Building for tomorrow
Sitting alongside will.i.am during the session was Jonathan Mildenhall, the co-founder of marketing consultancy 21st Century Labs and former chief marketer for Airbnb and Coca-Cola. The two worked together on projects 20 years ago, and re-engaged through College Track, which aims to help disadvantaged students across America go through college.
Mildenhall cited Peloton as one business that would see the content that is “far more authentic” and “far more effective” if it used the FYI platform.
“When the community generates content, and we saw this at Airbnb, you get a deep sense of authenticity, a deep sense of storytelling that is so organic and so compelling that it makes the traditional advertising agency content quite often feel incredibly superficial,” Mildenhall said.
“The big industries that are going to come tomorrow are going to come from communities like the ones that I come from,” will.i.am said. “We have a tool to help solve the problems that humans have ignored our whole entire life.”
And that’s the aim: to make the community the platform’s priority, which means protecting their rights. Will.i.am promised there is no intention to access or sell user data or to compromise their privacy.
“And we grow from there as we build from that principle of the human moral compass on our business practice,” he said.
Adweek reached out to content creator @Cocomocoe for her thoughts on using FYI
Currently, the app is not available on desktop. While I do believe that the future of working is mobile, it would be nice to have the desktop version. I use my desktop to edit videos while using other apps at the same time to grab images, grab links and email with collaborators as the project comes to life. That is harder to do when only on the phone as it forces you to focus on one app at a time.
One bonus of the app is that it is sleek and simple. As a first-time user, I did not struggle to navigate the app.
The biggest push for me to adopt FYI over the other platforms I currently use would be the AI chatbot that is baked in. The public domain AI tools are still relatively new and sometimes difficult to navigate. I have used AI bots on sites before that will crash or give me a limit of questions I can ask in a week. FYI, to my knowledge, has allowed me to use the bot without limit.