In December, J.B. Miller and his team integrated R.F.I.D. bracelets into Charity:Water’s annual benefit in New York, helping the nonprofit raise more than $3.1 million via an on-site call for donations. Guests pledged amounts by moving into a designated space, where staffers used scanners to send data from individual wristbands to a real-time tally and display on enormous screens. For Miller, 48, it wasn’t just about introducing a wireless system at an 1,800-person event, but using it to make guests feel personally involved.
“Technology often detaches people from the experience more than it connects them to it. When people stop, pull out their phones, take a photo, and post it to Instagram or Twitter, they’re not in the event. They’re interfacing with a piece of technology,” Miller says. “At Charity:Ball, it was tactile and more true and natural to the way humans interact with each other and in a collective experience. And the use of technology actually created a dramatic moment.”
Beyond leveraging new digital tech tools, Miller and his 20-year-old company, which has offices in New York and Tokyo, have been using structural elements to immerse attendees at events. For a Spotify event last year, the creative and production agency built four stages, including a large one backed by a giant, curved LED wall and a central theater-in-the-round platform. This allowed the team to put performers—like Janelle Monáe and her full band—in different areas of the room, creating a surround-sound effect.
It’s with ideas like these that Miller has amassed an impressive roster of clients—from Time magazine and Bravo to the U.S. State Department and Panasonic—in a number of countries. As he sees it, events are about being part of a brand’s storyline and can boost a business’s bottom line. “We’re not just being called upon to execute a brand activation; we’re being called upon to uphold the mantle of what a brand means tomorrow, and we have to think about an event as content that is going to be created, replicated, broadcast, photographed, and reverberated online in many ways, predictable and unpredictable.”
