Marketing Digital, June 14 2010
JENNY SMITH, Creative Director, Target Marketing, St. John's
What are the latest, greatest ad technologies or media in this world of tomorrow?
3D, virtual reality, holograms and Gabble. Everybody’s got 3D glasses or 3D contact lenses. They’d be tailored to your interests and preferences so ads would appear based on psychographics and demographics. Virtual reality would allow anyone to sample any product or service. Holograms would pop up at opportune times to remind you to buy stuff. And then there’s Gabble: much like Google, but you can have a conversation with a search engine and it’ll help you find what you’re looking for.
Picture a busy cityscape: what does outdoor advertising look like?
Bye-bye static billboard. Hello holograms and robots. Think OOH advertising that interacts with people, fully equipped with scanners and facial/profile recognition, allowing the consumer to be placed, in real time, in the ad.
Are there ads inside the average home? If so, where?
Ads will be embedded in appliances. If you’re low on bacon or beer, your fridge will tell you. It’ll formulate a shopping list and place orders for you at your local grocery/liquor store. Almost like having a wife at home. How nice would that be?
Anything else you’d care to contribute in painting a picture of this fantastical future?
Smell-o-vision. Virtual-reality vacations (like Total Recall). Body scanners for your house so you can buy clothing and, of course, shoes. No more having to deal with bad change room lighting.
JOHN FARQUHAR, Chief Creative Officer, Partners and Edell, Toronto
Picture a busy cityscape: what does outdoor advertising look like?
All advertising will be directed at me. A billboard will say “Hey John, your wife Cindy would love this Buick.” My mobile signal will reach store signs as I drive by. It will n
o longer say Har ry Ro sen, it will say “Hey John, 30% off on Etro shirts, just for you babe.”
What does the average mobile device look like? What can it do?
People love them phones. Here’s what they’re going to do: 24-hour health monitor like that cool Sick Bay monitor on Star Trek, only in your pocket. Cheap enough for everyone, not just the hypochondriacs. A “Relationship To The World Monitor” through Facebook, text messages, phone messages, credit score, bank data, etc. will index my actual place in the world. How popular am I today? An 87! Excellent! How successful? A 63? Better work on that.
What else do you see in this fantastical future?
I do want a silver space suit. And one of those cool intergalactic Barcaloungers for lazy fat guys from WALL-E.
ERIC WEAVER, Account Director/Digital Strategist, Tribal DDB, Vancouver
What are the latest, greatest ad technologies or media in this world of tomorrow?
Consumers will be packing more information consumption and distraction into every second of their day, which will drive advertisers to adopt both more and less-intrusive techniques. Increased intrusion will push consumers to adopt blocking technologies. Tivo-like features will become integrated into car audio systems, allowing consumers to bypass radio spots. Robo-call technology will combine with geolocation services to send voice ads to your phone, which will push consumers to embrace call-blocking technologies. Those without them will be annoyed as hell and will use their phones as texting rather than voice devices.
What does the average mobile device look like? What can it do?
Mobile devices will be built into augmented-reality sunglasses or visors so that consumers have a heads-up view of the information they want, such as the distance to various friends. People will look totally bizarre as they walk around, deep in conversation with others. Voice commands will allow consumers to get the information they want delivered to these visors so that, for example, a bank location and hours can be displayed along with GPS-like directions within the visor.
Mobile devices will also talk directly to the onboard computers within our vehicles, allowing media to transfer effortlessly regardless of location.
Are there ads inside the average home? If so, where?
Consumers will continue to push back against intrusive advertising, and while some incremental gains will be made by advertisers with small on-product ads (think animated cereal box from Minority Report), homes of wealthier consumers will remain relatively ad-free.
SABAA QUAO, Managing Director, Cloud, VP Strategy, Emerging Platforms, The Hive, Toronto
Picture a busy cityscape: what does outdoor advertising look like?
Following São Paulo’s lead when they banned outdoor advertising in 2007, outdoor advertising is eventually banned in most cities by 2020. By 2025, the industry finally finds a use for augmented reality–outdoor advertising returns in full force because it is now only visible through special “advertising enabled” augmentedreality glasses. Seems appropriate: advertising is augmented reality.
What kind of services or content have ads made free?
For
some consumers, things turn out to be better than free. By 2025, ad agencies are paying consumers directly to watch the ads. The most influential advertising consumers are able to earn a living because of the high CPM rates they are paid due to the pass-along influence they command.
What else do you see in this fantastical future?
There are no big agencies left. By 2025, all that remains are roving bands of loosely affiliated art directors, writers, designers and technologists. These post-advertising gangs generate ad concepts and user experiences on the fly and float their creative outputs to an advertising exchange populated by “CPM traders” who, in turn, distribute the ads to their clients. This works quite well until that bubble bursts in 2026, the date of the third cataclysmic advertising dot-com industry crash.
MAGGIE FOX, Founder, Social Media Group, Dundas, ONT.
What are the latest, greatest ad technologies or media in this world of tomorrow?
The notion of the standard display ad unit as we know it will no longer exist. Rather than new standards being determined by size, they will be determined by engagement–can you like, share (on e-mail or the social platform of your choice), comment or mash it up? Instead of physical space it will be about social space–how is the ad social, sharable, engaging? How can it be set free into the world, using consumers’ own networks?
Are there ads inside the average home? If so, where?
If ads are essentially valuable, interesting content, why shouldn’t they be everywhere? Brand messaging is woven into the fabric of almost all the content we consume, offering media companies a new monetization model and brands a highway into our wallets.
What else do you see in this fantastical future?
Brands are going to have to start thinking more like media companies. If you look at the music business, piracy is a huge issue. Their content is so good, people are stealing it. However, for most brands, their content is so lousy most people are ignoring it. The irony is that the business model for the average marketer actually depends on their content being “stolen”–brands desperately want us to share, like, comment and post their content to our networks. They want and need word of mouth, digitally enhanced or otherwise. So, brands are going to have to start thinking differently, and make content good enough to steal. No matter what else in this fragmented, billion-channel universe, people do not get tired of good.
DARREN PEREIRA, President, Co-Founder, Indusblue, Toronto
Picture a busy cityscape: what does outdoor advertising look like?
Plastic displays have matured enough to allow tunnels, light poles, pillars and skate ramps to become screens that react to all kinds of things including pressure, weather, motion and sound. As the city goes through its regular chain of events, so do the ads change based on crowd density, with personal messages being delivered to nearby mobile devices.
What are the latest, greatest ad technologies or media in this world of tomorrow?
Digital projection technology, digital billboards, mobile apps, IPTV and digital tablets are commonplace. All devices talk to each other and through permission- and location-based apps, consumer information is stored and ads are delivered according to a consumer’s interests and buying habits.
What does the average mobile device look like? What can it do?
The average citizen’s mobile device is more like a credit card that plugs into or scans all types of peripherals to do transactions. Standard features like web access, app access, location apps, IPTV channels and video conferencing are all standard.
What kind of services or content have ads made free?
Media as in movies, music and news is all free. The 10-second spot is the most compelling thing and mobile ads are the big winners at Cannes.
Anything else you’d care to contribute in painting a picture of this fantastical future?
Flying cars and air highways. It’s possible!