BLITZ welcomes our new Vice President of User Experience (UX), Tim Richards, formerly VP of Experience in the West at Razorfish. As a leader and visionary on accounts including Intel, Disney, the NFL, SONY and Activision, Tim brings an impressive portfolio and working knowledge that will have an immediate impact on BLITZ’s campaigns.

At BLITZ, Tim will drive innovation and strategy for UX and creative efforts—continuing to develop new tools and processes for conceptualizing and communicating user experience design. According to Ivan Todorov, BLITZ’s Chief Executive Officer, Tim will “help give BLITZ the additional muscle to really put a stake in the ground to lead UX services among digital agencies worldwide.” Tim’s knowledge will advance our development of rich user interfaces and applications for specific hardware and devices, including console gaming, mobile, out-of-home and location-based services.

“It’s great to join the teams at BLITZ, who are way ahead of the curve,” said Tim just days before entering BLITZ’s doors. “We share a belief in a highly-engaged, disruptive, and human-centered creative process, and creating user experiences that have a lasting impact on the audience.”

As BLITZ continues to grow our business and practice areas, we are excited to introduce Jack Skeels, our new Vice President of Business Development. As the former Managing Director at SapientNitro’s Los Angeles office, Jack helped build and grow deep partnerships with major clients including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Linksys, WebEx, Bare Escentuals, Genentech and more.

Jack brings an abundance of experience in strategic counseling, relationship development and collaborative leadership, as well as a multi-decade track record of increasing business and developing new vertical relationships for a range of services.

Ivan Todorov, BLITZ’s Chief Executive Officer, says that Jack is a “great addition to the BLITZ family as we continue to increase our business and offer new services to existing clients.” Additionally, Jack’s business prowess will “allow us to provide a greater level of consultative services” that will enhance our ability to satisfy our clients’ needs.

Jack received his B.S for both Computer Science and Industrial Engineering from Northern Illinois University. He continued his education at the University of Southern California to earn his MBA—with honors—for Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Southern California, where he was the Founder and President of Marshall Strategy Group.

The Los Angeles Business Journal (LABJ) named BLITZ in its list for the 4^th annual Best Places to Work Awards. This honor is unique in that it required complete teamwork–every single BLITiZen had to provide feedback about our 3^rd Street Promenade home away from home.

It all started with the employers, who had to complete a comprehensive survey conducted by the Best Employers Group to capture all essential information. Next, the employees, including managers and senior executives, each answer an anonymous questionnaire regarding every facet of life at the company–leadership and planning, corporate culture and communications, benefits, work environment, hours and pacing, understanding for personal obligations, and every detail in-between.

After responses are returned to the LABJ, a “benchmark report” is compiled by averaging the responses of all 72 statements for the participating companies. This information enables each company to be accurately compared to others in order to determine their ranks both overall, as well as within their county.

Though the list of leading companies in each county was released the first week of July, the specific company rankings are unknown until August 4^th, 2010 when LABJ hosts an award ceremony at the historic Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. All honorees will be celebrated throughout the night of cocktails, dinner and socializing, which culminates with announcement of which company is truly the Best Place to Work in the City of Angels.

Whether LABJ names BLITZ #1 or not, we know that we have an awesome environment with awesome people that create awesome work. Congrats to all BLITiZens!

Communication Arts, the leading trade journal and premiere source of inspiration for designers, directors, advertisers and other visual artists, has been bit by the BLITZ tech bug for its July / August issue. In “Web 3-D: Taking Sites to the X-Axis,” Joe Shepter discusses the growing importance of 3-D to the Web, specifically pointing out BLITZ’s innovative use of augmented reality (AR) for the John Mayer “Heartbreak Warfare” music video.

Our CCO, Ken Martin, is among one of three industry professionals interviewed in the article. According to Shepter, however, BLITZ is “the digital agency most rooted in 3-D technology,” due to our proven excellence in training (all designers are required to learn Cinema 4D), strategy, and effective utilization of existing and novel technology to approach Web media, as exemplified by our John Mayer project. As Ken puts it, “with 3-D you have to be really mindful that the juice is worth the squeeze… [because] when you get into heavier content, you have to justify the wait time.”

Considering the gamut of honors, awards and media mentions for our John Mayer video, it seems safe to say that this seamless 3-D Flash experience was worth the “wait time.” AR’s immersive environment not only connects Mayer with fans beyond listening to a track or watching a music video, but it also enables Mayer to transcend traditional marketing techniques and cross the separation of art and science.

Look for our article in the Emerging Media column on pages 26-29 of the July / August issue.

Download the full article
Learn more about the John Mayer music video
Learn more about Communication Arts

While most of the attention has been focused on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in the last few years, BLITZ is seeing the beginnings of an interesting trend that could have major relevance to marketers; the return of the desktop application. For years the message was clear, “get online, move in to the cloud” but in exchange for greater potential reach we’ve given up significant capabilities that only a desktop application can give us. Right now, only a few brands and even fewer agencies (including BLITZ) are currently tapping in to this potential goldmine of user engagement.

The single most useful capability of a desktop application for marketers is persistence. Your brand has the opportunity to live and breathe on the user’s computer in an “always on” way. With a website, your marketing message becomes a destination the user must actively visit. With a banner ad, you as a marketer are hoping your ad-buy puts that impression in front of the appropriate person. A desktop application, once installed, can become part of the user’s daily life, with your brand message incorporated. BLITZ was able to take advantage of this concept with our “Virtual Echo” application for the Fox TV show Dollhouse (blog post, download). At its most basic, this application served as a constant reminder to fans to tune in to the next episode while also providing them with a bit of coolness through augmented reality.

Virtual Echo also took advantage of another key feature of a desktop application, push notification. Rather than rely on users returning to our destination to get the latest news, we could push that information directly to the user, without worrying about getting stuck in an email spam filter. Marketers and content owners have been trying to get a push, rather than pull, model for delivering content to users as far back as 1996 with the launch of Pointcast. Pointcast collapsed with the dotcom bust, and today would be irrelevant in a world of RSS readers, but if the notifications and pushing of content are tailored, relevant and potentially exclusive, users will engage. Virtual Echo used the character herself to notify the user of new content to keep users interacting with her. DirecTV’s NFL Supercast application, also developed by BLITZ, used push notification to keep users up to day on all aspects of the NFL’s Sunday games (case study). In addition to supplying live video, the game pushed statistics and even the ball’s field position to the user’s desktop.

Two other capabilities not to be ignored are offline storage and the potential for greater performance. While it seems as though HTML 5 will begin to give us some offline storage for web based solutions, we as marketers can’t wait for this new technology to hit critical mass before taking advantage of it. Our DirecTV application used offline storage to cache highlight videos for instant playback. Improved performance is not guaranteed by any means, but there are many more technologies that are available once we move to a desktop application that do provide significant jumps in performance and capabilities, including full-blown 3D support, advanced object recognition and unlimited support for different types of custom hardware.

There is one large potential obstacle to enabling these types of scenarios, getting the user to actually install the application. Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight have both worked hard on the technical side to improve the installation process, but that doesn’t address the real question of why would a user want to give your brand so much of their attention. BLITZ believes the key here it to provide relevance and utility. The two applications mentioned above both made a strong push toward these attributes. By providing content that was relevant to the user and exclusively available to the user through our application they had reason to install it and by providing longer term utility in our applications, we were able to keep those applications installed.

Without both relevance and utility, applications either won’t be installed or won’t stay installed. If you satisfy only the utility side, say by developing a branded Twitter or Facebook application you might get installed, but you will constantly run the risk of having your app replaced with a newer better utility. Satisfy only relevance of content and you will be forced to constantly update your content to maintain that relevance. A great example of the blending of the two is the Betty Crocker Digital Kitchen Assistant. In addition to taking advantage of persistence, offline storage, notifications and the visual performance of WPF, it provides a great recipe organizer utility and regularly updated content from the Betty Crocker Recipe library.

Branded desktop applications shouldn’t be the only weapon in your marketing arsenal, but they do open the door to some incredible possibilities. BLITZ has a few more in the works right now which are definitely going to be relevant, useful and incredibly cool.