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4 really good reasons to upgrade to a 3D TV.

3D TV brings the family together

3D TV brings the family together

Upgrading to 3D TV is inevitable:

Every home electronics manufacturer worth mentioning has jumped onto the 3D TV train. In this year and the next there will be 3D Television sets from Sony, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, and that’s just naming a few of them. If the recently concluded CES trade-show is anything to go by, it seems that everything is being labelled with 3D TV ready or 3D enabled. There are even blue ray 3D players due soon to bring the 3D Cinema experience into living rooms.

Major broadcasters are also upgrading or making contingency plans to go 3D. Ironically just as 3D Cinema has bailed out a dying Cinema culture, which was previously suffering from the proliferation of HD home theaters, TV broadcasters are now hoping that the magic of 3D just may save the passive TV viewing experience! After all, audiences are turning away from the passive model of television broadcasting, and looking at technologies such as Mobile TV and also a “Connected TV” experience. Some initiatives such as Sony, IMAX, ESPN , DIRECTV and others will start 3D TV broadcasts soon.

Content to drive 3D TV is the main concern and everyone in the business realizes that this is what will make or break the 3D TV revolution.

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Will Google create a Surrogate Reality world?

Surrogate Reality:

In the movie Surrogates, we were presented with a look at something that is not too far fetched even today. The idea that we can (will?) have our own Avatar in the form of a robot, that will represent us in the real world and possibly conduct all our social interactions is not far fetched! The video above shows us the technology is already here today. It just needs to be fine tuned, perfected and made cost effective. Price is not an issue for someone who may need such assistance, or “life augmentation”.

Having our own Surrogates, even in a “phase 1″ stage where they are not human like, but just motorized robots with a single arm would still be welcomed. This would benefit people who may be physically challenged, senior citizens and even in circumstances such as Homeland defence. There are already robotic vehicles and remote controlled robots that assist in bomb detection and such, in civil and specialist security forces.

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5 reasons Experiential Agencies could disrupt Digital and Traditional Ad Agencies

Advertising Disruption

Caution: disruption ahead

Birth of The Digital Advertising Agency:

Advertising agencies could soon face a road block. This article will use “could” instead of “will” as it is a very sensitive subject and a topic of heated debate, with no one really wanting to cross path with the established heavy weights that drive an industry that is worth millions, or billions of dollars per year – the Business of Advertising.

The road block in question is the fate of the traditional model of advertising and brand marketing. So far everything was smooth running, no major disruptions, except for a few pot-holes now and then called ‘digital advertising’ which surfaced around the time of the Dot Com boom. However back then, Digital advertising was played down as “online extensions” of traditional advertising. It was literally thought of as a convenient way to show progressiveness of a brand and for more practical reasons such as to offset printing costs, by letting people download an electronic version of a brochure or a postage stamp sized video clip.

No one thought much of Digital Advertising and the webshops, until the past 2 to 3 years, when three things happened. Broad band internet access became widely available to most of the developing world. Secondly, portable connected devices, i.e laptops, and smart phones became cheaper and more wide-spread. The third was a curious phenomenon called Social Networking.  In a broader perspective, technology had become affordable and people were able to communicate and connect with each other faster than ever before.

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7 reasons you don’t need to justify ROI for Social Media Advertising

Social Media ROI and socialnomics

Traditional Media Advertising is out; Social media platforms are in:

If you are one of those in Media and Advertising, having a rough day at the morning breakfast brainstorming sessions in your corporate boardroom or agency “creative den”, trying to convince the “suits” that they need to undo past thinking and make way for the revolution in how advertising and marketing will be done (pause for breath)… then take heart!

Here are 7 reasons to give them something to think about, when your asked that well rehearsed question: “What about ROI? how do we measure and justify ROI on this new fangled social media advertising thing”.

1) ROI becomes a need for justification when spending on Billboards, TV and Print than when signing up a Twitter account or starting a FB page. The investment for this is already part of the salary for one of the junior staff.

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What is Real? – Will social networks augment our outdoor world?

(from The Matrix- What is real?)

Social Media meets Augmented Reality:

The scene above is one of the memorable moments from the movie The Matrix. With augmented reality now becoming a “reality”, this may soon be a question we could be asking ourselves. Every one now knows what the basics of AR are; It’s the overlaying or mixing of Computer generated imagery in proper registration with the live view of our world. It has come to the fore-front because advertising agencies have found a great way to engage audiences and also due to smart phones getting more processing power, built in phone cameras getting better and importantly, computer vision tracking and processing algorithms getting better.

(A digital version of your Facebook buddy in your room?)

Computer generated virtual worlds are not new, and have been “inhabited” by the gaming community for a very long time. Usually also called MMOGs. There are also virtual worlds such as the well known Second Life by creators Linden Labs that has been an online world for quite a few years now. It has all the makings of a social network, and in-fact CAN be called a social network that is much more powerful in what it does than networks such as Facebook and MySpace. The reason that it may not be as widespread as the latter social networks, is because it is a computer generated 3d world that needed fairly decent PC hardware to run. I say needed, because hardware and technology has rapidly become cheaper and more accessible than ever before, Today’s notebook PCs are more than capable of handling the graphics demands of this virtual world. There is even talk of a smart phone version of Second life coming out.

What if we were to think of FaceBook as a huge computer generated 3D world, just as in second life, where each users FB page was actually a 3D model of their house? The same goes for a person’s or company’s LinkediN profile. What if these social/business networks were to use the Second Life visual depiction and networking analogy?. So the LinkediN profile of a company like Google would actually be a 3D model of the google campus or at the very least a simple 3D building that you “enter” with your avatar, and roam around learning more about the company.

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Nightclubs – The ideal media platform for targeted Digital Advertising

Digital Advertising in Nightclubs

Digital Advertising in Nightclubs

Targeted Digital Advertising; the “Why”

Targeted advertising is “in”; mass media advertising is out. We can already see how in-effective mass media advertising is, with the decline in revenues faced by traditional media delivery platforms such as television and print. Even Digital mass media advertising is slowly suffering, with the introduction of built in email spam filters and laws against cold calling and unsolicited SMS coming into force in many countries. It was always a hit and miss affair anyway. The idea that you spam everyone,  and hopefully attract or trap many.

With control of media consumption now in the hands of the consumer, there is a focus on media delivery that places importance on quality over quantity. Just as the shift from traditional to Digital Media by consumers allows them granular control over what they consume, the same advantage can be used to the benefit of the advertiser, tailoring and targeting the brand message to a desired demographic, thereby achieving a higher and measurable success rate, than blindly “broadcasting” a message that never reaches the audience because of automated filtering and end user control.  Targeted Digital Advertising can be applied to segments of society, such as the financially more stable Senior Citizen, but focus has always been on the cool and younger Gen Y or Millennials, as an audience .

Targeted Digital Advertising in Nightclubs; the “How”

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Mixed Reality Advertising – The evolution of outdoor Billboards

Augmented Reality - Hybrid Billboards

Augmented Reality - Hybrid Billboards

Digital Personal Space – the evolution of Human Interaction.

Of all the established media platforms, nothing is more effective for outdoors or out of home (OOH) advertising, as the ubiquitous Billboard. Whether on a bus shelter, a unipole or indoor locations such as malls and underground tubes or metro stations, the billboard is the single most effective way of attracting public and consumer attention.  However, just as people have accustomed themselves to “tuning out” to television adverts, many people today, automatically tune out to billboards, while walking on a city streets. Unless the billboard is of a sizable display, it does not easily catch the attention of passers-by.

Advertising and Marketing agencies are soon finding out that people’s lives are greatly influenced by all things “Digital” and this is where advertising and media delivery focus has shifted to. It makes complete sense that if eye-balls are glued to either a laptop screen or some other such personal digital display, such as cell phones, then Digital Advertising has come off age. The key phrase here is “personal displays”. As technology gets cheaper and more widely accessible, another interesting phenomenon gets noticed, the concept of “personal space” takes on a whole new meaning.

It is interesting to note human behavior in a typical city today, from walking on the street, to riding a bus or metro. People who are not tethered to a digital device such as an Ipod or a cell phone or their net-books, are the only ones who look around them, at other people and may maintain that invisible little boundary around them – personal space. Meanwhile people who have a pair of headphones on, or are accessing some sort of information on their smartphones or laptops, effectively tune out to the world and the older concept of personal space, and switch on their Digital Personal Space.  In effect they do not mind as much, being jostled around a bit on a crowded bus, and do not mind crowds whizzing past them on a street – as long as their Digital Personal Space has not been invaded or disrupted!

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Why Advertising Agencies need a Think Tank department.

Advertising_marketing_think_tank

Modern Advertising agencies have standard departments that work in sync with each other to formulate an ad campaign and service their clients. There is the Creative department, Account Services and Media Services. Each advertising agency may also have more departments that are unique to them. Some newly formed divisions in traditional agencies will include the Digital Division that has now become a must have, as technology and Online Digital advertising is becoming a message delivery vehicle to the masses and a platform not to be ignored.

It is this fact – Technology and Digital, becoming entwined with advertising in the recent years, that has actually opened up the need for a more high level “Think Tank” division to be implemented for the benefit of an Advertising Agency. Nowhere in the past few decades has technology been so central to influencing the method of advertising as has been in the past decade or more precisely the past 5 years. As Marketing and Ad agencies start off the new decade in 2010, it is certain that two terms; “technology” and “Digital” will be the buzz words that drive the success of forward thinking agencies.

Media Delivery Platforms – Old and the New:

Television, Radio, Newspapers and Billboards were the traditional and well established advertising and media platforms to the masses up until the past decade. There was an initial spurt of online advertising that suffered a heavy blow during the dot com bust. It’s after that, very slowly and cautiously that the online digital platform started picking and soon started becoming a force to reckon with. Today’s online digital influences that cannot be ignored are phrases such as “Social media marketing”, “Twittering” and “Mobile marketing”. These new media delivery platforms have opened up a whole new methodology for advertising and influencing consumer behavior and reaction to products, brands and services.

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