We had the pleasure of being creative collaborators for the inaugural TEDxPortland event--contributing our digital expertise to enrich the event experience. One of the pieces we worked on was an interactive networking "game" conceptualized together with Wieden+Kennedy (the event's lead sponsor) and Second Story (Portland's interactive installation experts). The project's goal was to connect attendees and digitally augment their networking (Emerge developed the web and mobile components for this project). It was primarily targeted at an exclusive list of attendees that were invited to the celebratory after party on Wieden+Kennedy's rooftop deck overlooking Portland.

You've sponsored the Grammy Awards and now you want rich media as dynamic as the show itself. Leading up to and after the big show you have several distinct campaign phases, each with it's own unique creative treatments, but you don't want to retraffic a whole slew of banners each time- it would be great if the campaign could automatically change on, say, Sunday morning. As ever, k-weight is tight and there's a lot of awesomeness to squeeze in. Oh, and we only have six weeks. Possible? Envelope please...

You bet it is. Thanks to time-based content when the show started on the east coast viewers there saw banners announcing the big moment had finally begun, while viewers anxiously waiting on the West coast continued to experience media counting down with them. Working with Google DoubleClick's Rich Media Dynamic Ad (RMDA) platform we created rich units that a pizza-fueled Wieden + Kennedy team could change up on the fly while watching the show—if a giant eagle had swooped in to carry away Lady Gaga's egg, it would have showed up in banner within minutes. All executed in a remarkably tight turnaround.

How better to engage Lacrosse fans than offering them the chance to explore Max Seibald's amazing talent an immersive 3D experience? We can't think of anything better than Nike's "Max's Moments," designed specifically for Inside Lacrosse and Nike's Lacrosse Facebook page. In addition to building out the experience for Wieden + Kennedy, we worked with the amazing team at Razorfish and Google DoubleClick to take the unusual approach of delivering the experience to Inside Lacrosse as rich media, enabling the full benefit of DoubleClick metrics, tracking, and serving. The project is a standout example of awesome and is currently featured on the front page of DoubleClick's gallery of amazing rich media.

This year the fabled Sims™ game franchise made headlines by expanding virtual living to game consoles for the first time in its nearly twenty year history. Game maker EA and Wieden + Kennedy chose Emerge to help spread the word through a massive global impression media buy that enticed Sims lovers to "Simify" themselves and see their virtual antics splashed across the front page of the Tabloids. Not only did we face significant technical and scalability challenges with a project of this scale, we also had less than 6 weeks to pull it off.

We first determined how best to convert an uploaded image and render it out into an image of a tabloid newspaper as a truly Sims-like character. The result is a "Simmification" engine that takes user images from a webcam or upload and converts them into "Simmified" tabloid headlines on the fly across all platforms. From there we extended the campaign to include standard and rich banner units, a microsite, as well as a "Make Headlines" tab on the Sims Facebook page. Given the challenges of supporting the massive fluctuations in traffic inherent in such a large ad push as well as the heavy load of processing the images in real-time we chose to host the campaign in the Amazon AS3 cloud solution, a first for both Emerge and Wieden + Kennedy. So far the results speak for themselves.

If you want a challenge, try making a cutting-edge website that communicates the spirit, energy and vision of a cutting-edge company. If you really want a challenge, try doing that for an interactive design firm. But a new site for our long-term partners and industry-leading experience crafters Hot Studio? Now you've got an Emerge-worthy challenge!

As the CEO and Founder of HotStudio, Maria Giudice, said herself:

If you think it's hard to get everyone in your company aligned around something as supposedly simple as the choice of a single word or a color palette, imagine being one of a team of 10 designers, producers, and technologists who had to satisfy one another... and the other 40 brilliant and opinionated people who work at Hot Studio! Let me tell you, it was not an easy task.

Well, Maria, if it was easy, anybody could do it!

Push the envelope, then push some more. Stretch the flexibility of the Content Management System, across multiple content types, contributors and audiences. Take the notion of a fluid layout to new extremes, all while maintaining pixel-perfect accuracy and a seamless, intuitive user experience. Oh, and since HotStudio has been leading the way in designing tablet experiences, make sure it excels on the iPad.

You know what it's like when everyone *thinks* they're an expert. Well, when Hot Studio is your client, everyone IS an expert. But instead of "too many cooks," the result instead speaks to the dedication, smarts and talent of an extremely productive partnership. Cheers!

The California Strawberry Commission is a state government agency that represents an industry of 600 growers, shippers and processors of California strawberries. Emerge led the Commission through an exhaustive visual and user-experience design process to an engaging, interactive experience for strawberry lovers everywhere. Powered by an Enterprise-class Content Management System, the new website is full of fantastic recipes from professional chefs and top food bloggers, along with colorful and mouth-watering food photography. Recipes can be shared via social networks, voted on, and printed, and consumers can even submit their own recipes to be featured on the site.