Experience design agency MaxMedia has redesigned and relaunched MaxMedia Lab (max/lab), its onsite creative, research, and development center for customer experience solutions. The Atlanta-based agency’s second-generation lab sharpens its focus on three distinct areas across passive, interactive, and data-driven experiences that correlate with its experience design initiatives across many industries and verticals.
Propelled by the vision of MaxMedia president, Keehln Wheeler, nearly every MaxMedia team member played a role in the redesign. Walking into the max/lab, visitors are greeted with a mix of large-format video walls, interactive experiences, and nuts-and-bolts installations that establish a digital stage to brainstorm, create, and experiment. The entire company of 40-plus employees celebrated the lab’s grand reopening on Thursday, October 26 with a private event attended by regional clients and partners.
Shane Weaver, director of strategy and insights for MaxMedia, was one of several executives and creative staff driving the redesign, along with Don Berg, executive vice president; Jeremy Ciccone, director of technology; and Lauren Herle, producer. According to Weaver, the company made a deliberate effort to understand what resonates today with clients and consumers in the marketplace from an experience design perspective. Those experiences were built into the new max/lab infrastructure, with the goal of producing and delivering relevant experiences across passive, interactive, and data-driven categories.
“The new max/lab does an exceptional job of showcasing tools and environments that support the selling of products and services, and communicating complicated messages in a very human way,” Weaver said. “It provides an easy-to-understand platform to demonstrate experience design solutions to our clients, and at the same time fuels the creative juices of the MaxMedia team. It evolves our lab beyond a showroom feel toward a more fun and imaginative working environment.”
Max/lab addresses a key concern for many retail, hospitality, entertainment venue and other executives of consumer-facing businesses considering an investment in experience design: ROI. To this end, MaxMedia is showcasing some of its projects with AT&T and other clients in the telecom, brick-and-mortar retail, and quick-service restaurant (QSR) industries that demonstrate how to achieve a tangible return on investment out of digital content and experiences.
“One of the goals we have achieved with the max/lab redesign is the demystification of complexities around the more concerning business elements, from ROI to staying on top of emerging trends and technologies,” Berg said. “We demonstrate how IoT products function as an integrated experience in a consumer’s home, and provide data on its value and advantages. The goal is to offer detailed insights into the ROI through pre- and post-deployment comparisons. The new max/lab offers a very multifaceted environment, and we think it is a unique space that will continue to set us apart from other experience design agencies.”
