Mini Case study

Mini—case Study Obscura Digital expansion into new product category

Situation: Obscura Digital (OD) was highly successful digital marketing and data visualization company located in Silicon Valley. It was a breakthrough leader in creating digital, experiential marketing events. They were the pioneer of many new digital marketing and communication techniques for clients around the globe. OD did a 54 camera projection on the Sydney Opera House for YouTube which did projections inside and outside of the facility synchronized to the music being conducted inside by Seiji Ozawa. It drew an audience to YouTube larger than any other single event in YouTube’s history. OD also did projections on the Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi for the government of Abu Dhabi and a projections on the Empire State Building, on the United Nations building in NY and on a specially built installation in Copenhagen, Denmark..

OD also worked with Elon Musk to convert a Tesla Model S to become a stealth mobile guerilla projection vehicle. Equipped with a retractable FLIR camera and a projector, and camouflaged with electroluminescent paint, it could project images on any pollution from factories that would billow into the air. One such projection was on the smoke coming out of smoke stacks at polluting oil refineries.

OD also did digitally projected background sets for numerous events like Burning Man, South by Southwest, Coachella and for individual touring performances for numerous entertainers such as Katy Perry.

Other works include building lobbies for Salesforce and Genentech and interactive wall murals for the Hard Rock Café and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Those interactive walls allowed viewers to view the real collections and digital archives of the organizations, search the backgrounds of the items they were looking at and even enlarge the images for closer examination.

OD grew dramatically as a result of leading the digital transformation of marketing.

Through their work on the interactive walls, OD found that collaborative activities had remarkable results and could form the basis for a collaborative computing product that could be sold to major corporations around the world. They envisioned using their knowledge to also digitally transform collaborative decision making. The product they envisioned would allow numerous people to work on a massive wall and, simultaneously from anywhere else in the world via their computers. OD felt such a combination could speed up and improve work output. As an MVP test they put together an architect, a builder and the manufacturer of office furniture. They worked together real time on the project of designing and building a headquarters for a Silicon Valley company. OD found that the working together simultaneously, rather than in the traditional sequential methodology resulted in a building that took 90 less days to complete and at a cost savings of almost 30%.

These breakthrough results led OD to undertake the development of a much more robust digital product to sell and market for collaborative computing. They found, however, the project was taking much longer than they thought—primarily because the same people who worked on the new product also were working on the very exciting experiential marketing projects which had deadlines that could not be missed. They also found the ongoing regular cash flow demands of the digital project created problems for the company that had major up and down swings in their cash flow from their experiential projects.

Questions the management considered:

1. What were the differences between producing a digital service and a digital

product?

2. Should they set up a separate company for the new product and finance that

separately?

3. If additional funding was needed, where should they go to seek it out?