November 2008
Manifest Digital announces its win of the Chicago PhizzPop challenge sponsored by Microsoft.
This innovative contest pits small teams from top-flight local agencies against one another in an intense 3-day effort. After receiving training on the newest Microsoft technologies, the teams were presented with a business challenge.
Winning both the popular vote and the judge's review this year, Manifest is pleased to be among an elite handful of agencies in the country who can claim this prestigious award. The team will continue to a national competition at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin in March 2009.
Participating agencies were presented with a Chicago-specific challenge: In support of the 2016 Olympic bid, find ways to actively engage and ultimately generate support with the city's youth so that we can show the world how excited we are to bring the Olympics to our city.
Teams were spurred to not just get the youth involved but somehow show their impact/support in a visual/meaningful way.
Brian Henkel, Kevin Panke, and Dan Thompson represented Manifest. The three applied Manifest's unique approach to succeed. Put simply, they operated as equals on a team of diverse perspectives, speaking the same design language. The language is key here, given its heritage in user-centered-design (UCD).
"To extend the metaphor," says Jim Jacoby, CEO of Manifest, "UCD applied as a religion becomes a distraction. UCD as a language on the other hand is a powerful tool. We've set up an environment that celebrates an open and honest culture that speaks this language to each other and our clients."
"There's one other aspect that is subtle and often overlooked," Jacoby continues. "You have to create an environment that fosters fearless exploration. We fail all the time inside our four walls, and we celebrate it. That's how we learn. And that's how we succeed in the market. You're seeing the results here."
"Microsoft deserves a lot of credit," adds Brian Henkel from the User Experience practice. "They put themselves out there with these tools, trained us quickly and let us explore openly."
"We could have come back from the challenge and just said, 'you can't.' We dreamt up some crazy stuff and our developer, Dan Thompson, frequently said, 'I'm not sure, but I'll look into it.' Every time he came back to us, it turned out we could."
Dan Thompson is characteristically soft-spoken on the accomplishment. "We did it all on Vista Machines," he confirms.
"These guys came up with some brilliant stuff, integrating it across channels and with offline marketing concepts. I've seen these design challenges before and they are often heavy on design and light on execution. More than 75% of our solution is fully functioning already."
He pauses and smiles, "That's in three days." Then he continues, "I demanded it of myself. In the last 30 seconds of our presentation, if those crowd-sourced photos taken minutes earlier hadn't shown up in our interface, I wouldn't have been satisfied. Nope, it all worked."
"This is about a well-rounded solution," adds Kevin Panke the lead visual design and marketing team member.
"The Olympic committee here in Chicago needs a real solution to attract the city's youth to the cause. It's a major challenge to get them involved and attract the attention of a worldwide audience. Our offline and online integration across social media and traditional interactive make the whole thing work."
Manifest is pleased to begin discussions with the lead agency on the 2016 Olympic pursuit for Chicago, OgilvyOne.
Manifest is also pleased to have earned this honor under the critical eye of a highly esteemed panel of judges: Jaclyn Valrose, David Armano, Kevin Flatt, Bryan Jones, Blagica Bottigliero, Jeff Smith.
Want to see what 24 hours of creative awesomeness look like? Click here.
This news message is supported by The Creative Finder, an online platform for photographers, illustrators, designers, and art directors to promote their portfolios towards new clients and collaborators. Creatives who wish to sign up for an account can save 10% off annual fees with promo code 'designtaxi'.
