In 2005, the CEO of Rolex Patrick Heiniger – the 3rd CEO in the 100 year history of the company – entrusted me with guiding Rolex marketing into the digital age as a special consultant in charge of the Rolex Digital Initiative.
Team
For 5 years, reporting directly to Mr. Heiniger, I headed the Rolex digital marketing team and the agency Critical Mass, to achieve just that.
The Mission
The mission was, unambigously, to publish the best luxury site on the web.
True excellence is the essence of all things Rolex.
In 2007, our new ROLEX.COM was independently reviewed by Forrester Research as the top brand-image site on the Internet – click here.
(The present Rolex site is different.
New brooms…)
Impact
We multiplied the impact of ROLEX.COM by 2000% on all KPIs – increases in unique users, repeat visits, reach, strategic positioning, average time spent per visit…
Patrick Heiniger has passed away since, and here is the perfect place for me to honor the memory of this visionary marketer and leader.
He breathed life into the Rolex brand and defended it against all dragons. He achieved maximum vertical integration of the Rolex value chain, concomitant with maximum quality and profitability. His resolve, expectations and support made my crowning achievement with ROLEX.COM possible.
Patrick was tough, very, and generous, very much. He was Rolex.
+2000%
ROLEX.COM global impact increase
across KPIs over my 5 year project tenure
Ashes and snow
Ashes and Snow is the work of filmmaker and photographer Gregory Colbert. An epic celebration of man and nature, his iconic images have started to infiltrate our collective unconscious.
The Nomadic Museum is a temporary exhibition hall for his work, the all-time attendance record-breaking exhibition for a living artist. The Nomadic Museum migrated from New York to Los Angeles, then to Tokyo and Mexico City.
I served as Managing Director of Flying Elephants Inc. in New York from 2005 to 2011. I managed the business operations and exhibitions as well as the relations with the exclusive sponsor of Ashes and Snow, Rolex. I supervised building and operation of the Nomadic Museum in Santa Monica and Tokyo. It was an almost unsurpassable emotional journey. All the credit for the amazing success lies with Gregory and his art. Helping to realize his vision is sufficient upon itself.
I was present at SIGGRAPH 1989 in Boston where Jaron Lanier demonstrated the first virtual reality application. I conceived and produced the Zócalo, Mexico City, Nomadic Museum 3D VR walk-through and Zócalo model using the Unity game engine, which is forward compatible with the newly released Oculus Rift and other VR headsets. At the time there were no drones so we sent up a small balloon with a camera to get the aerial view of this central square of Mexico City since the time of the Aztecs. VR of what was real for a moment and is not anymore: The ephemeral exhibition building which was real for only 3 months in 2009 is thus preserved in VR in every real detail with enhanced immersive features expanding on every aspect of Ashes and Snow.
Many many visitors emerge from the exhibition moved to tears, literally crying, unable to express exactly why and how they became so involved. Fuji TV Events, Japan's largest event organizer whose promotions include art, concerts, and entertainment of any kind, conducted an exit poll at the Nomadic Museum in Tokyo. The result was the highest satisfaction number they had ever recorded: Ashes and Snow exceeded the expectations of 92% of visitors.
Gregory Colbert makes us remember dreams we thought forgotten.
15 years is Gregory's creative cycle before he offers new works to the world. That time is near.
NM Santa Monica timelapse
Gregory Colbert
VR of NM Zócalo (video)
ashes and snow (movie excerpt)
92%
Exhibition visitors expectations exceeded : Best exit poll number ever for Fuji TV Events, Japan's top event organizer.
Bespeak is the only existing software with taste. Fashion style taste, that is. The Bespeak personal stylist app downloaded 200,000 times served as proof of concept that styling taste can actually be encoded. We went beyond styling outfits by matching clothes with individual appearance in terms of eye, hair, and skin color, body type, neck length etc., in effect allowing to activate the individual physique in the online shopping experience.
In 2010, I co-founded Bespeak Inc. in New York with Alan Flusser, the tailor extraordinaire who styled Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1, author of the best-selling men's style book ever, "Dressing the Man". We developed the most complex app of its day with more than 50 look-up tables. It was rated in February 2012 by industry experts for The Times of London as one of the top 500 smartphone apps out of over a million.
The business objective was to offer an alternative to collaborative filtering for apparel e-commerce websites in order to enable better matching recommendations based on aesthetics, personal preference and individual appearance. Still today, clothes and styling recommendations are either random, hand coded, or based on what other people with similar browsing history bought. Usually that bears no relation to what you look like or what matches the outfits on offer, or those you own.
We found resistance to our disembodied recommendations engine from designers who otherwise do not mind personal stylists. Yet Bespeak enables recommendation personalization beyond anything in existence in the most difficult and highest growth potential segment of e-commerce, apparel.
The next step for Bespeak is to explore its potential in IoT, the Internet of Things.
video demo of
Bespeak app V.1.0
Alan Flusser & Chris Bruck Patent
TOP 500
Out of 1 million smartphone apps
(The Times: 2012)
In 1994, I co-founded EOL, the first Internet portal, and arguably the first web start-up, in Europe. I served as Managing Director under my co-founder and CEO, Jürgen Ziessnitz. I knew Jim Clark, co-founder of Netscape – the first graphical interface web browser – from a previous venture and got the lowdown on the World Wide Web in person from him at Mosaic Communications (the name before it became Netscape) headquarters in Mountain View. We pivoted our business model right away.
The EOL shareholders were three media conglomerates from Germany (Burda), France (Matra-Hachette), and the UK (Pearsons).
Touring Europe alongside AOL and Compuserve executives to promote Internet services, we told crowds how the Internet would change their lives, how a million people would embrace it and how some people might even spend money...
The company's strength were the shareholders allowing our rise to prominence, and they were its weakness too. While they fought for control of EOL, Deutsche Telekom and AOL struck a deal that, combined with the rise of Yahoo!, would eventually overcome EOL. The shareholders refused an agreement I had negotiated with Netscape to acquire 10% of Netscape stock pre-IPO. It turned out to be the biggest IPO of all time up to then. Epic fail, as my teenage son Ilya would say.
In 1995, I was the keynote speaker at the first Global Online Summit in Brussels.
Those pioneering days of the Internet as we know it remain as one of the most exciting and gratifying experiences of my life.
80X
Multiple on second round valuation
1st
Internet Portal in Europe
VOBIS
KIKUOKA
JSTV
SYNCAST
My first marketing move was a golf balloon. Yes. Brokering, then building this Japanese golf course and hotel was challenging as a first job (Managing Director), and even more so the system of golf memberships which are in fact tradable securities that had to be registered with the Luxembourg equivalent of the US SEC. All memberships sold out, and I credit the golf balloon. It was also smooth flying. (1989 – 1990)
I conceived the creation of Japan Satellite Television, a Japanese-language satellite pay-TV channel broadcast in Europe by the Astra 1B satellite.
Advisor to the Chairman of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.).
I wrote my Ph.D. thesis using this venture as a case study.
(1990 – 1991)
SEVP Value-Added Services with VOBIS, Europe’s largest PC manufacturer and retailer with 500 outlets, part of the Metro conglomerate.
I created FIXIT, an innovative human plus Internet-based customer service initiative for computers; deployed throughout Europe. This turned Vobis customer support into a differentiator and revenue-generating asset.
(1997 – 1998)
Syncast was a program-once, deploy on all operating systems, synchronized interactive broad- and webcasting for TV operators. As SEVP BizDev, I launched “N24Online”, the first web-based synchronized interactive TV news channel, with Kirch Group. Sadly I watched the 9/11 attack live on our channel in Munich, just as I had stepped off a plane out of NY.
(2000 – 2002)
BLOCKCHAIN
Blockchain is The Next Big Thing: a decentralized tamper-proof public ledger that was invented as the underlying pipework of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, blockchain has now gained traction independently of the vagaries of bitcoin itself. What if I told you that blockchain will disrupt everything? Even the disruptors of today. Imagine taxi rides à la Über, but without Über, no intermediary required. Or a Google self-driving car that is also self-owned, pays off its construction cost in installments, pays its operating cost from renting out rides, pays for its recyling at the end of its life, and bestows its inheritance to the Red Cross. The rides will cost a third of what they do today. All pre-programmed and executed through a blockchain smart contract (or DAPP, for decentralized app). Now, not only possible, but happening...
This peer-to-peer technology then threatens all intermediaries in all industries and the financial industry took notice first. At the core, key blockchain platforms are FOSS (Free Open-Source Software) such as bitcoin itself, or the new and more advanced Ethereum. All major financial institutions including some central banks have teams or projects building on blockchain technology. Hundreds of FinTech start-ups are out of the starting blocks. Sidechains, alt-chains, colored coins: blockchain technologies are rapidly mutating. But where everything seems possible, it is hard to make out what will really happen, much less what will succeed.
One holy grail of the digital revolution, micro-payment, remains yet to be achieved, and bitcoin for one cannot achieve this because of proof-of-work energy expense. Blockchain latency is a problem as well, and so forth. And what decentralized application (DAPP) will be the killer application to bring blockchain into mainstream use?
From 2018, I served as CMO for the Luxembourg-based APLA blockchain platform project
SoLoMo
My Lux-Airport mission involved an international benchmarking study of 25 airports comparing and analyzing in detail web, mobile, and social practices in order to distill best practices recommendations for the new digital assets. I also made a brand review and suggestions.
The next stage was the development of public tender documents with detailed requirements and priorities. We encourage a seamless user experience (UX) between the new digital assets.
The website and app launched on January 13, 2017.
Social Local Mobile is the digital strategy in the works for the Luxembourg airport authority, Lux-Airport. The goal is to put the travellers at the center of all services and ease their journeys by all means available, seamlessly integrated, always relevant, intuitive and easy to use.
Returning to Europe after almost two decades in New York, I was called to this fascinating mission which is currently under way, with a complete redesign of all web and mobile digital assets.
Reality TV