The New Selfie World
Today, it is not enough to put up a billboard or a sign. You must make it pic-worthy. Giving people a photo-op is a great way to engage people in meaningful and sharable ways.
In Las Vegas, the Fashion Mall has an area dedicated to selfies. The “selfie cubes” were busy, even in the middle of the day.
Suja juice used a billboard with kale wings to encourage people to take selfies with their billboard, but also rewarded people for the effort (if encouraging people to eat more vegetables was not enough). For every 10 #KaleWings photos, Suja had TreePeople plant a tree in the LA area where the campaign was administered. You get a cool message experience and a chance to make the world a little better. Not bad for a day’s marketing. 
Immersion, engagement, relevancy are all words marketers like to throw around, but until you actually find a moment when the marketing melds the experience with the message so it’s a win-win, you don’t have true engagement.
Photo from Twitter.com #KaleWings.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.