5 Minutes with... Geoff Renaud

Geoff Renaud is the CMO and co-founder of creative marketing agency Invisible North. Originally an experiential agency, Geoff and his partner Amber Ward pivoted during the pandemic and have since used their content division and creative media department to help to build the future of brand experiences across web3 and traditional spaces.

With Geoff at the helm, Invisible North serves major crypto-native clients including ConsenSys, Coinbase and Algorand, as well as leading traditional brands including Netflix, Bumble & Vimeo. Always capitalising on the hottest emerging tech trends - such as new tools like Jasper.AI and SurferSEO - Invisible North is shaping consumer experiences in new ways, leveraging web3, gaming, the metaverse and more to push the creative limits.

LBB’s Ben Conway caught up with Geoff to discuss his career journey so far, the future of consumer experiences and the technology that is making the experts excited right now.

LBB> What creative content inspired or interested you most when you were growing up? Do any TV shows, films and ads stand out to you?

Geoff> Music was the driving force behind my early creative inspiration and unlocked a whole galaxy beyond my upbringing. We lived in an incredibly diverse household with both parents playing instruments and passionate about all types of music. I grew up in the ’80s and ‘90s in metro Detroit and music was everywhere. ‘The New Dance Show’ was on cable access and ‘The Electrifying Mojo’, possibly the greatest radio DJ of all time, was on the airwaves, and my dad made sure we tuned in. 

At home, we also had all vinyl so it wasn’t just the music you could immerse yourself in, but the artwork as well. When you’re a little kid, those albums were these huge physical items. I remember being seven or eight years old and we had albums like ‘Hell’ by James Brown and ‘Live Evil’ by Miles Davis with this insane, otherworldly cover art. I absorbed all of that and was bewildered by both the music and the visual experience. It helped set me on a path to working in creative fields my entire life.

LBB> You work with clients in an emerging space - web3. How are brands looking to bridge the web2 to web3 gap? What innovative tech and activations are you deploying regularly with your clients?

Geoff> We’ve focused less on helping our brand clients rush into web3 strategies and more on helping native web3 companies (blockchains, hardware like Ledger, exchanges, etc.) tell their stories to consumers. I always joke that I didn't want to ‘build the Skittleverse’ because I knew no one was going to go. 

I do believe that web3 is an evolution of the internet and that value being stored in digital assets is inevitable, so brands will have to adapt at some point. There are so many regulations, security and UX concerns before mass adoption happens that we are supporting infrastructure growth and consumer education as the priority. We work with companies with two feet into the space, versus brands looking to experiment or grab headlines off a transient play.

LBB> When did you co-found Invisible North? What were the key motivators for starting the company?

Geoff> My partner Amber Ward and I started Invisible North in 2013. We had a shared passion for building community, creating experiences and surrounding ourselves with smart marketers with a high cultural IQ. My background was in music production and she was coming from a luxury and fashion background. We saw the opportunity to do something interesting in experiential – which by and large felt pretty cookie-cutter - and I think we’ve done a solid job delivering value for clients while pushing the boundaries of experience.

(Invisible North's SalesCraft Video Game for Intuit)

LBB> Working with major crypto-native clients like Coinbase, what are some of the main opportunities and challenges?

Geoff> We’re lucky that we’ve been able to work with endemic brands in web3, AI, AR, etc. Whether it’s gaming engines, AI-driven virtual world-building platforms or native crypto companies, we’ve attracted pioneering technology firms as our clients. Since we're fluent in these emerging technologies, we get hired faster and there are fewer agencies to compete against. There are also fewer ‘rules’, as these companies tend to be less rigid about their marketing processes and more open to big ideas. We’ve been able to do some incredible work globally because there are fewer preconceptions about how the work should be done and clients tend to be more adventurous.

With all this upside comes the increased risk of market conditions affecting budgets, so you’ll continue to see boom and bust cycles for some of these industries until clear players emerge and regulation and compliance are more established.

LBB> Invisible North was originally an experiential agency - when and why did you pivot? How would you describe the company and its capabilities now?

Geoff> The pandemic was oddly very good to us. We were forced to evolve, invested in our nascent content division in 2020 and grew it into an eight-figure vertical by 2022. Our creative media department was born out of all the OOH buying we were doing in the deep of the pandemic when people couldn’t convene. While virtual conferences mostly came and went, we built gamified learning experiences that engage remote teams that were still running years later.

LBB> What are some of the most useful tech tools that you’re currently using in the CX space?

Geoff> We’re playing with world-building tools like Atlas, which is just coming out of stealth and is a company we invested in. It’s an ultra-powerful, AI-powered engine that creates virtual 3D environments from language commands. A lot of the big gaming companies are adopting it for world-building, and we’re going to be using it to create immersive environments for client experiences.

LBB> What exciting new opportunities do the metaverse and gaming provide marketers and brands right now? How have you harnessed these in your own projects? Tell us a bit about that!

Geoff> Being a company that’s known for building physical experiences for brands, we’re always looking at how to expand our clients’ audience base beyond the physical footprint. We’re excited about digital extensions of physical experiences that have real potential for audience traction. For brands, it might be building a gamified learning environment, like the training game we built for Intuit’s sales team. It was built in the pandemic in place of their annual conferences, but proved so popular that it’s become a year-round training and certification platform we run.

LBB> What recent project are you most proud of and why?

Geoff> Taking over Times Square for Algorand last Earth Day to promote its carbon neutrality and minimal energy use was pretty epic. It allowed us to encapsulate our entire team’s skills: experiential, OOH, media, content, etc. into a program that got a ton of global earned media for a cause we were passionate about.

LBB> What are some of your goals for 2023? What excites you about web3 marketing and using these tools in the near future?

Geoff> We want to continue to evolve and be the leaders in bringing AI and immersive-generated experiences into the world. We’re about to see a true convergence of physical and digital experience and we are building teams to support that. We’re hiring solutions architects and creative technologists to build experiences that are way beyond the boundaries of traditional live experiences.

LBB> What is a technology that people are currently underestimating/under-utilising or that is going to be a big success in the future?

Geoff> Mastering composability in AI, being able to stack tools and architect custom solutions for clients is going to create a massive advantage for agencies. Having expertise in all the amazing resources coming online and being able to combine them for powerful solutions is something we’re working on ourselves. Data scientists, solutions architects, strategists and creatives coming together to build custom tooling is something we’re really excited about.