’s about putting yourself in their shoes and thinking ‘what would you like if you were interacting with a business, say most of the channels I just mentioned are b2b channels for us, putting yourself in their shoes and saying ‘how can I make their experience of us and the brand as memorable, as pleasant, as engaging as possible so that we stand out compared with all our competitors’. When they say, ‘who are we going to call for this particular opportunity?’ they say, ‘well, we’re going to call Stomping Ground because they’re great to deal with’ or ‘we love dealing with them. They make things easy, life easy’. And that’s really important. You know, I say, sorry to keep jumping between B2B but with GABS it was the same thing; we have 180 different festival brewers that brew a beer especially for the event, we have 70+ exhibitors in each city and again it’s about making their experience fantastic. So how do we take all the pain points away from their experience with the whole process? How do we make it so easy that they just have to show up and their ice is there, their stand is there, the menus are already done so we’ve asked them to do things a minimum number of times and it just makes it smooth and easy. I’m just thinking you were comparing this with the big corporates and it seems in the digital world they talk about [interface] and user experience, it’s kind of an analogue version of user experience. That digital user experience is so important when you’re on an app and everything just seems to work. This is an analogue version of that. How do you just make everything work? How do you make everything simple? How do you make us easy to deal with? But it’s not - yes, we do use digital tools to help us, but it’s about the concept, an analogue version of the user experience.

Mark: Yeah, I mean we talk a lot about the human side of experience too and analogue definitely relates a lot more to the standard human emotion which some people tend to forget. They get focused on digital tools and numbers and all these things whereas sometimes you can just break it down to the simplicity of ‘oh, what would I want if I was there?’ Just a good time, chatting with friends, having a beer. It can be quite a simple thing and not to be over-thought sometimes as well. You talked there as well about jumping around your businesses. Which is great. We want to talk about it, they’re all really interesting in their own right. What i’m interested to hear about, is I guess, maybe as well, how is GABS and Stomping Ground and event the Local Taphouse, which is one of your first ventures, what are some of the lessons you’ve taken from - I think GABS particularly comes to mind, the Beer Spectacular which is an amazing festival - Have some of the experiences from that crossed over into Stomping Ground or are they quite separate in the way they’ve been developed? It feels to me there’s quite a collaboration, a neat collaboration and curation amongst those ecosystems of businesses.

Guy: Yeah, there certainly is and at their heart and at their core are a couple of different things. One of them is great beer, you know the best beer that we can possibly find and interestingly there’s a common thread that weaves them all together and that is our sense of purpose. The one thing I’d say for any business to be successful is it really needs to have a strong sense of purpose and that sense of purpose and what it stands for is a thing that customers and consumers, staff and suppliers, and everybody can kind of jump in and relate to. There’s a great sort of Ted Talk on finding that “why”. It’s interesting because when my business partners and I sat down separately we went through this program, this process to kind of really, to dig out that kernel of why we really exist and what we came up with was that we really wanted to share our love. We’ve got so much passion for beer and craft beer and delicious beer. We wanted to share that love with as many people in our community as we possible could through exceptional experiences. The interesting thing was, that was common to our Local Taphouse, to GABS, and Stomping Ground. It’s really a common thread. We use each one of those words very carefully. My business partners and I wrote that down separately, slight variations of the end output but it was all the same thing; we wanted to share our love of great beer with as many people in our community as possible through exceptional experiences, consistently exceptional experiences. Love is a word of passionate and we wanted people to be passionate about what they did and what they were consuming and what we stood for. Share is about being inclusive and bringing everyone along for the ride. Great beer, we kind of use great beer because its front and centre of everything that we do and craft beer is quite a nebulous term. We tend to use independent beer a lot but at its core it's about great beer, it’s about beer that gets you excited, it's about beer that’s well-made and presented and delicious. And then we talk about community. As many people in our community as possible. We want to reach as many people as we possibly can and community is a word and again, it’s a bit of a buzzword but the authenticity behind that is about authentically building a community. Whether it’s at the neighbourhood level of Local Taphouse and Stomping Ground and the way they exist in their neighbourhood or whether it’s a little bit wider or even a bit narrower when you’re talking about your family, your working family and a bit wider when you start talking about the world and your place in it and how your responsibility to be sustainable and to think about the recycling and your impact on the planet… putting solar on the roof. That’s being a responsible member of the community. We’ve already spoken about exceptional experiences and having them be consistent, consistently exceptional experiences and what that’s all about. Interestingly, even though the manifestation of that sense of purpose was three distinct businesses… that was without question, the common thread through all three of them. What we’ve learnt is having that purpose, that strong sense of purpose, knowing why you exist is really important and something that you can really kind of rally behind and get employees to rally behind. You can behind and hold it up as something that we’re all striving to do.

Mark: Yeah, definitely. I think, I just heard what you talked about with community and I think also building people that are passionate about your brand. I mean, I find it amazing with GABS itself you had 170 festival beers and ciders, that are actually made by other craft brewers especially for GABS, is that right?

Guy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Well, what we say is it has to be released for the very first time at GABS. Some people make it just for GABS and never to be seen again. Other people time their release so it’s released at GABS and can go on to be one of their seasonal beers or one of their regular beers. There’s a whole bunch of stories that go on throughout the nine-year history, the nine year festival of GABS where these beers have gone on to be pretty amazing beers and they’re regular parts of the Australian beer landscape and they make a beer especially for the event. It’s the only place you could assemble that number of beers that have never been released, never been tasted before and that’s part of the whole excitement. When you’re talking about experience and creating something that’s unique, the unique element of GABS is these festival beers and the fact that every year the festival renews because there’s a whole new stable of beers never been tried, never been tested before. There’s excitement around that, there’s buzz. ‘What’s this brewery done? What’s that brewery done? What’s the next big trend? How’s it all going to play out?’ There is some excitem-- there’s also some from the veterans, they become a little bit less excited about that and more excited about what is happening at the exhibitor stands but it means there’s always that sense of renewal and excitement.

Mark: Which is quite awesome. I mean, I’ve got to say that’s a bit of a trend where we’ve seen people are using events, experiences, retail as well as a platform for engagement. It’s a place where people can come and experience a brand. Then the limited edition releases, we’ve seen that with Nike doing it at events where they did a special limited edition release with a shoe which you could only purchase there in the moment at the event. It seems though as if that creates a lot of buzz, creates a lot of social sharing and people wanting to get some return on these investments or try and see some measurements around these kinds of things that they’re doing and investing in experiences, this social sharing comes off the back of unique experiences. Things like 170 unique beers being made and released at that festival itself is something that you can’t get anywhere else and that’s where a lot of the value comes in for these guys.

Guy: Absolutely and you’re right. That’s the whole, these experiences, branded experiences and experiencing the brand or the flip side of that is definitely a huge part. It’s increasingly cluttered marketing and advertising environment where it’s very hard to get some cut-through. One of the best ways to do that is to associate with an experience and then have your brand associated with this fantastic festival, this great time. From a Stomping Ground point of view when we’re partnering with other festivals we’re doing a couple of things; we’re allowing people to experience our brand in a great environment, then we’re also associating our brand with whatever brand or experiences we’re aligning with from a GABS point of view when we’ve got partners like Dan Murphy's, who is one of our partners on board, it’s a really fantastic way for them to really push their message about discovery and that aligns really well with what GABS is all about. People are discovering all the different beers. They’re explaining how their brand is all about discovery and so one of the ways we’ve helped to allow that manifest is we create a mixed six pack of GABS beers that have never been released before and we make them available as a limited release mixed six pack through Dan Murphy’s. And to your point of having this limited release sort of special offer, you know, that only gets released once a year, you’ll never get this assembly of beers together in one box again and that goes nuts every year. So they love that. It creates a real point of difference for them and our brewers love it because they get to participate and sell a fair bit of great beer through this sort of channel. And the consumers love it because they can get something they wouldn’t normally be able to get their hands on.

Mark: Yeah, definitely and that’s what you’ve done at the festival itself. There’s another component which I think is amazingly incredibly intelligent which is you’ve created something around GABS as well called GABS Hottest 100. Sort of similar to Triple J Hottest 100, where I guess Australians the opportunity to back their favourite craft breweries. Can you tell me a bit about that? Was that just a fun idea that you guys came up with in the office one day? Or was it a conscious decision to try and think of a digital platform to help amplify and extend the value of the event outside just the moment of the event itself, something that can run over, pre or post the event to give it a longer, I guess tail of impact.

Guy: Yeah, exactly. Look, the way it all started actually is at the Local Taphouse. We had 20 different beers on tap and we go through about 400 different beers every single year and it started off in really early days as a bit of fun amongst staff and some customers to really vote for… you know, we had all these really great beers on tap so we started doing a voting things of you know, what was your favourites over the last 12 months? And it just gathered a lot of momentum. Fast forward, it’s now been going 11 or 12 years. When GABS came about, we at one point in time, several years ago felt that GABS was a much better vehicle to spread the Hottest 100 far and wide and get a wider audience and a greater audience to sort of get engaged and get talking about all these sort of great beers and push the barrel of better beer. It’s become a pretty amazing poll and a bit of a barometer for what’s success - well, what beers are doing well and resonating with the public. It is, the tractors complain that it’s a bit of a popularity contest. It absolutely is a popularity contest and definitely distribution and size does have an impact on how successful a beer will be in the poll. If it’s a very small beer that’s only ever available through one outlet, that makes it very difficult for it to poll but some of those beer still manage to get into the Hottest 100 which means you know they’ve really resonated. There’s always a challenge. You know, it’s really hard to please everybody but it’s a great barometer of what’s doing well out in the marketplace. To get in the top 100 these days with literally thousands of beers out there, thousands of beers, is no mean feit at all and it means that the beer has done exceptionally well. And yes, you’re right. It’s a great way of extending the festival and extending the reach beyond the exact time of the festival. It gives us a lot of opportunities to reach out and chat with our market and consumers and customers. It allows us to discuss this with retail. There’re a lot of retailers that use it to say what beers they should actually have on their shelves and fridges. Hospitality venues look at it as which breweries are doing really well and what they haven’t tried and might actually want to try because consumers are loving it. It’s been a great poll and it’s a really influential poll these days which is pretty humbling to see where it has come from and where it’s gotten to.

Mark: Well it’s a great industry and it really stood out to me. It’s a really smart piece of engagement and marketing at the same time. We are getting pretty close to time. I just wanted to ask you one or two very quick little things here. Where do you plan to focus most of your time moving forward? Is it going to be Stomping Ground? Do you have big plans for expanding that brand or are you just kind of organically feeling it out as you go? Where is your time kind of going to be focused on?

Guy: Yeah, look definitely Stomping Ground. We’ve got a couple of projects on the go that I just sort of alluded to which is Morrabbin at the old Phillip Morris tobacco factory in there which we’re going in as an anchor tenant in a fantastic sort of repurposed group of buildings. The airport as well, that’s going to be a real focus for us but then also just increasing our production. We want to max out our Collingwood production. We’ve got some growth there. Kicking a show on the road. I look after a few different parts of the business and as we get bigger I’ll be sort of handing them off to people who are much better at it than I am hopefully. There’s plenty on the go. We’ve got some great opportunities to do, you know, we love sort of doing branded events, we love participating in festivals, we like doing pop ups, the hospitality experience, but we also love partnering with great venues to create mutually beneficial outcomes. So Stomping Ground, our focus certainly in the very near future is to really try and stay as local as we can. It’s a market that’s really much more accessible to us. We don’t want to overreach and do anything half-heartedly. We want to sort of do it really well. We’re really, really focused on our Melbourne backyard for the foreseeable future but down the track you never know what happens. Our real focus is Melbourne for now and creating these great experiences and really building the brand and consumer awareness of our brand as well and continuously innovating in terms of product and limited releases. A lot of fun stuff.