TAPPING THE EXPERIMENTAL CYCLE
When pressed to describe ourselves, our typical response is that we are an experimental media lab and a brand think tank. We leverage independent and entrepreneurial thinking about media and community - sometimes in the building of our own brands, and sometimes in partnership with established brands looking for innovation.
We're brand builders ourselves, and in the habit of sharing the lessons we learn in the trenches with other brand builders. Some of those you could think of as partners and some of them as clients (but we find that those aren't necessarily clear cut categories anymore in the digital age.)
Internally, we think of it as an experimental cycle of ideas that can be tapped in different ways at different times and with different partners. Those ideas, though, continue to fuel the creative fires of that next idea still hazy on the horizon:
A chart like that makes the flow seem simple. The role we play in a team that assembles around a project is actually more complex. One of those teams might, for example, end up looking something like this:
Our role in a team like that is part of a dense interconnected collaboration and cuts across traditional categories of consultant or producer or analyst or community builder or programmer.
The experimental cycle (and the networked revolution) tends to melt the traditional lines between vender and client and agency and partner and story and product and publisher and audience. It begins to boil down to collaborators and brands, and even that shows a tendency to melt together as well.
Which, interestingly enough, is the main subject of the ideas that fuel our experimental cycles to begin with - how digital technology and the networked revolution change the nature of community, and thus the relationship between audience and media and brands.
