Page 36 - Advertising Annual 57

BUSINESS
Incubating the Incubators
At creative agency HUGE’s coffee shop in Atlanta, wearable smart watches notify baristas when customers walk in to place an order and what their order will be. The café proves HUGE can deliver smart retail solutions to clients.
Rebecca Huval
With blond-wood tables and friendly environmental graphics—one white wall simply says “Hello”—this café in an artistic enclave of Atlanta looks nothing like
a creative agency, and it serves lattes alongside a Japanese food menu. But all of the to-go cups betray the café’s purpose: the label stamped on the side reads “HUGE”—as in HUGE, the agency known for its digital work for some of the world’s best-known brands, not for its double espressos.
In fall 2015, the agency opened the café to manifest its user-centered design values in the physical world. The real café has a real need to turn a real profit, but it also serves as a laboratory of sorts for HUGE to try out its digital design and retail ideas on living and breathing customers. “We made a conscious decision not to make an internal lab that’s hidden in the agency that you only focus on when you have the time,” explains HUGE’s managing director, Michael Claypool. “We wanted to be face-to-face with customers and put real ideas in their hands or right in front of them.”
The coffee house–cum–innovation lab has put Apple Watches on its baristas. The watches deliver messages about orders and customers, and HUGE fine-tunes how often to vibrate baristas’ wrists so they never accidentally oversteam a cappuccino. The
café has placed radio-frequency IDs on the sides of coffee mugs to recognize customers and their usual orders as soon as they walk in the door. Once the barista is notified, she will start brewing
a patron’s favorite coffee. “You don’t have to talk to a human to make an order,” Claypool says. And HUGE can now deliver solutions to their retail clients with the confidence of an agency that has been there, done that.
Innovation labs in creative agencies have been around for a decade. In that time, they’ve evolved into new forms, always trying to stay ahead of the tech curve to prove just how cutting-edge they are. With new tools popping up seemingly monthly—augmented reality, virtual reality (VR), 3-D printing, artificial-intelligence bots—ad agencies have formed departments simply to keep up with new devices as they arise.
In some particularly gutsy agencies, incubators create their own businesses and consumer-facing products. Some formats are informal, such as Grey Group, which simply partners with clients to scale products. For Volvo, the ad agency came up with LifePaint— a coating invisible during the daytime, but reflective by nightfall. It hopes to roll out the paint for cyclists as well as drivers, making
a profit on its own product as well as from its client relationship. On
38 Advertising Annual 2016