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Stephen Curry

The woman who used VR to sell the Stephen Curry basketball shoe

Marco della Cava
USA TODAY
Tricia Clarke-Stone, 39, is the founder of Narrative, an ad and marketing company that is on the forefront of using technology to bring consumers deeper into the worlds of their favorite brands.

NEW YORK – The sign on Tricia Clarke-Stone's desk says it all: "Boss Lady."

The 39-year-old runs Narrative, the two-year-old advertising and marketing firm she co-founded with hip-hop business mogul Russell Simmons, with a CEO's strut and a fashionista's flair.

"I want to create an agency for the future," says Clarke-Stone. "It used to be about telling stories, but now it's about creating a narrative that makes you the consumer part of the brand experience."

Indispensable to that task is technology, she says, from leveraging social media campaigns to harnessing virtual reality.

"Tech helps put people inside the story, and if we get the hearts, we get the eyeballs," she says, staying model-cool inside Narrative's 21-person midtown offices despite a broken air-conditioning system. "Tech is critical to this new ad ecosystem."

Her team recently used VR to help Under Armour launch its new Stephen Curry basketball shoe. The company invited journalists and bloggers to a Bay Area event where they experienced key parts of Curry's hoops life through Google Cardboard, the inexpensive paper holder that turns any smartphone into VR goggles.

The Narrative team put together a series of short films that showcased Curry's formative moments as a child, college player and professional with the newly crowned NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors.

"VR is the perfect platform for an immersive brand experience," Clarke-Stone says with a smile. "The shoe sold out."

A visitor to Google's recent developers conference in San Francisco tries on Cardboard, which turns any smartphone into a virtual reality player.

Clarke-Stone leans forward at her desk, which is surrounded by an eclectic mix of pop paraphernalia, including a large crown, Louis Vuitton playing cards, and skateboards.

"We may sound like an ad agency," she says, "but I think of us as an innovation lab."

SIMMONS LIKES HER STREET CRED

Hip-hop legend turned entrepreneur Simmons thinks of Clarke-Stone as a force.

"She's brilliant, in part because she grew up in hip-hop and is connected to urban popular culture in a profound way," the Def Jam label founder says of his Brooklyn-bred friend, who he tapped back in 2009 to help run his digital company, Global Grind.

"Whatever we put her on, she always offers something unique, and her use of tech in branding is really on the forefront," says Simmons. "Today's marketplace moves so fast. Making a brand stick with consumers has never been more difficult. But Tricia always finds a way."

And that way increasingly will rely on tech developments, says Maureen Morrison, who covers agencies for Advertising Age.

"Advertisers and agencies are still working to figure out how to best adopt tech like VR on a bigger scale, and I do think in the next year or two we could see wider use of it," says Morrison, noting that Cardboard last week took the top prize in the mobile category at the Cannes Lions International Festival for Creativity.

Judges called Cardboard an "enabler" for a variety of ad-content submissions.

"Narrative's use of Google Cardboard isn't necessarily unique, though they are ahead of others," she says. "Marketers do talk about reaching millennials through mobile and other tech, but the fact is that's also just the way the world is moving."

When Narrative was asked by Universal Pictures to help promote the Ice Cube/Kevin Hart comedy, Ride Along, Clarke-Stone decided to lean on the short-video platform Vine and its top influencers. Fans of the comedian and rapper-turned-actor were asked to submit clips in an effort to "crack the Ice," or make Ice Cube laugh, which played on Cube's character's stern on-screen demeanor.

"We were able to create an extension of the Ride Along story before the movie even came out," says Clarke-Stone. "The simple truth is, there is so much vying for our attention these days that brands need to create multi-dimensional experiences for consumers using all the platforms that are out there."

'THE ONLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN IN THE ROOM'

Clarke-Stone wants to make clear that her pursuit of the cutting edge doesn't see color. "We are not a multi-cultural agency, which often is code for catering to just African-Americans and Hispanics," she says. "We're a cross-cultural nation, so that's what we're focused on."

Narrative used Google Cardboard to help promote Under Armor's latest Stephen Curry shoe; the NBA star is shown here during a recent filming session for the video game, NBA 2K16.

That's not to say issues of race and gender don't play a role in her everyday existence.

"In many meetings, I'm usually the only African-American in the room and often the only woman," she says matter-of-factly, recalling one such gathering at a major company where another female executive who had to leave early whisper to her, "It's great to see another woman in this boardroom for once."

As for her frequent treks to Silicon Valley, where she often meets with venture capitalists to pitch Narrative's services to portfolio companies, "they're usually 100% surprised to see me," she says with a laugh.

"One at least said what they were thinking, 'It's not everyday you see an African-American woman running a successful company,'" she says. "So it's a daily effort to change perceptions."

To that end, she and Simmons recently talked about Narrative doing some pro-bono work for the New York Police Department.

"When I hear about Charleston (where a white supremacist killed black churchgoers) and the issues with police brutality, it immediately makes me think that it's my job to figure out how to change things," she says, suggesting that perhaps there is a way to use tech and storytelling to "help officers clarify their perceptions of the communities they police."

She picks up Cardboard and twirls it around.

"Maybe we can use this to bring (police officers) into the lives of the people they're serving?" she says, eyebrow arching. "It's just an idea. I have a lot of them."

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