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Noble adds third office, Olympics emphasis

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Springfield-based advertising agency Noble Communications recently added an office in Boulder, Colorado, in a strategic move to be near training facilities for Olympic teams. The office serves as home base for the Noble Communications Active team, a small, specialized crew with an emphasis in creative technology. They work with national governing bodies, such as USA Archery and the United States Tennis Association to increase member involvement and interest in the sports.

“These guys are awesome. They are electrifying the whole agency, from Springfield to Chicago,” Noble Communications founder and Chairman Bob Noble said of the buzz in the firm’s other two offices. “They are bringing a whole new level of competence into a fairly traditional agency, dealing with traditional clients.”

Noble Communications began working with USA Archery in 2013 – 44 years after Noble started the full-service ad agency focused on major food brands. The Active team creates the national coach and instructor certification curriculum using video, web delivery, a mobile application and newly designed print resources.

“We saw the value moving into the archery project,” said Shelby Klein, Noble’s director of creative technology.

After winning the bid for an undisclosed amount with USA Archery, the Noble Active team purchased recurve bows in order to learn the sport themselves. 
According to Noble Executive Producer Dex Ballard, such complete immersion allows Noble to fully understand its clients. In this case, learning the bow and arrow was essential to communicating the 10 steps of shooting.

The relationship with USA Archery led to working with the U.S. tennis team in 2014 to help with product development and membership value ideation. The Noble Active team was later charged with creating an experience for USTA at the 2016 U.S. Open. They created a gamified experience, called the Virtual Skills Challenge, for fans and spectators.

“What we came to them with was an open source technology using the Microsoft Kinect and Windows platform to create a gesture-based simulation of tennis drills,” Klein said. 

According to Ballard, USTA officials said Noble had the highest satisfaction rate of any consumer experience on the grounds at the U.S. Open. They reached 4,500 attendees, generated tens of thousands of impressions – all with an experience that took 3 minutes per user activation. 

“We had some adults that would come back five to 10 times in a day,” Klein said. 

Managing the technology behind the experience, Klein said many people returned to beat their own scores and to get atop the leaderboard.  

“We made something that challenged people, that really made them feel that they were connecting with the game at a different level,” he said.

Local assist
Springfield consulting company Brio2 Solutions Inc. was instrumental in developing the Noble team’s relationship with the NGB’s for archery and tennis. 
“We are a connection, a conduit in the pipeline for working with Noble and other sports entities’ organizations,” said Peggy Riggs, co-owner of Brio2 Solutions and a retired deputy superintendent with Springfield Public Schools.

Riggs teamed with Jodie Adams, the retired director of the Springfield-Greene County Park Board, to start Brio2 Solutions in 2011. Noble was one of the first national companies with which they worked. When USA Archery needed to revamp materials, and USTA wanted more member engagement, Brio2 Solutions collaborated with Noble.

Adams said she didn’t anticipate they would remain so busy in retirement. 

“We were both in sports and knew about sports, but I think we were both surprised when the opportunities started coming forward to get involved with various consulting projects,” she said. “It’s all a great accident.”

Hidden solution
According to Klein, USTA plans to invite the Noble Active team back for the 2017 U.S. Open. 

Ballard said improvements to the experience they created would involve a scientific deep dive. They hope to scientifically analyze the skills applied on the court and reverse-engineer them to get the experience onto the Unity multiplatform gaming development tool and turn it into a more invigorating experience. 
“We’re not trying to make something that takes people away from tennis. We’re trying to make something that bridges the gap,” he said. 

The use of media technology is unique since it often has been perceived as the greatest threat to sports. Sedentary behavior is a big driver in youth obesity and the lack of involvement with sports. Media, technology, apps, phone and video games are things that keep kids inside, Ballard said.

But Noble asked: What if the solution is hidden inside the problem? Ballard said this kind of outside the box thinking with open-ended questions allows his team to fully solve problems. Their work aims to build a bridge from the closed-in sedentary environment to the outside world – “to get kids from their living rooms, from their Xbox systems, from gaming environments into a conversation with coaches, trainers, in tennis clubs and parks where you can have events and clinics,” Ballard said. 

Klein said surgeons play video games so they can have better dexterity for performing surgery and that same logic can be applied to professional sports. 
Ballard said he heard attendees at the USTA general session, which involved key stakeholders and the executive committee, discuss embracing technology, digitizing as an organization, putting an emphasis on the future and engaging people in new ways. 

“It’s exciting for us to hear that because that’s the movement we’ve really been trying to encourage,” he said.

Ballard attended the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro alongside USA Archery. 

“We’ve become very close in building these things together. It’s important to have those experiences to know the true value of the world we’re living in,” he said. 

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