The lengthy line of younger girls curled across the nook from the enduring Casa Magazines retailer on eighth Avenue in New York Metropolis and stretched alongside West twelfth Avenue. They had been there to eat popsicles within the heat sunshine, decide up reward baggage from the high-end style model Miu Miu and settle for free copies of books Miu Miu chosen as “Summer Reads.”
The books weren’t an afterthought. They represented substantive literary contributions to the empowerment of girls, like “A Woman” by Sibilla Aleramo, considered Italy’s first feminist novel. Nor was the occasion a one-off. Miu Miu was staging related occasions in Milan, Paris, London, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
This was a grand-scale model activation and we had been there to fulfill Anna Paterlini, co-founder and consumer director at NEWU, the phygital company that partnered with Miu Miu to make this occur.
It’s a phygital world
The time period “phygital” is probably not fairly as acquainted as “machine learning” or “the cloud,” nevertheless it has been round some time. It was coined in 2007 by Chris Weil, co-CEO and founder at Horizon Sports activities and Experiences and it refers to offering customers with linked bodily and digital experiences. Acquainted examples of phygital advertising and marketing are the location of screens in brick-and-mortar shops in addition to digital OOH experiences.
NEWU has taken phygital to some outstanding new ranges. The Miu Miu activation, Anna defined, had a comparatively restricted digital part. Trend-driven social media influencers had been deployed to carry the crowds to the activation’s areas. Different examples of NEWU’s work had much less anticipated angles.
- For Peroni Nastro Azurro, a silent disco celebration with wearables.
- For Airbnb, an Airbnb property in Milan reworked by the location of digital screens and a bodily button passers-by may push to activate the screens and win prizes.
- For Warner Music and Spotify, AI-powered conversations with a digital duplicate of the singer Achille Lauro.
- For Samsung, the AR expertise of making artwork (once more, for passers-by on the street), the ensuing content material displayed in real-time on massive digital screens.
The checklist goes on, however for probably the most half, these are higher seen than described.
Meet Poltrona Frau
The phygital takeover of Milan Design Week by luxurious design model Poltrona Frau was radical for a enterprise that began as a furnishings maker in 1912. If the title Poltrona Frau shouldn’t be acquainted, a number of the manufacturers they work with are family names. We requested Leonardo Allasia, Poltrona Frau’s director of world advertising and marketing, communications and ecommerce to elucidate what’s now a posh and diversified enterprise.
“The company has three different business units,” he mentioned. “The first is the residential business unit, essentially the manufacture and distribution of accessories and residential furniture, primarily for home and office but for living indoors and outdoors; everything you can imagine except for kitchens and bathrooms.” It creates, he mentioned, a life-style expertise.
“The second business unit is our custom interiors division,” he continued. They oversee large-scale public area tasks, the likes of the Harvard and Yale College theaters, the theater and auditorium that was executed for Apple headquarters in California. The European Parliament was one in every of our most spectacular tasks. The corporate has executed round 5,000 totally customized large-scale tasks — luxurious showrooms, hospitality, auditoriums, convention facilities, theaters, airport lounges and main workplace customized tasks.”
Lastly, there may be an “interiors in motion” enterprise. “This oversees the servicing, upholstering and development of interiors in the luxury mobility space. Ferrari is probably the most famous client we’ve been working with for decades; every single Ferrari on the road has an interior developed by Poltrona Frau.” Different purchasers embody Lamborghini, Ducati, Lotus, and Land Rover. This unit additionally works in first-class and business-class industrial aviation.
It’s related that this long-established enterprise has a digital presence, promoting not solely via its personal showrooms and licensed re-sellers but in addition via an e-commerce enterprise throughout 14 European markets. Additionally related is a change the enterprise is present process. “We’re moving from a product-focused offering to an experiential offering. This has led to a desire, from a communications perspective, to think a little bit out of the box.”
The Milan Design Week expertise
Poltrona Frau sprang out of the field with an intensive OOH activation for Milan Design Week. One intrepid choice, in step with the transformation of the enterprise was to desert the product “as the center of the narrative” in favor of much less product-focused storytelling (evident within the pictures reproduced right here).
Milan Design Week is an annual occasion, after all, and once we spoke, Poltrona Frau had simply accomplished its second metropolis takeover via OOH billboards in partnership with NEWU, the company Allasia had found via their OOH marketing campaign for Prada.
“We had to be disciplined not to use a real-life setting to communicate what the brand stands for,” mentioned Allasio. “We had to generate an emotional reaction in a very short time frame and we had absolutely no need to show, in a limited amount of space, everything that we do. The objective was to generate a reaction and drive traffic to our showroom during Design Week.”
One coup in 2023 was a full takeover of the subway cease that takes guests to the Salone del Cell, the hub of Design Week. “The message was, go and enjoy your fair, but the most important part is at the flagship store of Poltrona Frau,” defined Paterlini. “This was so effective that they changed the rules about buying that space the following year; a lot of other brands were not happy. That was very good fun.”
In parallel with the OOH expertise, NEWU created a cell technique utilizing geo-fencing. They deployed a fringe across the OOH installations inside which passers by would get show promoting on their apps (depending on their privateness settings). The cell dialog continued within the weeks after the occasion.
“We broke the rules of the industry,” mentioned Raffaele Bifulco, co-founder and managing director at NEWU, “because never before during Design Week did a design company do something like this. In the past, the advertising was very usual; all the art work was very similar.”
Touching me, touching you
Paterlini agrees that NEWU (“new spaces, new ideas” is their mantra) is on the lookout for alternatives to intervene in sudden methods. They make use of, for instance, “trend hunters.” “We do a lot of research and development,” mentioned Paterlini. “We spend time trying out new solutions that might seem challenging and the right partners to work with.” Improvements needn’t depend upon cutting-edge expertise; with Poltrona Frau it was the idea that was extra revolutionary.
However there are some technologically outstanding activations in NEWU’s portfolio. I requested Paterlini to inform me about what NEWU did for Amazon Music utilizing haptic expertise. The event was the launch of the album “Materia (Pelle)” (“Material (Skin)”) by Marco Megoni.
“This came out right after the pandemic and the entire concept of the album was about sensory experiences,” Paterlini defined. “Every single song was inspired by a different sensory experience. Amazon Music wants to position itself as a brand that provides never-before-seen experiences for its customers. We thought that the best way to convey the positioning, but at the same time talk about the album, was to make sure that the sensory landscape that inspired the album came alive.”
NEWU was conscious of a start-up that specialised in haptic ecommerce experiences, like with the ability to contact a bag earlier than shopping for it via a haptic interface. “We thought it would be great for fans to be able to touch, through the interface, all the things that inspired the album.”
The end result was an set up in Milan’s most important railway station to coincide with Mengoni’s dwell look within the metropolis. Followers had been touring to Milan for the reveals and NEWU anticipated a lot of them to funnel via the station.
“The installation consisted of a sort of pillar with a haptic interface for the fan and an LED screen. You had to put on headphones and put your hand on to the sensor. While listening to the songs, you would see the artist touching different things — and you would feel exactly what he felt. The experiences went from simple interactions, like touching a stone or ice, but at one point he touched his body and you could feel his heart beating. That was a very emotional experience.”
“This is the future for us,” mentioned Bifulco. “I don’t want to say that trend hunting is more important than creative direction, but technology goes hand-in-hand with marketing and it’s important to let the two disciplines speak together.”
And naturally, the customers don’t want to know the expertise. “It’s just something that will surprise you,” mentioned Paterlini.
