Tocquigny

Last Monday Tocquigny’s own Craig Saper tweeted something that has been on my mind ever since:

“iOS 5’s location-based reminder platform is brilliant. The second I stepped out of my office, I was reminded to pick up a dinner ingredient.”

iOS 5 - Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch - will include location-aware notifications as part of the API when it launches to the public this fall. Beta users like Craig are already seeing the value of creating custom location-aware reminders through Apple’s own Reminders app, which is designed to alert users of a to-do when arriving or leaving a location.

To what level an app can use location-aware notifications is not yet clear to me (opt-in vs. opt-out, available only when an app is active, always on in the background and so on). But it’s safe to assume that this new level of location integration will change how marketers and product developers think about location-based services going forward. After all, the mobile screen, unlike the computer screen or the TV screen, is always with you and always on- perfect for streamlined, real-time personal engagement.

There are countless opportunities to light-up location-aware notifications in meaningful ways. For example:

• Out for a run at Lady Bird Lake with MapMyRun? In 0.25 miles, you’ll find free water provided by the Trail Foundation.
• At Waterloo Records? Get a coupon for Amy’s Ice Cream.
• Passing Whole Foods? Salmon is on sale.
• Friends checked-in at a nearby happy hour? Stop in for a deal on appetizers.

With location-aware notifications, companies can start communicating with a specific person, with her varied interests and sensibilities, in a specific location. This isn’t simply reconfiguring current communications; this is a new way to engage with customers. It should be designed to be relevant and actionable while on-the-go. After all, connecting with a customer through her mobile device is intensely personal, and if we want to achieve that level of engagement, we must be prepared to add meaning.

Managing privacy is the trick here. There is a fine line between relevant opted-in communication and unwanted promotions. As marketers, our role is to understand how the consumer wants to engage and help her manage her preferences.

Have you thought about how you can take advantage of this new level of location-integration for your business?

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

By now, I hope you’ve downloaded the newest version of How We Love Food – now available as an iPad app. From print to online to mobile and social, How We Love Food has evolved, just like my interactive marketing agency, Tocquigny, has over the last 30 years.

 While the way we share recipes has drastically changed since 1980, the way we share food hasn’t changed much at all. Everyone knows that food is all about sharing with friends or family. A meal well prepared is a meal best enjoyed with great company. Just like a successful dinner party is dependent on inviting the right attendees, the success of a mobile application strongly depends on promotion.   

That’s why we put so much thought into how we would best promote How We Love Food. An integrated transmedia campaign was led by two email blasts, driving users to the App Store. A landing page and a Facebook application also helped share the buzz about the application and pushed users to the App Store. Internally, the agency celebrated our proud creation by sharing links with our personal networks and – as you’ve seen all week – by contributing to 17 Stories with posts about our passion for the convergence of food, technology, and marketing.

The icing on the cake? Making things really social by contributing all download proceeds to Urban Roots, a signature program of the youth empowerment nonprofit YouthLaunch, which uses sustainable agriculture as a means to transform the lives of young people and increase access to healthy food. After all, How We Love Food – like most food experiences – has always been about sharing.

Over time, tracking key performance indicators like downloads, unique visits to the landing page, email click-through rates, referral visits to our agency site, and social media mentions has helped to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of different tactics.

In the end, Field of Dreams was a bit off. In marketing, if you build it, they won’t come. Promotion is the critical binding ingredient. So the next time you’re cooking up a mobile project, don’t forget to invite everyone over for dinner.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

It would be much easier to write about how technology hasn’t changed food – nearly everything has felt the impact of mobile apps, social, and the deluge of data. Whether it’s start-ups turning data from something mysterious to something fun (Gojee, Food Genius, Punchfork), food bloggers whose style and recipies I love (Homesick Texan, What Katie Ate, Cannelle et Vanille), online communities creating new local experiences (Grubly, Housefed, Dinevore), or apps that recommend jumping off I-10 in Jennings, LA to have lunch at Boudin King - technology’s impact on how and what we eat can’t be understated.

Our biggest challenge? Cutting through the noise! More than 5500 iPhone apps pop up when you search for “food” in the App Store.  Searching “food blog” on Google returns about 728,000,000 results. It’s like drinking from a fire hose - and the information will just keep on coming.  Once you hook up nutrition info with FourSquare and Nike+ I’ll know exactly how far I have to run to work off last night’s burger.  Or when you connect a smart fridge to the geo-location on a phone, I won’t forget to drop in and get cornichons when I’m near Central Market.

If you’re interested in food and technology, I love foodandtechconnect.com. For geeks like me it’s a great way to find out what’s new - from the latest start-up to new ways to think about all this data. New voices and new technologies will continue to teach us more about food and help us enjoy it. There are great fun problems to solve and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

But even as I think about all this innovation, the most important thing about food is what what tech hasn’t changed - it’s still all about coming together to enjoy a good meal with great people.

To add some flash to a recent new business pitch, we decided to utilize one of the first concepts that we toyed with in Tocquigny Labs.

Projection mapping, as it’s commonly called, is the process of projecting images onto 3D geometry.  It’s been used quite frequently on a large scale to transform buildings into massive canvases, like with Coca Cola’s 125th Anniversary Celebration, but the idea itself is quite scalable.

For our presentation, instead of just creating a PowerPoint, we decided to bring projection mapping to the conference room. We designed an arrangement of four white canvases at different aspect ratios and then wrote custom software that allows us to map different images and videos to each surface using only one projector, all while being able to control the presentation like a normal PowerPoint.

Just the small element of depth introduced by the physical canvases makes the presentation feel strikingly different, and despite the fact that the light actually comes from one projector, it often seems as if the canvases are self-illuminating.

Finding ways such as this to introduce some tactility to the digital world can be a great way to create engaging, memorable experiences. In fact, many recent tech trends such as augmented reality, multi-touch screens and natural user interfaces all deal with the merging of digital information and physical interaction. Projection mapping is just another tool in the technologist’s arsenal, but the results can be quite compelling.

One of our core responsibilities at Tocquigny (and more specifically within Tocquigny Labs) is to immerse ourselves in emerging technologies, with the key objective of identifying their respective applicabilities within our space. When something is launched, for instance Google+, it is my team’s task to become the resident experts, with the capability of answering a wide gamut of business and technical questions from both internal stakeholders and clients. Like scientists, we must see beyond the buzz-ridden Mashable articles and “Trending Topics”, and actually submerge ourselves in the technology. This all leads up to the key function of Labs: adding relevance & context. Every day we get to don our creative caps and architect innovative applications of the technology specific to our diversified client-base and their short- and long-term needs.

We have a roadmap of technologies in queue, but this week’s was one we had been waiting to test out for quite some time: the Kinect motion-sensing input device (created by Microsoft). Released in conjunction with the XBox 360, it didn’t take long for technologists to see the Kinect’s applicability beyond gaming. The infrared device brings John Underkoffler’s visionary gesture-control interface from Minority Report to life.

This $150 consumer-facing infrared camera has introduced natural user interfaces (through gesture- and voice-control) to the masses. Offered many different names by the tech-crowd (computer vision, NUI, gesture-control, feature-recognition, spatial navigation, et al), the Kinect represents what many feel is the future of physical computing. 

This week, we took the Kinect for a lengthy test-drive. Most notably, we used the device to capture full-body movements and converted them into commands that were fed into a piece of music composition software. Illustrated by the above photo, a person can control a digital symphony simply by moving any joint in their body. Sounds like a toy, right? A pretty practical toy… After all, this experiment was the catalyst for dozens of ideas pertinent to our future-facing clientele.