By Renato Agrella

Entering the final months of the year always makes us look back at what we have accomplished as a company. Various KPIs can measure our achievements, but they don’t illustrate the less quantifiable reasons for our success. With Thanksgiving approaching, 2A wanted to give a collective thanks to our families, colleagues and clients for being a pivotal part of our growth this year.   

We are thankful for our families and their love and support. Throughout 2017, our families visited our office and attended company events—parents, significant others, children and siblings brought their enthusiasm and goodness to our team. Case in point, over the summer we welcomed family members at our surprise baby shower for 2A partner Abby Breckenridge. Our families’ unconditional support usually takes place behind the scenes, but these glimpses remind us that they also help us thrive professionally.

We are thankful for our colleagues and their focus on teamwork. We are lucky that 2A is home to a wonderful group of creative strategists who know how to work hard, but also have fun. A perfect example is how everyone rallied for our AW Shucks Party, creating a custom, party-themed animation, homemade spicy pickled carrots, elegant invitations and hilarious wayfinding signage, even during a very busy season. Thank you to the entire 2A team for always bringing your A-game.

We are thankful for our clients and their continued trust in the 2A team. 2017 has been a year flush with new clients, in part because existing clients spread the good word about 2A. So thank you! We know our deliverables and services are our best sales tools and look forward to creating more great work together.

We have so much to be thankful for this year, in large part because of our families, colleagues and clients. Here’s to their continued support, teamwork and trust to propel 2A into 2018.

By Renato Agrella

Facebook recently launched their virtual assistant “M”, which is only available in San Francisco. This move brings the competition to Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, Baidu’s Duer, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now. It’s funny that Google’s assistant doesn’t have a human-like name. In a world where devices and information are becoming the center of all interactions, it makes total sense for companies to reach customers in more human ways. Here’s my experience trying to communicate with some of these virtual assistants:

Siri: I have used iPhones since 2007 and when Siri came out I was super excited, but that excitement was quickly shattered by the bad experience. In full disclosure, English is not my mother tongue and my very thick accent was my initial excuse for the bad experience. However, after several years of trying and multiple updates from Apple the experience has only improved to mediocre. I’m not a big fan of someone that suggests a famous Chinese writer when I am trying to find the closest bakery.

Alexa: I have only used the Fire TV voice search which doesn’t have the full functionality of Alexa. I was impressed by her accuracy, all my queries yield the correct result and that was pleasant. At some point, I actually thought that my accent was magically gone. However, to be fair I was not using the full functionality of Alexa but only searching on a contained collection of movie titles.

Cortana: I’ve used this one for couple of months. The best thing about it is the ability to use it both on your mobile device and your laptop – This might apply to Google and Apple if you only use their OS and devices. The voice recognition was not that good at the beginning but rapidly evolved into a very reliable way of search things in both my devices and the web.

It seems like the success of virtual assistants will rest on their ability to adapt and learn from our requests and interactions to provide accurate results. This sounds very similar to what we do at 2A. Are virtual assistants trying to take over?

By Renato Agrella

The word “gamification” is a term that has been loosely used that is gaining traction in the enterprise sector lately. Since it is growing in importance, we need a clear definition of what gamification is. According to Wikipedia “Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and increase users’ self-contributions”. It is a powerful tool to push content, training, compliance, improve productivity and/or increase sales in your organization.

Mistfit is a very good example of how gamification helps to change people’s behavior. For instance, you can track your activity by yourself in the platform, but the experience is enhanced by its social aspect.  The user is able to add their friends to an activity. This allows everyone to have a common goal and users are competing to be the first to reach the goal. This situation forces all users participating in the activity to increase their activity level in order to be on top of the scoreboard.

This seems like a trivial job but it is not that simple. Here are things to consider when developing a gamification initiative:

Identify Goals: When designing a gamification initiative, identify clear individual goals that are to be achieved through the experience. These goals should include everything one might be able to achieve through the user’s gamification initiative. In addition, the organizational goals should be clear as well.

Find Goal Alignment: Individual goals and organizational goals have to meet at some point to guarantee the success of a gamification initiative. The sweet spot is to find the intersection between the individual and organizational goals, to ensure both are achieved.

Engage Emotionally: It is important that the players are able to emotionally engage with the program. To achieve the best results, find an emotional component that will drive adoption from the users, instead of making engagement a task. For some people ranking at the top of the list is most important, for others, it is getting rewards – badges, points, etc. In any case find what resonates with your players and actively attempt to engage them.

Create the right rewards: Remember the goal is to change a behavior through gaming mechanics. Behavior is intertwined with rewards systems so it is important to be thoughtful about the rewards and the potential outcomes they will create.

Gamification can be a very powerful approach in changing behaviors of users, increasing adoption of your product or educating your workforce. But it is important to pay close attention to individual goals, organizational goals, goal alignment, overlap, emotional engagement and selecting the right rewards to make your gamification initiative successful.