Procter & Gamble Fast Summit Tuner
Posted in Tim Portfolio - August 1, 1998 - tim
In 1998 Procter & Gamble held a conference to in effect shake up the interactive industry a little bit. The point was that there were no standards and requisite controls in place to allow serious interactive advertising to expand in pace with demand. P&G invited a few executives from major CPG, service, media and entertainment companies to speak. And one actual interactive firm: Red Sky. P&G also contracted Red Sky to create a piece to drive home some of the issues – and potential – inherent in the medium.
Red Sky designed and created the P&G Fast Summit Tuner which, at the time, was an amazing little unit. Invitees to the conference could download the “tuner” which ran as an executable on the desktop, but communicated with our server. We didn’t really tell the attendees what we were doing – it looked like an innocuous countdown and messaging device. Although if you clicked it and “flipped it over” (see the demo) you could see in real-time other users interacting with the tuner over the web.
At the conference we unveiled the other side of the story: a map of the US which displayed all of the tuners – where they ended up, how they were used and other stats that were unusual for the time (and an interface that would be unusual even today). One of the big surprises was how many people actually copied and forwarded tuners to others – we had anticipated it (and allowed for it), but it really demonstrated the potential power of viral distribution long before all the viral self-help books hit the airport bookstores. A really fun piece to build.
