#tangiblemedia

Finally, come to my 3rd year in BCT. I am more confident than in the last two year, I do feel some nervous and confuse but not that much.  It is hard to say what you sure to do at the moment, but I understand my good at and will develop it during the journey. It is great that I have a team with some people that I have worked before. We can easily make good communication as we all know each other's ability and interest. This year,  we start our brainstorm with some keyword that we interest before but don't have the chance to do. For example, Tim has talked about hologram using in the first year when we make the fans project, but finally, with the safety problem, we drop it. What I am interested in is the interaction use. I always believe it is important to have interaction with the audience. When we have a brainstorm and look back some project we have done, I strongly recommend my team to look back the fans project as it is my first interact project.

During the research process, I find a video that introduces an MIT project about a physical hologram table（tangible media table). It is shocked me when I am watching the video. I start imagining what if we can put this feature into our project? What if we make another way to interact it?

With these kinds of thinking, our first project idea comes out-visualise the sound wave. We think to visualise a record sound can be a new way to save people's great memory. It is similar to the sound wave wedding ring but could use in the more far range.

Truly original ideas are hard to come by. Search was a big one. The way social media has evolved makes it unlike anything else as well. And marketers have told us that PebblePost’s Programmatic Direct Mail® is a unique new marketing channel.

On the other hand, a lot of entrepreneurs who think they’ve invented the next big thing have merely imitated ideas from the past, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Here’s a case in point. One day we were at an agency making our pitch. (Yes, I know a lot of my stories start like this, but that’s life at a startup.) We set the stage for our presentation by telling the assembled group that we had this incredible innovation.

A young woman spoke up and said, “We do a lot of innovative things, too. We do this thing called native advertising.”

I paused. “You mean advertorials?”

“What are those?”

“Have you seen a full-page ‘article’ in a magazine that’s labeled at the top in small print with ‘Paid Advertisement?’ That’s an advertorial. It’s a form of native advertising that’s been around for ages.”

“Yeah, but we do it in entirely new ways. We do it on tablets.”

I smiled. “Romans were doing native advertising on tablets back when that meant chiseling a rock.”

Everybody laughed. They all thought I was kidding. To be honest, so did I.

Turns out it was no joke. I have a relative who’s an expert in medieval literature and oversees the collection at the Getty Museum. When I told her that story, she informed me that Romans actually did scratch out ads in rock.

Here’s how it worked. Public spectacles were an integral part of the culture; the Colosseum drew crowds of more than 50,000 people. Those with an entrepreneurial bent were smart enough to take advantage of these captive audiences by advertising their services. That included the two most important professions of the era: dentists and prostitutes. Leave it to the Romans!

But I’m left to wonder about a couple of things. If a spectator at the Colosseum showed an interest in one of those tablet ads, would he have encountered a series of related carvings on his way home from the races? Would a smaller tablet have appeared at the entry to his dwelling that day? What kind of incentives might it have offered? Free admission to the chariot races?

The Farmer in the Deal (Or: Sowing the Seeds of a Startup)

The most common question we get here at PebblePost is: “How did you come up with the idea for Programmatic Direct Mail®?”

The answer is like that old saying: slowly at first, and then all at once.

I have a deep background in digital and programmatic advertising, of course, dating back to its earliest days. And like a lot of people I was fascinated by how quickly programmatic evolved. It swept through display advertising, swept through email, and then into video ads. People thought the next stop would be in-home, with IPTV, then on to radio, outdoor, etc.

I was concerned with IPTV privacy issues and with liquidity—how to get high-quality video ads to run at the right time in the right place.

At any rate, I’d been giving the question of where programmatic would go next a lot of thought. And one of my favorite places to think is at my farm in upstate New York. It’s a rural retreat, mostly just fields and woods—a great antidote to city stress. When I’m there with my family I’ll often lose myself in a simple task and let my mind go wherever it wants. Call it free-range thinking.

So one day I was cutting a field on my tractor, running all these various programmatic scenarios through my head, when it hit me: Wait a minute. Everybody forgot about direct mail. It’s the second-largest ad spend next to TV. It has the highest response rate of any media. And there’s been no new product in 25 years...

I turned the tractor around and headed back toward the house, still thinking: If you could do retargeting with direct mail and make that work, you could build up a lot of data and eventually make a complete programmatic loop…

I knew there would be a lot of technical details to work out, which is why I couldn’t wait to talk to my buddy Rob Victor back in New York City. I knew he had this really great idea for a workflow management system that would bring digital tools to direct mail. We might be able to merge ideas into something really big. Own programmatic for an entire marketing channel. So I sent Rob a text: Let’s grab a beer. I got a big idea.

After that I went back outside, got on my tractor and finished thinking through the basic framework of what became Programmatic Direct Mail®.

I’ve told that story often. And I had just finished telling it to my dinner companions at an event PebblePost sponsored in San Francisco when a woman I’d never met gave me a dumbfounded look. Apparently she’d heard only the very last part of the story. “Wait,” she said. “Are you telling me that before all this you were a farmer?”