Marco Tempest – and dying unicorns

The augmented reality of techno-magic

I admit, it must be this process of becoming a middle-(r)aged man. But I am blasé.  Going to many conferences, listening to the very core of ultimate thinkers, seeing the authors of my favorite books on stage… I love it. But I see that it becomes increasingly difficult to “wow” me, and that I become more and more critical on how people perform and behave.

What I miss most these days is freshness, passion, and a childish fire to share the excitement. If I look at my corporate world: what is the point in trying to get the message across if people, client and/or agency side, get not childishly on fire around a concept or an idea. I learned one thing:  If people in that mythic meeting room without windows are not nodding after a project is unveiled, if you do not see the smiles and twinkling eyes… the project will not fly. Projects need passion. Projects deserve passion. Passion and this innocent fire-within to share are the magic ingredients to make a good project sing, and rock. Passion is magic.

But like unicorns, real magic is hard to find these days. Most of us spend way too much time looking at PowerPoint slides that look like they are made by the Spanish Inquisition, and that are brought by the corporate equivalent of zombies: death inside, but still walking.

Some speakers at #LeWeb brought their keynotes and product demos with about as much passion as I can muster to set out the garbage in a hailstorm. In walks Marco Tempest. Tempest is not a corporate guy. He is a magician, bitten by modern technology. A guy re-inventing his world. A world that is ruled by silly card tricks, a million years old, and black-clad guys sawing curvy underdressed girls in two on stage.

Tempest has burning passion to spare. You see the people shifting from hanging in their chairs to full attention just as he walks in and smiles. A smile that awakes an audience, dear Marco, is worth a fortune.  And then he talks… captivating his audience every single second. Explaining on how he uses bleeding edge technology like augmented reality, crowdsourcing, camera tracking, interactive lighting and cross border social media to give his projects body and existence.

Marco awoke the boy in me. I’m including a video of Tempest, so you can judge for yourself. One sentence of his keynote will be my 2012 motto… “Believe in your magic. If you do not believe in your own magic, how do you expect other people to believe in you?”

That is why we do not see unicorns anymore… we stopped believing in them…