By: Griffin Platto
This Thursday, we have the exciting opportunity of welcoming Jeff Joanisse to Room 176 in Lake Ontario Hall. For a brief introduction, Jeff Joanisse is the co-founder, creative director, and executive producer at Th3rd Coast in Grand Haven. To prepare for the meeting, take a look at some of the questions I had the pleasure of addressing to the rockstar himself, Jeff Joanisse.
On an average day, one could catch Jeff being simply very busy. With all his jobs and duties, there are many things you could find him doing such as, “meeting with clients, writing proposals, and managing the creative process of the projects that we have on our docket.” It sounds like a lot to juggle, right?
Considering Th3rd Coast’s unique agency mission, I thought it would be advantageous to ask how Th3rd Coast approaches solving opportunities for their clients. In response, he said they pride themselves on being a business solutions company that strives to answer these opportunities and problems through digital media—their expertise.
To me, XR, or extended reality, experiences are a fairly new technology. If you look at the virtual reality headsets for any video game, it opens up a whole new world, literally. In concept, the idea of integrating advertising and XR experiences is quite curious. With that said, Th3rd Coast adopted XR experiences overtime and were up to the challenge. Jeff said, “The XR push really came from my partner, Joe who realized the opportunity and the inevitable need of XR solutions in training but also in marketing and advertising. We have spent a lot of time over the past couple of years investing in these opportunities which now seem to be truly taking off.”
I also asked him how they managed using complicated, innovative technology while also maintaining genuine, real relationships. He said, “. . . Relationships are relationships and we build our business off strong relationships because our customers know that that we can help them solve their problems.” Their clients respect their expertise and solutions. Jeff went on to add that they have a lot of “tools in their toolbelt to solve a problem,” the challenge is figuring out which tool will hit the nail right on the head.
Th3rd Coast’s foundations lie upon a strong base of marketing, journalism, and entertainment—it made me curious how did such diverse fields combine into such a successful, groundbreaking digital media agency? Jeff responded with, “At the heart of everything we do is storytelling, problem solving and trying to make people better—at something.” This statement resonates true to all involved in the industry—we are storytellers. Depending on what agency or corporation, title or role, we are authors informing and persuading our audience, based on the story we choose to tell.
If you wanted to know a little more about Th3rd Coast, here’s a quote from Jeff—”Our ability to create user-centered solutions that solve business problems and hopefully engage and entertain the user or learner—that’s the essence behind everything we do.” If that wasn’t a culmination of a company, I don’t know what is.
If you’re not already excited about our talk this Thursday—you should be now! Be ready for fun, fascinating info, and a little bit about what XR experiences are like in the world of advertising.
Because things get real, real fast 
Leave a Reply