by Jonathan Marshall

Tali Krakowsky from Creativity Online wrote an unbelievable blog about augmented reality and how it is helping to blend our physical and digital environments. Augmented reality will quickly become a very effective tool in digital and interactive strategies for many advertising campaigns in the near future. In today’s digital world- any new, fun and shiny toy like this quickly gets stripped down and exhausted by techies in marketing and advertising agencies everywhere. The best part about new technology is discovering all the different settings that you can apply it in. Tali goes on to discuss and show the different ways augmented reality is already being used right now.

Adding a virtual dimension into our physical environments is not a trivial matter. Introducing digital bytes into our building materials is a revolution that is even more significant than fabrication and construction developments in glass, steel and concrete. As the distance between the virtual and physical world collapses, our relationship to our spaces, information and each other changes.

Here’s a fascinating example of how the physical enters the virtual. This augmented reality iPhone App, currently pending Apple’s approval, maps infinitely valuable New York and London Subway information directly into real spaces.

This in no way compares to hanging a subway map on your wall or even carrying one in your pocket. It also transcends anything that you could experience through Google Maps on a mobile device. This application is much, much smarter and more seamless. It thinks and extrapolates data. It delivers highly-curated information and places it directly into our living environments.

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Where it goes from here is so exciting to think about that I have to stop myself from typing. How rich, interesting, intelligent, entertaining, informative and personalized our experiences can be through these digital lenses remains for us to invent and create. (For more on this technology, augmented reality, and how it’s being used on mobile devices and in gaming, check out this Creativity feature.)

Inversely, here’s a stunning project that blends the virtual into the physical. This facade projection project by urbanscreen transforms a two-dimensional surface into a multi-dimensional space by adding depth, time and sound.

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Don’t think you’ve seen this done before just because you’re familiar with the idea of architectural projections. What’s most compelling about creating interfaces that mix media is that the content and the way in which it is applied becomes the innovation.

We are all familiar with the iPhone screen and an architectural facade as interfaces. What’s infinitely fascinating to me is how conceiving of content that is intimately linked to its virtual and physical interfaces (the screen and its surrounding architecture) can change the way we live.

Overstatement? Maybe. Maybe not.

by Jonathan Marshall

It’s official, digital marketing is no longer considered trial and error. Most marketing experts agree that the effectiveness of traditional marketing will most likely stay the same or decrease over the next few years. What will replace those mediums are new, digital channels where users can contribute- Twitter, Youtube and Mobile marketing. And even though many business applications of social media remain to be proven today, most marketing experts also agree that the effectiveness of those channels will increase dramatically. What does this all mean? The result is that digital marketing, which currently holds a little more than 10% of overall advertising spending in 2009, will most likely double in the next five years. This is obviously great news for digital marketing agencies like Jacob Tyler. Josh Bernoff from Digital Next goes on to talk about Forrester Researcher and their 5-year marketing forecast including trends, conditions and very convincing statistics in his blog below.

Here’s one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you’ve ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

This means that inside every projection is an idea or ten about the future. Those ideas can be powerful, and they come from research with marketers and consumers.

My colleague at Forrester, Shar Van Boskirk, just published our five-year interactive marketing forecast. The idea inside it is the real kicker.

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.

It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

It means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

And it means that social “media,” which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn’t even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I’ve learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you’re in advertising, you’d better learn to speak digital, because that’s the way the world is going.

by Jonathan Marshall

In addition to last week’s discovery of Handerpants, and in the spirit of reiterating just how effective viral marketing truly is, today’s post is an online video for Samsung from digital marketing company The Viral Factory. Although I found the video on Creativity Online, it has just over 10,000 views on Youtube. And while the video responses are mixed between lovers, haters and morons who get stuck debating whether or not the video is real (common guys- it’s an ad, of course it’s not real)- it gets people talking regardless. That, like I said last week, is the point of Viral marketing, creating a buzz in today’s user-generated content environment.

In the video, Samsung claims to have set up 32 hidden cameras all over London’s Piccadilly Circus to capture a live stunt. After the stage is set, a UFO flies over the heavily-visited London sector, pauses, and two elephants bungee jump out of the bottom of the ship. After dangling for about a second or so, the elephants get pulled back in the UFO, and it darts out of the picture. After the witnesses rushed to capture the ridiculous spectacle on their phones, only one person is able to show off a photo she snapped with her lightning-fast Samsung Jet. And that’s it.

So how well does that work? What do people think about fake stunts staged to look like real ones? Powerade has a great viral video of Lebron James draining 90ft. jump shots from the opposite-end of the basketball court. Although the flight of the ball, timing and actual jump shot of Lebron all look realistic, anyone who has ever played basketball before understands that it takes way more effort to pull off a stunt like that- even for King James. Whether or not Lebron can make those shots is not the point of the ad, Powerade just wants to point out the ridiculous skills and further hype the bball-phenom dubbed “The Chosen One.” That being said it, like many other Nike, Gatorade and sports virals, has well over 1,000,000 views on Youtube. Most would say that is effective, but what do you say?

by Jonathan Marshall

We have certain expectations of products and of brands, both natural and conditioned. By breaking traditional aesthetic and behavioral boundaries challenger brands are blending the senses, creating synesthesia-type experiences to stand out and define their difference.

This is a pretty clever way to make consumers temporarily stop and think about the advertisement, whether they are shocked, intrigued or even scared. It’s about taking our expectations of brands for a ride, and showing us that they don’t want to be predictable. For some San Diego Marketing Companies that have been around longer, that might not be the safest approach, they most likely need consistency. But, for the new and undiscovered- take a chance and put some pressure on the typical consumer experience and thought process. Sophie Maxwell of Pearlfisher discusses this unique concept and advertising strategy in her blog below.

There is a moment in the Karl Lagerfeld documentary Confidential where its maker answers a “call of nature” in the House of Chanel to find the following placarded mantra: “Si tu pisses partout t’es pas Chanel du tout” (pissing everywhere isn’t very Chanel). Quite right too I think, as this is evidence of three good things: the fashion industry for once taking itself less seriously, a rare return from said overt glitzy glamor to the famously blunt form and natural style of the house’s original founder, and the fitting extension of this original trademark elegance to their lavatorial standards.

I’m referencing it here not just because it’s a funny little clip, but because it made me think about my main point this week: whether it registers or not, we expect certain behavior from certain brands. We form preconceptions and then levels of expectation (as above) through our relationship to and engagement with their products. We like them to meet our standards and ideals. And this is as it should be, especially for brands that we have come to know and trust. However this shouldn’t stop new blood from challenging the status quo, both in reinterpreting our expectations and experiences and in capturing our imaginations.

While true synesthesia is involuntary–like when people describe being “hurt by” shouts–the idea or theory of one form of sensory stimulation blending with, or suggesting, another offers exciting new creative territories. Here are some interesting examples of new approaches not all following the same principles, but all nonetheless challenging what we know and how we know it. We’re anticipating (and hoping for) more…

Scent by Sight:

Boudicca, the London-based design duo is a favorite. By launching a paint as their first perfume they stayed true to their inspiration–their namesake queen Boudicca–who with her warriors marked themselves with wode, a blue dye, before battle. The blue spray may disappear minutes after spraying (leaving a powerful scent that includes notes of juniper berry, cardamon, nutmeg and amber) but its lasting effect may be to change what we expect from a perfume by bringing sight, not just scent, into the equation. The pack structure is a hardy: a beautiful paint can, rather than the slender dispensers typically used by fragrance houses.

Tasting by Whiffing:

Scent is being used in two revolutionary and quite vice aversive ways. Le Whif is a chocolate inhaler created by Harvard professor David Edwards. Le Whif comes in four flavors and is, he explained in an interview with UK publication The Daily Telegraph, inspired by the opinion “that eating was tending toward breathing, so, with a mix of culinary art and aerosol science, we’ve helped move eating habits to their logical conclusion. We call it whiffing.” As it contains zero calories the diet market can’t be far from his thoughts.

Inhalation/Scratch-and-Sniff Cinema:

“Breathe responsibly” is the disclaimer ingenious duo Bompas and Parr greet their visitors with upon entering Alcoholic Architecture, their pop-up bar in London’s Soho. Here, they revolutionize the intake of alcohol by letting you inhale rather than drink, specifically a nice gin and tonic. Forty minutes of exposure apparently equals consumption of one cocktail.

And that wraps up today’s blog, so in the spirit of synesthesia- smell you later.