Raf Chang, CEO of Tiger Party

Today’s episode is a recap of the conversation that I had with  Raf Chang. Raf is the CEO at Tiger Party and even if you haven’t heard of Tiger Party, you’ve definitely seen their work.

Tiger Party is the company behind-the-scenes that brings all those digital billboards together in Times Square on the New Years' Eve to countdown together and create Out of Home’s most famous moment each year and what actually goes on behind the scenes, one night of the year, to pull it all off. And they do it all, from hardware to software, and I think a good way to think about this one is if Elon really wants to put a billboard on the moon, he’s probably going to use Tiger Party to do it.

What did I learn?

That there is an emerging theme amongst guests and Episode 111 guest Stew Redwine put it this way, that “life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans”. Raf was pulling off insane Museum Exhibitions when he got pulled onto a digital billboard project and the rest is history in the making so wherever you are right now, it is only your final destination if you choose it to be, otherwise, wherever you are right now is exactly where you’re meant to be to get to that next chapter, however long that may take, even if you are perfectly happy with where you are. What I’m constantly reminded of from those of you who are driven by the thrill to learn, explore, build, and discover is that it only starts to make sense when you look back…and that the road ahead isn’t always clear but to keep moving in pursuit of whatever drives you.

From there we had a pretty technical conversation about what goes into building the amazing digital spectacular billboards that we see in top cities around the world, like the ones in Times Square for example. Raf went deep on what creatives need to consider when designing for these screens and I think the overarching theme is - if you’re making a huge investment in running a campaign on a digital spectacular, that you have to understand the technical capabilities for two reasons:

1. Most importantly, so your creative retains its integrity and doesn’t end up all distorted or looking like you just resized every other ad from your campaign and threw it up there
2. And two, so you know how to leverage the asset to create the most memorable moment for your brand

Ultimately, asking “what is the job to be done?” is important for advising brands or for, as a 

brand, making the most of your investment, and understanding the technicals is vitally important.

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation to me was about Raf’s team. The team at Tiger Party is the team behind all of those digital billboards in Time Square counting down together on New Year’s Eve which is effectively the Superbowl moment of OOH and comes with an incredible amount of coordination. Each system has a backup and typically each system has multiple backups and the soundbite I wrote down here is specifically about how Raf’s team is structured to handle a potential crisis like a screen going out. For crisis moments like that, Tiger Party dedicates 1 person to fix the problem and 2 people to answer the phone which I think is a really valuable lesson from a customer success standpoint because eventually, you’re going to have something that doesn’t go right, whatever your business is, but that it’s usually easier to have one person focus on fixing the problem and that the best investment is made in having great communication so that everyone is on the same page and expectations are appropriately managed.