The Strategy Partner Group attended Contagious magazine's Now/Next/Why conference in New York City to address how big brands can best address current and future technological trends. Topics discussed included digital immediacy, adaptive innovation, new currencies, coding as an essential skill, creating global brand franchises, and innovations that take interactions beyond screens and into the real world. Speakers provided insights on how brands can navigate changes in areas like time preference, trust, education, data usage, and interactive technologies.

1. Strategy Partner Group
Now/Next/Why
The Strategy Partner Group visits Contagious
magazine’s innovation conference.

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Strategy Partner Group
Now/Next/Why
On Wednesday May 1, the Strategy Partner Group attended
Contagious magazine’s Now/Next/Why conferencein New York City.
The goal of the day was to address one pressing question:
How can big brands best address current andfuture
technological trends?
In this document, we’vesummarized the event’s presentations and shared some key insights.
Topics include:
• Digital Immediacy: How do brands market
themselves and compete in a world of 'Buy ItNow'?
• Adaptive Innovation: Prioritizing experimental practices
to fuel innovation and growth is no longer a luxury,
but a necessity for modern marketers.
• BeyondScreens: As technology breaks outfrom behind
the glass, whatwill the post-mobile era mean for brands?
• NewCurrencies: Digital has reconfigured how we think
about value - both in terms of whatwe expect to receive
and how we expect to pay for it. How do brands go about
navigating this new value exchange?
Check out photos and videos fromthe event: http://eventifier.co/event/contagiousnnwny/

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Strategy Partner Group
Digital Immediacy: Every Second Counts
Time is precious: consumers are obsessed with immediacy and
instant gratification. Time is also relative: sometimes it flies,
and other times it drags on.
- Katrina Dodd, Contagious Magazine
Today, an increasing number of brands are working more conspicuously with time:
– to earn our time, to keep it, and to make the most of every millisecond.
The more that brands can understand and work with our sense of time and experience,
the better they are able to create lasting relationships with consumers.
Brands can use time as a tool to establish connections
with consumers and add value by:
• Expediting: offering the most elegant means to an end.
• Engaging: enhancing and deepening the consumer experience.
Katrina Dodd, Contagious Magazine

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Strategy Partner Group
People confuse the desire for privacy with desire
for control and transparency.”
- Mark Guldimann, Enliken
The public’s placement of trust has shifted from authority to peer:
• Only 35% of people trust government officials, while
61% say they trust people like themselves.
• 21% of Americans and 15% of Britons would be comfortable with abandoning traditional
sovereign currencies for currencies not tied to a major banking institution
The decentralization of trust has bred the decentralization of currency, and alternative forms have
arisen: cyber currency (such as Bitcoin), mobile airtime, loyalty,
reputation, sharing, and even personal data.
To evolve with the shift, brands need to reconsider their value
exchange with their consumers.
• Brand currency = the totality of a brand’s assets
• How can this be monetized and invested?
• Trust and transparency are key
New Currencies
Mark Guldimann, Enliken

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Strategy Partner Group
Coding Generation
Communication is only possible among equals.
Not everyone needs to be a specialist in the field,
but a basic grasp of coding language is useful to
enable shared meaning and productivity.
- Leng Lee, Codecademy
Increased access to education + democratized technology = burgeoning coding generation
On the frontlines of this movement is Codecademy, one in a
series of recent ventures designed to make learning to code
easy and accessible for the masses via an online platform.
Leng Lee, head of Business Development at Codecademy,
believes coding is becoming an essential skill that should be
part of school curriculum:
• There will be 1.4 million(est.) U.S. job openings
in computer science by 2020., butless than half
as many people qualified to fill them.
• Digital consumption is now standard
(the internet, ieverything), but digital production
is not. Producers area powerfulgroup
with increasingly universal demand.
Leng Lee, Codecademy

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Strategy Partner Group
Creating a Global Brand Franchise: Top 10 Takeaways
Coca-Cola’s Wendy Clark shared what she learned during the process
of turning Fanta’s one-way dialogue into a completely immersive
“global brand franchise”:
1. Be a better you(not a worse them). “We had to let Fanta be Fanta” and find an “ownablespace” for them to play.
2. Know thy consumers. You need to know what the core target wants and give over to them.
3. Datais not a proxy for decision making. Welcome data, use it, act on it - but remember that data doesn't make
decisions, you do.
4. Dreambeyond reason. If wedon't dream big for our clients/brands/companies, who will?
5. Do not accept the status quo. Be restless. Reimagine the “no’s”
as a “yes” waiting to happen
6. Get intothe conversation. Wendy and her team are building a
“hub” to enable real-time social listening and consumer engagement.
7. The days of control are over. 80% of the content put out
on your brand is not created by you - it's created by consumers.
8. Great work basedon great ideas basedon great strategy
can get collective agreement very quickly.
9. Drawa line inthe sand on culture. Own it and create the one you want, even if you have to startsmall.
10. Talk is cheap. Show evidence that you'reinvesting behind and actioning great work.
See more: www.playfanta.com
Wendy Clark, The Coca-Cola Company

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Strategy Partner Group
Adaptive Innovation
We all have this manic obsession with innovation - with being first.
But perhaps what’s really important is being second
- but getting it right for real people.
- Will Sansom, Contagious Magazine
True innovation is disruptive, chaotic, and often impractical. Big brands can’t handle this kind of
disruptive change. For them, innovation is more about refining than disrupting.
In the quest to be more adaptive, some big global
brands are looking beyond their walls:
• Accelerator programs that engage the startup
community
• Ex: Nike+ accelerator “seeks small companies that
shareNike's commitment to helping people live
more active lives.”
• Open source R&D
• Ex: AT&T’s Foundry program looks externally for
“the next big development – or 100 small developments”
and takes a Venture Capital perspective, relying on a few big successes to make up for the many failures.
Will Sansom, Contagious Magazine

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Strategy Partner Group
Constraint & Innovation
Creativity is internal – it’s personal. But the measure of innovation
is adoption. You can be as creative as hell, but if the outside world
doesn't rate your contribution and accept it as an innovation,
your creativity is meaningless.
- Howard Pyle, IBM Design Lab
Constraints provide a helpful, often necessary framework during the creative process – and become
even more essential when making the leap from creativity to innovation.
Pragmatism is key: If you're not thinking about how
what you're doing addresses an unmet human need,
and how it fits everyday lives of real people,
it won't go anywhere.
Key considerations:
• Who are our partners?
• What kind of time and money do we have?
• Who is the audience?
HowardPyle, IBM DesignLab

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Strategy Partner Group
Beyond Screens
We're beginning tire of having interactions interrupted by screens.
41% of Americans use their tablet or phone when talking to others.
- Nick Parish, Contagious Magazine
Wearable computing like Google Glass allows people to be back in the moment, rather than
buried in the technology.
• More human and natural
• More emotionally resonant
• Encouraging people to interact
These technologies require a design that's
more empathetic, pointing towards a coming
revolution in how we approach messaging
and communications.
Nick Parish, Contagious Magazine

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Strategy Partner Group
With the introduction of the iPhone, touch screens became a tipping point technology that radically
altered the way people interact with their devices and generated an avalanche of innovation.
- Ivan Poupyrev, Disney Research, USA
The next generation of interactive innovations will take the human experience beyond the screen and
into the real world, eventually “making the whole world interactive.”
• inanimate objects, such as plants, that respond to human touch
• virtual textures that can be felt over a regular
screen (think: feeling sandpaper or
a hardwood floor on the screen of your iPad)
It’s all about constructing the ultimate experience.
Ex: paper tickets at Disney World
will soon be replaced with RFID bracelets,
the data from which will be used to
optimize each visitor’s experience and
“bring the fantasy to life.”
The World That Feels and Responds
Ivan Poupyrev, Disney Research, USA

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Strategy Partner Group
To Continue the Conversation…
Julie Belgraier
Associate
Strategy Partner Group
julie.belgraier@ipsos.com
+1 (212) 293-6507
twitter: @IpsosSPG