I’ve Only Been Wrong Twice | On efflorescence

What a month…

Eric Kanagy, CEO of Goshen, Indiana’s software start-up RedPost and I sat down in late, late December. He told me that he wanted Dannyprose to art direct and design the booth and take-away materials for RedPost’s presence at the 2008 Las Vegas Digital Signage Expo. The deadline was yesterday.

As a bit of background: RedPost is a company I have worked with before. Their mission, unlike many digital signage companies, revolves around the message of a client, and not the medium of their signs.

They don’t do video. They don’t provided high-definition (technically) displays. They don’t spend thousands of dollar-per-unit developing hardware to “out-tech” the competition.

They do provide local advertisers with arts- and culture-related means in which to talk to audiences and their events. They develop local neighborhoods (meaning a block, a city, an office building) with affordable ways to let people know what is coming up in their society.

We wanted to make RedPost’s booth something other than any other tech expo booth you have ever been to: medium-focused, unrelatable and - frankly - boring. We wanted to create the experience of buying into this product, and Kanagy’s version of small urban environments: where you manage to know the people around you and still have a “large city” feeling to what you do.

So, instead of displaying his tech, we built a huge coffee shop. 10 feet x 20 feet, we draped the backdrop of his booth with printed and stretched canvas and decided to serve free lattes to any expo-goer that wanted to enter the booth. Our giveaways were local, Goshen artwork, and our takeaways were hometown newspapers.

Eric is on his way to Vegas right now; I’ll update the experience here as he blogs about it.