On The Edge Manchester On The Edge Manchester - John Bower: Digital innovation at Hallmark cards
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Topic: What IS Digital Innovation? - Innovation: is it only about the technology? - How to successfully add some digital innovation into your marketing mix - Understanding how to maximise the impact on products & the company
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On The Edge Manchester On The Edge Manchester - John Bower: Digital innovation at Hallmark cards
- 1. John Bower On The Edge Manchester Conference
- 3. John Bower Head of Digital Innovation
- 4. A Brief History Of Hallmark
- 5. A Brief History of Hallmark In 1910, a teenage entrepreneur called Joyce Clyde Hall (J.C. Hall) stepped off a train in Kansas City, Missouri, with two shoeboxes of postcards under his arm. Hall quickly made a name for himself with the picture postcards he sold. Rollie Hall joined his brother in business, and the company was named Hall Brothers.
- 6. A Brief History of Hallmark On Jan. 11, 1915, a fire destroyed their office and inventory. Unfazed, they took the only salvageable item – their safe – and set up shop again. Noticing a decline in postcard sales they recognized a need for more privacy in communication. They started offering cards mailed in envelopes.
- 7. A Brief History of Hallmark Having learned a hard lesson about dependence upon third-party stock they decided to print their own cards, and in late 1915 they invested in a printing press. With the success of the Hall Brothers greeting cards, J.C. and his brother continued to innovate.
- 8. A Brief History of Hallmark Their first foray into other product lines came in 1917 when the Hall brothers "invented" modern gift wrap. When they ran out of solid-coloured gift dressing, during the busy Christmas season, they improvised by selling French envelope liners as a replacement. This proved so popular they decided to start printing their own gift wrap.
- 9. A Brief History of Hallmark In 1928, the company began marketing its brand by using the Hallmark name on the back of every card. JC Hall was intrigued with the similarity between his name and with the term for markings on gold jewellery. This was the same year that Hallmark ran it’s first advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal.
- 10. A Brief History of Hallmark In 1932 Hallmark signed it’s first licensing agreement, with Walt Disney. Disney and Hall became fast friends and there has been a close relationship between the companies to this day. In the same year Hallmark created display stands that allowed customers to see all cards quickly and easily in stores.
- 11. A Brief History of Hallmark In the 80’s Hallmark continued expanding and bought various companies in the process including Crayola. The Hallmark Channel was launched on cable and satellite television, which showed family friendly movies and also produced Hallmark funded films. With the rise of the World Wide Web, Hallmark saw the need for an e- commerce platform for finished goods, and a requirement for personalized cards and gifts.
- 12. A Brief History of Hallmark With new technology around every corner, the future of the company is hard to predict, but we’re constantly poised and ready to lead and innovate. Whether it’s internet video streaming, social networking, or mobile applications. As big as we’ve become, and as iconic as our brand is today, we’re still privately held, still based in Kansas City, and still led by the Hall family.
- 13. About Me
- 14. About Me • Born in West London • Moved to the South Coast • Dad owned a PC Hardware shop • Mum was a Biology teacher • Learned programming from an early age
- 15. About Me • Started building websites in the early/mid 90s • Worked at a digital agency in London at 17 years old (1997) • Co-founded a digital agency in Worthing, West Sussex in 1999
- 16. About Me • At 21 decided to focus on 3D Computer Graphics and Animation research • Developed an algorithm for real-time muscle deformation • Gained a Masters degree from NCCA Bournemouth University
- 17. About Me • Met Vicky in 2001. • Moved to Saltaire, West Yorkshire in 2009. • Married in 2014.
- 18. About Me • Did contract Flash/Web development for regional Digital Agencies. • Started my own freelance company.
- 19. About Me • Took a job at Hallmark UK & Ireland as the Web Developer in their e-comm team in 2012. • Became Digital Innovation Specialist in 2015.
- 21. Digital Innovation at Hallmark • To provide tools and applications that make workflow more efficient. • To give advice and support on website architecture and emergent web technology. • To understand the capabilities of hardware and infrastructure, from severs to handheld devices. • To future-proof the company.
- 22. What is Digital Innovation? • To be a nerd.
- 23. Internet Users by Device 29% 17% 22% 30% 2% Devices (%) Laptop Desktop Smartphone Tablet Other Source Ofcom Research 2014
- 24. Internet Users by Device • 900,000,000Tablet • 870,000,000Laptop • 660,000,000Smartphone • 510,000,000Desktop • 60,000,000Other • 3,000,000,000Total Source Ofcom Research 2014
- 25. Interesting Technology Media CentersSmart Glasses Smart Watches Augmented Reality Virtual Reality Web VR Node.js HTML 5 NoSQL DB’s Angular JS 3D Printing
- 26. Interesting Technology • Mobile Application development is only worth doing if it’s cross-platform. • To do so requires web technologies such as JavaScript and CSS. • Cross-platform Mobile Apps must be built responsively. • Building Mobile Apps is exactly the same process as building web applications.
- 27. Smart Wear
- 28. Smart Wear
- 29. Smart Wear
- 30. Smart Wear “SMART WEARABLES MARKET TO GENERATE $53BN HARDWARE REVENUES BY 2019” juniperresearch.com – 9th September 2014
- 31. Smart Wear • Screens are small, if there is one. • Not connected directly to the Internet. Have to go through another device. • Only way to force a message to appear on the watch is through a text message to the host device, or via native application.
- 32. Virtual Reality
- 33. Virtual Reality
- 34. Virtual Reality
- 35. Virtual Reality
- 36. Virtual Reality
- 37. Virtual Reality • Virtual Reality is not restricted to games consoles and PC’s. • Mobile devices will soon be powerful enough to interface with VR headsets. • The restricted vision will prevent people moving too far from a single spot though.
- 38. Web VR
- 39. Web VR • Using coding technologies (WebGL and Javascript) to display 3D content through a web browser. • Uses two Virtual 3D cameras to create scenes for each eye. • Interfaces with VR headsets. • Allowing the user to navigate through content with full web page capabilities in the background.
- 40. Web VR
- 41. Web VR
- 42. Web VR
- 55. Summary
- 56. Summary • The future of the internet will be more immersive. • Reality and digital information will blend together. • There will still be a need for pages of information, but home entertainment will drive the development of more interactive 3D content.
- 57. Summary • Designing websites may soon require people with experience in 3D modelling and game development. • Designing themes for watches may be a good way to promote a product. • Glasses like Hololens would allow for virtual billboards and other visual overlays using AR.
- 58. Contact Email: John.bower@hallmark.com Twitter: @beclamide LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/johnmbower
- 59. Roundtable Question With the impending release of wearable devices and augmented reality, is traditional web design on the verge of extinction? Is responsive design the least of our worries? On The Edge Manchester Conference
Editor's Notes
- Historically people have worried that technology will destroy the greeting card industry, but there is only ever a culture shift. Unlike MoonPig and Funky Pigeon, we’re not just about cards. We have brands, software, technology. We are a partner with Amazon and we provide them with all the greetings cards for their new card department.
- Tablets are the most widely used devices for accessing the internet Followed by Laptops then Smartphones Tablets are great for surfing the net. You can fit a lot on the screen, they’re light and easy to hold, and they have Candy Crush for when you’re bored of looking at cat pictures. People would still rather use their Laptop than use the smaller screen of their smartphone though. Are people happier using Phablets than Tablets? Will iPhone 6 users increase the smartphone percentage? Other devices include things like Smart TV’s, Wearable technology, and Games Consoles.
- When you consider there’s 3 Billion people on the internet, even those in the Other category make up a huge number, from a marketing point of view.
- Although each of these technologies are equally important right now, we’re going to focus on mainly the left hand columns today. I’ll just skip briefly through the right hand side.. 3D Printing is something we’ve totally embraced at Hallmark. Being a company with a background in ornaments and keepsakes, 3D printing is an exciting field that will totally change the way we think about tangible objects. Obviously there’s a lot to be said for something that’s hand painted and crafted by our artists, but there’s an expanding market in making stuff yourself. Media Centers are things like Chromecast, Amazon Fire, Raspberry Pi, and AppleTV which are the successors to Smart TVs. Browsing the web and using apps on your TV isn’t an easy thing though, so they’re probably only ever going to be a medium for people to stream movies and music. If you can develop a plug-in that facilitates that though, you’re onto a winner. Node, Angular, and HTML5 are extremely exciting if you’re a web developer. They’re helping to make desktop applications obsolete. Pretty soon your devices won’t need storage because all your files and applications will be stored online and accessed through a web browser, or an application wrapper built around a web browser. HTML5 is the latest version of the code that makes websites work. Along with CSS3 they make the internet a media rich experience. CSS can even do 3D now, which I’ve been doing some research into. I’ve written a few demos on CodePen. Angular has been developed by Google and has been called HTML6 because you can write your own tags and tell the browser how to interpret them. It’s a fairly new technology and it’s really catching on. I personally found it very easy to pick up and when we rebuilt Hallmark.co.uk at the end of last year it made the development process really smooth. Node has been adopted by PayPal, LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Hallmark among many others. It runs the backend of our website and provides data endpoints so we can write applications that talk to our backend systems from anywhere in the world. NoSQL DB’s are incredibly boring to non-nerds, so I’ll skip them, but suffice to say they’re amazing and drastically speed up data storage and retrieval. We used MongoDB for Hallmark.co.uk which works really nicely with Node. You might notice that Mobile Development isn’t on the list. That’s because I thought we should go through upcoming tech rather than stuff you should all be doing already. Having said that..
- Here’s a few points we’ve learned about mobile development. Mobile App development HAS to be cross platform. There are lots of ways of doing that, including Titanium, PhoneGap and Adobe AIR Mobile. But the HTML / Javascript route is really the best for low – medium animation heavy applications. If your web designers aren’t designing responsively by now, you should sack them. You can develop it in a web browser, web developers can get their heads around the framework API quickly, and it’s exactly the same as building a web application. But talking about responsive design, what about the displays? Screens are all shapes and sizes, how can you design something that looks good on all possible devices? It’s about to get a lot more complicated..
- Smart Wear includes Glasses, Watches, bands, jackets, headphones… basically anything wearable that can either connect to other devices or access the internet directly, does more than it’s obvious function. A jacket with a built in GPS. Gloves that allow you to interact with other devices. A watch that does more than just tells the time.
- The Apple Watch is hopefully going to make wearable technology more popular when it comes out. Apple’s good at bringing a line of technology advancement into the public’s eye. They’re not necessarily the best at innovation, but they’re definitely the best at bringing stuff to market first. But is it useful as a marketing channel?
- Smart wearables are predicted to gain in popularity over the next few years. There are a lot of potential users to target marketing to.
- There’s not much real estate on the screen. It’ll be hard to get the message across to the target user. Watches in particular only display notifications from the host device. If you want a message to appear on the watch you have to send it from the host device. Or you could build a native watch application for the user to install, which could notify them of offers or if they’re close to a store. Watches might be good for gaming perhaps? If you were given a vague brief to build something for the Apple Watch today, what would you do? It’s something to think about.
- This is what the 80s/90s thought Virtual Reality would be. Everyone went crazy about it at the time, but it quickly died out because the technology just wasn’t ready for it. Computers were too slow, accelerometers were unreliable, and the graphics were just big shaded blocks that looked more like that Dire Straits video then actual people.
- Virtual Reality is having a resurgence as headsets become cheaper to produce and chips are getting smaller and more powerful. Oculus, HTC / Valve, Sony, and Microsoft are all developing headsets that use slightly different technologies. Virtual Reality headsets provide a closed environment to display content to the user in 3D. Google have designed Cardboard, which is about as low fi as it gets, but is actually surprisingly good. With 3D location tracking technology like LEAP Motion, and Kinect working along side the headsets they can provide a fully immersive and interactive experience. Oculus announced at GDC earlier this year that their device won’t be hitting the market until 2016, which gives others like Valve a chance to dominate the market.
- Oculus does not have controller tracking built into the Rift. You need to use a third-party device called LEAP Motion to physically interact with software. Or you could just use a standard input like a mouse or GamePad. Valve’s controller is a laser detector, like the headset, which is incredibly precise but looks a bit odd. Then again if you can’t see your hands because you’ve got a giant headset on it probably doesn’t matter. Sony’s Maraca-style Move controller has been around for a few years and is tried and tested. It’s remarkably precise considering it’s just a bunch of accelerometers and a big glowy ball that the camera picks up.
- You’re going to see more and more people like this.
- John Carmack said at GDC this year that he’s focussed on bringing Virtual Reality to mobile devices.
- Web GL is supported by all major browsers (including Internet Explorer finally!) It’s not just a way to make games, and the distinction between gaming and web interaction may become less obvious in the future. Each scene needs to be rendered at half resolution in order to maintain the framerate of the experience. Mozilla’s latest prototype web browser includes low level APIs that handle the VR rendering and the interface to VR headsets.
- An example of how the screen is rendered with a camera for each eye. The brain then merges the two images and creates an illusion of depth. This is from within the latest build of Firefox. You can just about see the Chromatic Aberration prevention filter applied to the 3D render to counter the effect produced naturally by lenses.
- An example of the sort of web sites that could benefit from Virtual Reality capability. The scene is displayed in 3D and allows the user to move through it and interact with objects. On top of all the normal worries that UX designers have they will have to consider motion sickness and vertigo.
- Another example of WebGL within a web browser is Google’s Maps Game You manipulate the cube in 3D in order to roll the ball along roads Although not directly an example of VR web design this experience would be made a lot more interesting if you rotated the cube with your hands in 3D space. Hololens will allow you to do this out of the box, but other VR devices would require some sort of third-party input device.
- AR lets you use markers to help some software with a camera work out where it is in 3D space in relation to the printed item
- It’s fairly old technology but the rise in powerful handheld devices means more and more people can experience it easily.
- There was a time when you’d have to print an ugly black and white marker on your posters and leaflets for the AR to work. They look a bit like QR codes, which is also a bit confusing because they’re totally different functionality wise. Nowadays you can process any image and use that as a marker. The process detects unique points within the image, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, and uses them to work out the angle of the artwork in relation to the camera.
- Blippar is a company who provides tools and services to digital agencies to create Augmented Reality marketing. They’re a good example of what you can do with AR.
- BlippAR is by no means the only option though there are a number of different technologies that allow you to create your own AR content. A lot of them are a fraction of the price too. BlippAR have just had the most money, best marketing, and AAA clients behind them so they have a lot more examples of what AR can do for you. Personally, as a developer, I would choose one of these.
- In fact this is a range of 12 cards we prototyped last year and are in stores now.
- We built this with Unity, Cinema 4D, and Vuforia. It’s multiplatform so it works on iOS and Android without needing to change the code (much). Our POS displays encourage customers walking past to download the app for free and try the cards in store. The cost of development was very low, and we managed to go from prototype to finished goods within a month. They’re currently for sale in UK, Ireland, Spain, and India.
- Microsoft’s Hololens is an AR headset. Google Glass is too, but it’s so feature lacking in comparison, Google have decided to discontinue it and go back to the drawing board. It might look bulky now, but it’s only going to get smaller. Imagine if it looked like a pair of ray bans?
- Microsoft’s Hololens is very likely to have Kinect technology embedded in it so it can scan it’s surroundings, and your hands.
- AR would also be useful for previewing all sorts of work without needing to 3D print anything. But that’s not as interesting as the entertainment value.
- AR devices have the portability for people to wear outside of the house. Because you can see through the lenses you won’t walk into walls. This would mean you could overlay marketing messages on buildings / road sides / buses / football fields .. All sorts. If you could make an AdBlocker for AR headsets now, you’ll probably be very wealthy one day.
- If you were given the task to design a campaign for these devices today, what would you do? How would you get your message across?