Michael Balders

I am a creative technologist dedicated to pushing the boundaries of technology to create the best user experience possible, every time. With over a decade of agency experience in the US and Canada, I am constantly striving to deliver exceptional work across all facets of digital marketing.

Featured Work

Cadillac

Cadillac Live

Car shopping is one of two things – impersonal and difficult online or high pressure and stressful in a dealership. Cadillac Live is the future. Shoppers engage with Cadillac brand ambassadors through a 1-way video, 2-way voice, browser-based platform, designed to give shoppers a low-pressure, personalized tour of the Cadillac lineup. This way they get the personal touch of IRL car shopping with the low-pressure experience of shopping online.

Since its Canadian launch in March of 2019 with just one-on-one tours, the Live platform has grown amazingly, expanding service to the US market and adding scheduled multi-user group tours, with support to stream on social. It has even been used to host special events, including live vehicle reveals.

Being first to the market with a digital showroom put Cadillac in a unique position in March 2020. The ability for customers to connect with the Cadillac brand in-person, from anywhere, was instrumental in making 2020 Cadillac Canada’s best sales year ever.

Building off technology pioneered by Live, we launched Chevy MyWay for Chevrolet US in January of 2021.

Sirius XM, Top Comic

Keith

For the popular Sirius XM radio show “Top Comic,” we wanted to show that comedy just cannot exist without comedians. We started by riffing on the idea of voice-controlled speakers and that inspired us to create a speaker named Keith. Keith is a digital comedian that only tells hilariously terrible jokes.

To pull this off, we created the Keith API, which took an input topic and then generated a joke based on word type, definition and a large variety of predefined joke templates. The API brought Keith to life and powered the entire campaign, with Keith appearing as a Twitter Bot, in a massive Vogon YouTube pre-roll campaign and even in a live stand-up set on Facebook Live.

Leon’s

Project Smart Furniture

Our goal for this project was to help families spend more time together, while also showing off Leon’s innovative side. Using off-the-shelf Bluetooth bands and a microcomputer hooked up to a sofa, we collected data on when family members spent time together.

The data we collected was turned into useful insights about who was spending time together, when and for how long. The results were pushed to an app for the family to view, with the goal of helping them to try and increase their quality time together. On top of that, we built a site that outlined the project, explained its purpose and gave interested consumers the opportunity to sign-up to receive updates on how to purchase their own Smart Furniture.

Mohegan Sun

Interactive Golf OOH

Mohegan Sun is a large casino and resort outside New York City. Media secured a large storefront space on Wall Street, near the stock exchange and we were tasked with using it to target Wall Streeters. Since golf is very popular for this audience, we decided to focus on the resort’s golf course, creating an interactive long drive competition. The entire sign-up flow and virtual queue took place on a user’s phone and when it was their turn, they used their phone and its accelerometer to swing the virtual golf club. At the end of each day, the person with the longest drive had a chance to win a golf weekend at Mohegan Sun.

Additional Work

PC Optimum

insiders project

A headless-content platform to support the PC Insiders subscription, this challenging yet successful project was the result of a coordinated, multi-agency delivery effort.