I was honored to be asked to speak about CloudTags this week at NYU Stern at the L2 event called “Social is Media.” L2 is the leading think tank across luxury, beauty travel and CPG. Scott Galloway is the Founder and among other things you may remember him as the Founder of Red Envelope.

We were invited to present our work and case on Drop Dead Clothing. For those of you unfamiliar with it, we offered tablets to customers in the store to engage in social sharing. They could play immersive games as well as log into Facebook and share products for a discount based on their interactive experience. Over half of the customers in the store engaged and we increased sales. Here is the full Drop Dead case study.

I first spoke with Scott about a year ago on a phone briefing regarding our work. I’d enjoy being a member but it’s not in the budget yet. Although membership is expensive (at least if you aren’t Gucci or Polo) it seems worth the investment with innumerable reports and over 50 events annually on digital intelligence.

The event was a half-day workshop. Scott started with a summary of social and retail. Basically he said that social hasn’t driven commerce results. It has kind of changed interactions with customers, but not to the extent that many hoped. It has created new audiences but now those are being bought just as other media, on a CPC and CPM basis. He covered Facebook’s domination and success in the space. YouTube and other video content is reaching more of the young audience now than TV. Twitter is the leader for dual screen (on your device while watching TV) interaction. He was very down on Pinterest in that they haven’t figured out a monetization strategy in five years and keep changing direction. When you look at the comparative numbers of Instagram and Pinterest, I can see his point. Pinterest is getting crushed. There was also discussion of up and coming Asian platforms like Weibo, the “Twitter of China.”

Dove presented in the morning and discussed the power of social around their genius piece called Dove Real Beauty Sketches: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk and the parodies: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Jiwo3u6Vo

They are both worth the watch.

All in all it was a fun day and a glimpse inside an organization that I admire and hope for us to join one day. I’m looking forward to doing it again.