Digital or physical need to work hand in hand to tell your story
A week at IAAPA Expo Europe, one panel, and a show floor that kept splitting the world in two.
Oh boy, what a week.
I was in London for IAAPA ESA, my first time, and what a “ride.”
Interesting dynamics all week, and a lot of excitement, on stage and off. I don’t think one article will do it, so I’m splitting it up. This is part one.
How I ended up on a stage in London
I got invited to speak on a panel called “The Future Zoo: Can Digital and Traditional Experiences Coexist?” I was proud to share the stage with Sarah Dennehy of Rainbow Productions, Kieran Stanley, founder of Dan Pearlman, and Dominic Strange, COO at Chester Zoo. A well balanced panel, in the sense that every one of them brought a perspective I couldn’t have brought. That’s the only kind of balance worth having on a stage. And thanks to Nouria BENZALLAT, who moderated, and who kept me on time.
I represented the digital angle. If you know me, you’d have guessed.
One or the other
I’m a firm believer that digital and physical need to amplify one another, not compete, and a week in London didn’t change my mind.
Our panel asked whether they can coexist. It’s a fair question, and I hear some version of it in just about every conversation I have, whatever the industry, B2B or B2C. More often than not it turns into a one-or-the-other discussion, digital or physical, with the budget going to whichever side wins. To me that feels like the wrong conversation.
Unfortunately the show floor told the same story, with digital in one place, physical in another, and not a lot in between that looked like it had been designed as one thing from the start. I’m not going to name stands, because it was more the shape of the floor than anything one exhibitor did.
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And I can hear you thinking. Yes, but complexity. Yes, but cost. Yes, but throughput. I get all of that. Those are the constraints that actually decide things. What I think holds us back, though, is that we’re still carrying the traditional way of thinking about a visit, and carrying it a bit too far.
Maybe the experience is supposed to be more fluid than we let it be. You let people experience things on their own terms. Some will see everything. Others won’t, and that’s fine.
It’s like a theme park. Some people do every single ride, map in hand. Others pick the three things they actually came for and spend the rest of the day eating and sitting in the sun. Both had a good day, and I doubt either would swap. So I keep wondering why we design a visit, or a stand, or a showroom, as one track that everybody is meant to walk in the same order.
What I miss are the organic, entangled experiences. The ones where the visitor picks the path, and you can’t point at where the digital stops and the physical starts.
The sleeping animal
A lot of a zoo visit is animals being asleep or off show, and the visitor came for that animal. Put a screen beside the habitat showing her awake, doing whatever she does at four in the morning, and a flat moment turns into a good one. Nobody had to pick between the real animal and the digital one. They got both, standing in the same three meters.
I suspect the same move works on a showroom floor. The machine on the stand isn’t running, but the screen beside it could show it halfway through a night shift, doing the job it was bought for. The buyer gets to walk round the real thing and watch it work.
Where that doesn’t happen, I think what’s usually missing is one decision, made at the start, that the digital and the physical are the same project. In manufacturing I tend to see a launch with a physical showroom on one side and a digital campaign on the other, likely owned by different people, possibly signed off in different budget years, and stitched together near the end if anyone gets to it. The buyer still walks away with one impression of you, pieced together in whatever order they happened to bump into things.
The entangled version starts well before the gate, too. It starts the moment somebody buys a ticket, and it’s still running after they’ve gone home and started telling someone about it. In my experience that’s where a lot of the value sits, and it’s usually the part nobody owns.
Purpose
If there’s one word you should remember, it’s “purpose”. Everything you tell and build to create a full experience, every component of it, needs a purpose. Purpose means people don’t think “oh no, I need an app” or “I need to put on a headset”. It shifts the thought to “obviously, this is the next step”. People have a sixth sense for noticing, or feeling, that something doesn’t belong.
To give an example, ask yourself what augmented reality brings to the experience for people. Does it bring them closer to understanding your message, or was it a “let’s add something cool” decision because we had budget left over? Too often, it’s the latter.
What hits me is that we’ve been talking about digital, physical, storytelling and purpose for years, but we rarely let them play together in a well-balanced way.
I am still noodling on the topic for next week.
