Modern technology has been changing the way advertising and promotional professionals are able to convey their messages with mind blowing results. All one has to do is pay attention to the growth of digital media and the ability to reach consumers via this platform.  But one challenge of course is how to take this technology and adapt it to non-digital media.

Print advertising is not dead, yet.  Neither is out-of-home. And so the question is how do advertisers (and media platforms) keep these mediums relevant in a world where everything seems to be tracking towards an almost exclusively digital focus? I recently came across three campaigns – all internationally activated, as a matter of fact – that stood out to me as great examples of adopting technology for what would have in the past been a strictly two-dimensional “old media” tactic.

First, there’s the WiFi Poster:

Most of us think the poster is a vintage, if not outdated media. But in Korea they recently came up with an idea that will probably make us change our minds. The WI-FI poster, or the Poster 2.0 is a traditional poster “pimped” and transformed into a wireless hotspot. The technology is embedded or, better, hidden behind the poster, and it’s automatically activated once a user approaches the hotspot prompting the user to connect to the open network that has the name of the movie that is being promoted.

Similarly, there’s the Music Festival Posters:

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Last year I had a few opinions about South By Southwest and so I’ve decided to sit this year’s event out.  No Austin for me.

Are you going? Are you there now? Care to share your stories about this year’s version and whether I was way off bases last year?

In the meantime, I leave you with this: South By Southwest. Is It Worth It?

Chill tunes for a mellow morning.

One thing I can confidently predict is that we will be surprised and amazed by technological advancements that will grow at exponential rates. Other than that, I’ll let others attempt to predict the future:

Information Is Beautiful Studio have compiled 38 predictions about the future of tech, science, and humanity in general — with an educated guess as to their odds of actually becoming reality. There are predictions for all kinds of tastes: your computer will have a sense of smell, Pinterest will be bought by Google, the appearance of the first human clones, the territory of the moon will be claimed by china, and many more.

A colleague shared the below video with me recently. Worthy of a share:

Recently I addressed the year that Instagram has been having and my personal thoughts on the platform. The year has gotten better:

Instagram saw its busiest day in its history on Turkey Day.  While Halloween may seem like the best time to post and share photos of friends in crazy costumes, it turns that doesn’t come close to the joy of taking pictures of food.  While this doesn’t come as a huge surprise, 10 million photos in 24 hours is still a pretty massive number…given how fast Instagram keeps adding users, we expect this record to not last long.

The meteoric rise of Instagram truly is a marvel.

But what does this mean for the marketer and especially in the live event space? Simple. It’s the use of photography to amplify the live event that gets me exciting. And with the ‘democratization of photography’ and the decreased barrier to entry that Instagram provides the average person, photographing and sharing one’s live experience is ubiquitous. Live event marketers need to embrace this technology – among others – to share the experience, generate greater impressions and in the case of sponsorship sales, then provide those views to potential brand partners.

Amplifying the live event experience is the key. Leverage the resources to do so and the event lives on.

[UPDATE:] Recent news opens up an added opportunity. Don’t sleep on Flickr.

[UPDATE 2:] Here’s a guide to 20 Brands That Are The Masters of Instagram.

I’m a bit late to the party – this is from 2010 – but it’s still impressive.

This video depicts events in a stylized Los Angeles and is told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and mascots.  It won at the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals and won a 2010 Academy Award for animated shorts:

Your’s truly is featured in the new FRUKT’s 2012 “Field Work” Festival Report. To download a copy, go to FRUKT Insights.

A taste:

In essence it’s not always about how much bang you can get for your festival buck. Successful activations come in all shapes and sizes, from all-singing, all-dancing epic installations to the most humble and basic of sampling initiatives. Being true to the ethos of your brand and the festival audience is of paramount importance. “Today’s youth culture is probably the most  cynical ever and they know when they are being marketed to. There’s no getting around that”, says Machurov, “but if a brand builds an experience that speaks to them in a language they can understand – being cool, genuine and providing them with a useful service – then the fan will fully appreciate this and respond accordingly.”

For more info on FRUKT’s history of reports, I’ve written about them here and here.

Social media is evolving at breakneck paces. New technologies seem to pop up out of nowhere and grab our collective attentions and, in some cases, simply never let go. I ask you, did you see Instagram coming from a mile away back in 2010? I didn’t.

Here’s an infographic of social media trends waiting to take off.  Would be nice to come back to this at the end of 2013 and see which predictions were right…and which took a nose dive:

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Instagram is trendy. Instagram is cool. Instagram is addictive. Instagram is changing the way we all view the art of photography…and the world around us.

Back in April, the news was big. Instagram, a small but rapidly rising tech company was snapped up by Facebook for a cool $1 Billion. The shock waves were for felt immediately.

As Instagram is now ubiquitous in our Facebook feeds and almost everyone I know shares their lives through the photo-sharing app, an opinion piece written in WIRED caught my eye and basically voices my personal feeling about the technology. The filters associated with the app have “democratized photography”. Anyone can be a photographer now as long as they have the tools (read: filters) to make their photos look professional at best, and not horrible at worst. Where as the average person’s past best attempts at taking a photo resulted in a poorly framed shot, insufficient – or too much – lighting, and red eyes, the Instagram technology has allowed everyone to share a quality shot…whether purposefully or not.

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