The right tech can help brands build worlds but those worlds are meaningless without putting the audience at the center. At The Subthread’s first event in London, artist and Dime founder Doddz and 20(Something) co‑founder and creative partner Will Thacker drew the audience of marketers and creatives a blueprint for developing experiences customers will actually want to be part of.
Doddz begins every idea by asking “what emotion are we trying to evoke and what universal truth can the audience recognize?”. It's a similar starting point for Will when working on a client brief. “People need to feel something and a brand needs to have some sort of soul,” Will says.
“People need to feel something and a brand needs to have some sort of soul”
Pokémon Go was given as the gold standard by Doddz. “The Pokémon that you grew up watching was suddenly at the end of your street and you can go out and capture it. The story of Pokémon hasn't changed, but then you had this ability to be at the center of that story,” he says. And the commercial results from the game speak for themselves, Doddz adds.
This is something Will’s agency is conceptualizing at the moment. Currently building generative tools for brands to use in-house, Will is working up ideas to open up this kind of AI technology to customers. “I see a world, with the help of AI, where that experience can be extended to audiences so brands can use those tools, create worlds that you can dive into that they can build and see their own version of themselves within that,” he says.
Interactive brand activations don’t just wow audiences and help with brand loyalty, but that interaction creates decisions and decisions create data. In Doddz’s Tommy Hilfiger New York Puffer activation, people went on a scavenger hunt passing various iconic city locations and ‘puffified’ everyday objects on route via AR before reaching the store.
The brand gained more than footfall and emails; it learned which products individuals favored, which rewards motivated action, how long they stayed in‑world, and what brought them back. “That’s personality‑level insight, not just behavioral info like emails and where they live,” says Doddz.
