Wendr “Stop Checking In”
Billboard, 2012
- Role
- Co-Founder & Chief Engineer/Creative
- Relationship
- Fifteen months, founding to farewell letter
- Target
- A launch billboard for SXSW 2012 that sells the result of a social-planning app rather than its screens
- Constraints
- 2012 · a launch season compressed into four months · out-of-home, so one image and one line carry the entire company thesis · competing for attention against the check-in culture the product was built to correct
- Force fielded
- Sam Zises and Nick Charney Kaye — co-founders; Dan Zimmer — photography
- Time-to-dispatch
- v1.0 in the App Store February 8, 2012; public launch at Social Media Week NYC February 13; this billboard at SXSW in March
- Result
- Launched, and won twice in the same year: Thrillist + Samsung's “Speed Dating for Startups” (100+ applicants, judges including Ben Lerer) called it the most technologically advanced, and Budweiser's startup pitch (300 applied) put it behind the “Grab Some Buds” app. “Wendr powered by BlackBerry” launched across Latin America that December
- Principal
- Wendr — the studio operator's own co-founded venture
- 2 startup competitions won, 2012Archival · 2012
- 400+ applicants beaten across the two fieldsArchival · 2012
- Latin America BlackBerry launch, Dec 2012Archival · 2012
Stop checking in. Start hanging out!
Displayed at SXSW 2012 for the launch of Wendr — the “find your night” iPhone app co-founded by Sam Zises and Nick Kaye (Co-Founder & Chief Engineer/Creative). Photography by Dan Zimmer. The creative: a daytime block party overflowing the stoop of a green Victorian rowhouse — DJ rig in the bay window under the green “w” app icon, a woman on the window ledge, disco ball over the door, a vuvuzela, an inner tube, a forest of red cups — with the tagline in chunky white type on black bars. The billboard doesn’t show the app. It shows the result of the app, at 100% density.
It was launch season, so here’s the launch diary:
FEB 13 2012 Public launch at Social Media Week NYC — “so you can stop 'checking-in' and start hanging out”
MAR 2012 SXSW, Austin — this billboard
2012 Wins Thrillist + Samsung's “Speed Dating for Startups” (100+ applicants; judges incl. Ben Lerer) — “the most technologically advanced”
2012 Wins Budweiser's startup pitch (300 applied) → powers the “Grab Some Buds” app
DEC 2012 “Wendr powered by BlackBerry” launches across Latin America
~MAY 2013 The farewell letter. Fifteen months, fully lived.
The tagline was the company thesis wearing an exclamation point: Foursquare-era social software had turned presence into paperwork — you proved you were somewhere instead of being there. Wendr’s whole pitch, and this board’s whole copy, was the correction.
This billboard is the out-of-home sibling of the Wendr “Vallery Girl” :30 spot — one launch, two media. Epilogue: the team evolved into [L]earned Media, whose first clients included a certain magician already in this portfolio.
A decade before the manifesto wrote presence over avoidance down, this billboard was shouting the consumer version of it at Austin traffic. Avoidance had a UI in 2012, and it was the check-in button. The correction still stands: attention matters. Go where your body is.
Record: a 2012 venture, wound up in 2013 — the app is gone, the competition write-ups have rotted off the web, and this page cites none of them as live proof. The launch diary above is the record the founders kept; the billboard is the artifact. What is still clickable is the :30 spot from the same launch.
