Brian Wong – Co-Founder & CEO, Kiip
Doug Ziewacz – Head, NA Digital Media & Advertising, Under Armour Connected Fitness
Moderator: Gayle Fuguitt – CEO & President, The ARF
Gayle Fuguitt introduced these Data Pioneers of Change: Brian Wong and Doug Ziewacz for a panel discussion. What was important at SXSW: Brian spoke about the presence of brands and the theme of interconnectedness of devices, and brands rewarding consumer behavior. It is happening worldwide.
Doug confirmed the importance of interconnectedness. Both confirmed that this is happening rapidly.
Gayle asked panelists how to unlock funds for experimentation:
Doug stated that Under Armour looks for constant innovation and stresses the importance of data, analytics and insights. All companies need to have a long-term vision.
Brian stated that his lack of experience in the media business actually served as a positive for him. He encouraged brands to interact with consumers, advertising alone is not enough. Consumer data from the inter-connected devices will create opportunities for brands. But brands have to be responsible with this personal data.
Cool moments can come from these connected devices.
“It’s no longer good enough to give a consumer 10,000 steps.” You have to look at it from every angle –nutrition, sleep, system.
“Everyone’s connected,” said Brian. “The thing we’ve seen now is this hyper-adoption. How quickly people are going to take this stuff up.”
“In those moments a brand should be able to reward you, not just advertise to you.”
“We used to use content as the proxy. You might have been using Men’s Health before, but why not reach them as they just finish a run?”
By networking, all these new data points come together.
The trio talked about the notion of Try fast, fail fast, succeed fast.
Gayle Fuguitt: “How do you unlock funds for experimentation and growth? We know the money is there.”
Doug Ziewacz: “20 years ago innovation was a cotton T-shirt, and today’s it’s data. If we have this mission of making athletes better, we really need a way to demonstrate that.”
Brian Wong: Kickstart encouraging brands to interact with consumers in a different way.
These moments that indicated ME! “Google became the most important company in the world because they could find out what you wanted and that was so available just using search.”
“Going to the fridge. These signals are all need-states. That’s the next frontier. We think there will be billions of data points every minute, every second.”
Brian spoke about his upcoming book, THE CHEAT CODE. “These are codes in games and in life, that will help you tweak your process.”
Gayle asked about their perspective on failure. As entrepreneurs, both have had this experience.
Brian talked about being laid off at the ripe old age of 19 when he worked for a competitor to Reddit called Digg.
Doug said, “We failed at everything we could. And we tested. So we could succeed now.”
But he noted that success doesn’t have to come from quick failure. There are many different ways to arrive at success, at the same place.
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