NYC MEDIA LAB 2016

By Marta Mugica - September 26th, 2016
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the NYC Media Lab 2016. The NYC Media Lab is dedicated to driving innovation, entrepreneurship and talent development. This was a great experience where I was able to witness the best minds, projects and amazing talent in digital media. The conference was divided into multiple sections, and I could see how professionals, startups, and even students with much potential, connect digital media with technology.
Innovation is about reinventing and restructuring to deliver value to our audience. At the end of the day, these exciting inventions are going to help us to be more efficient and effective on a daily basis. “These inventions can change people's lives and make them easier”, says Orin Herskowitz, of Columbia Technology Ventures. He also explains that in order to offer this value to our audience we need to understand them, perform research and gather information. “Data is tremendously important, and it's what helps computers speak and connect like humans”. Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO of Vox Media speaks about the importance of being innovative, and passionate in order to engage with the audience while telling a story. Similarly to Mr. Herskowitz, Jim Bankoff also mentioned the importance of data, “Data ensures that the stories we tell are right for the right moment and to the right people”. Again, we need to understand our audience in order to provide them with valuable and interesting content like nobody has before. Christian Guirnalda, Director of Open Innovation at Verizon, introduced an exciting program that helps innovators bring their ideas to life. Everyone who has an idea can participate, they just need a potential idea that may make our life better and easier. After this brief introduction, different groups of startups, and students who participated in this program showed us their amazing projects. I must say that they really impressed me! My two favorites were “Dartboard” and “From Post from the Past”. “Dartboard” is an app created by students from Parsons School, that helps students to organize their loan payments and reduce a large amount of money in interest. The app also offered a plan for employers who pay the loans of their employees. Thanks to this method, companies can retain these employees longer. In conclusion, the app is killing two birds with one stone; the large concern of loan payments for this generation, and a big concern for companies with the retention of their employees. Another interesting application that got my attention was “From post from the past”. In this case, the app is based on storytelling that merges digital and physical connections. The app tells stories from the past in a fun and unique way. The audience would receive a box, and inside the box would be a letter and different objects, which are possessions of the person who wrote that letter. While opening the letter, the audience could hear the voice of the remittent telling the story. Once again, the audience can experience a close connection to the story thanks to the technology involved. In the afternoon, we were able to participate and interact in different workshops. These workshops featured presentations in virtual reality and augmented reality from researchers and industry experts and demos from different students and startups. Specifically, I really enjoyed the augmented reality that the app “blippar” offers. It was a very insightful and inspiring experience. We had to draw a butterfly and later we could see how the butterfly comes to life just by taking a picture though the “blippar” app. It was amazing and very exciting to see how the same butterfly I had just drawn seconds before, was now coming to life and flying around. These kind of experiences are engaging to the audiences, and as an advertiser, I can see a large amount of possibilities for brands to engage with their audiences.
That day I learned that anything is possible and technology opens us many opportunities that we could have never imagined years ago. First, we just need to understand the audience we are addressing our message towards and use the right tools and the right platforms to connect with them. Something that I really enjoyed is that I could meet people with different backgrounds and from different industries. Apart of peers from the advertising industry, I also had the pleasure to meet graphic designers, engineers, computer scientists, journalists and even fashion designers. I consider this very beneficial because I could understand how others use technology and digital media in order to get closer to their audience. At the end of the day, it is what all of us want to do. It was an amazing experience and I highly recommend all of you to assist next year with the NYC Media Lab. It is a unique experience which motivated me in every aspect.

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