Hi, I’m Adam J. Simon.
I went from directing theater and designing street games to running technology strategy for the world's largest experience company. It sounds like a career change, but it wasn't. The job was always the same: get people into a room and give them a reason to stay.
So that's what I write about. For more than a decade I've been forecasting the drift away from the online attention economy and back toward physical experience. Most visibly, that's meant writing IPG Media Lab's annual Outlook trend report, eleven consecutive editions distributed across Interpublic's global network and read inside companies including Amazon, Netflix, Nintendo, and Sony Pictures. And for eight years I co-created, produced, and hosted Floor 9, the Lab's podcast, which Adweek named the Best Thought Leadership Podcast of 2020. Since 2026 I've been leading emerging technology research at Disney Experiences.
The Lab wasn't only reports and a podcast. We built things for clients too, and the one closest to this book was the NYX flagship in Union Square, where my team wired the brand’s social feeds directly into the store itself. The latest beauty trends from Instagram were pulled in real-time, and matched with products you could use to recreate them. Or scan a product, and recently posted looks from real users popped up on the display for inspiration. That work helped earn NYX WWD’s Digital Innovator of the Year for 2016. For Miller Lite, we built a skill to let you restock the fridge by asking Alexa, which earned coverage in Fortune and Ad Age. And I worked with Johnson & Johnson on the launch of atrial fibrillation detection on the Apple Watch, covered by USA Today. Separately, as an independent consultant, I developed the immersive experience strategy for IMEPILT Studios as it scaled, work The Hollywood Reporter wrote about in the spring of 2020 while asking whether Hollywood would ever go back to normal. Each of these was a bet on how people would behave once a new technology stopped being new.
Reporters at The New York Times, Wired, Digiday, the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and Business Insider have quoted me on what Twitter, Apple TV, Snapchat, the streaming wars, and a postponed pandemic-era Olympics would do to the media business. I've spoken at CES every year from 2016 to 2025, as well as at industry events from Cologne to Bangkok.
Before any of that, I co-founded Socialbomb, a studio that built early mobile/social and connected TV experiences for HBO, Red Bull, and the BBC. Socialbomb was acquired by Refinery29 in 2013. I'm a member of the Television Academy's Emerging Media Peer Group and the Themed Entertainment Association, and I studied directing and themed entertainment at UCLA before a master's at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (gaming, geolocation, social platforms, back when those were three different things). The full CV is at /work.
You Have to Be There: How AI Makes Presence the Last Scarce Resource is a book in progress.
It's still the same job, just with a bigger room.