Consumers want information everywhere and at all times: from access to their service accounts on phone IVRs, main portals, social networks, and mobile devices, to identifying music with programs such as Verizon’s V Cast Song ID, or iPhone apps such as midomi and shazam. The latest trend is to allow the consumer to easily retrieve additional information on anything they want, lately commercialized using Matrix codes, also known as two-dimensional bar codes.

The most popular matrix code is a QR Code, created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.

QR Codes are used in a broad context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.  Read More »

This is the follow up article to my post “The Paradox of Interactive Marketing”:

Place your hand on a copy of Ad Age and repeat after me: “I am a responsible marketer. I swear I will not contribute to the death of Twitter.” OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at five ways that we can end the Paradox of Interactive Marketing.

1. Read, Read, and Read
I consider myself to be an avid trend watcher but you don’t have to be overly fanatical about this process to be successful. There are plenty of people like me who are sharing their insights every day on their blogs or potentially within your agency. Check out alltop.com to see a brilliant aggregation of some of the web’s best blogs on specific subjects like marketing, social media or trend watching. These people have been doing all the hard work for you while you’ve been wasting time at night sleeping.

Read more here…

Check out an updated and revised view of Paradox of Interactive Marketing at AdAge.com:

One of things I’m obviously passionate about is spotting new trends and potential new marketing opportunities. As marketers we’re all charged with looking for new opportunities to get our client’s brands out there, but to be successful we must be very conscious of timing. When is it too early to recommend a new medium or platform? When is it too late and you’re only adding to the clutter?

This problem is more acute in the digital and mobile space, thanks to the rapid evolution of technology. Let’s take a look at some of the more recent opportunities that I think have passed and use it as a platform to understand how to find the next big thing before it becomes just that — the next big thing.

Continue reading here…

Rob and I wish those of you living in America and Americans overseas a very happy Thanksgiving. I hope all of you are able to spend time with your families and take some time to appreciate all that we can be thankful for.
Check out the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live at Earthcam’s site.

In the words of Sir Francis Drake (and repeated countless times in pop culture since) “knowledge is power”.

As a person that is painfully enthusiastic about the marketing world, I find it very easy to get caught up in some of the more exciting and innovative work that we’re able to produce across so many mediums. It’s very easy to forget the importance of intelligently addressing your message to make sure the right people receive potentially focused and targeted messages.

All of this messaging can only be accomplished through accurate in depth details on people, businesses, places, and things. Building in depth catalogs on places and things is somewhat easy. Building intelligence on businesses is more challenging as they tend to be private by nature and trying to build in depth details of consumers has become easier and more complex at the same time.
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Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.  Read More »

In this tough economic climate it’s important to strive to be your best at your job. There are layoffs all around and we must all aim to please both our clients and our company superiors.

One quick way to do this is impress your co-workers with a skilled series of dares. We have devised the following point system to help you succeed at office dares. Try these out in whatever order you think works best.

One-Point Dares

1. Ignore the first five people who say ‘good morning’ to you.
2. To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
3. Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, “Sorry, I really prefer it this way”.
4. Walk sideways to the photocopier.
5. While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
6. When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn’t you.
7. Finish all your sentences with “In accordance with the prophecy…”
8. Don’t use any punctuation.
9. Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
10. Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.

Three-Point Dares

1. Say to your boss, “I like your style”, wink, and shoot him with double-barrelled fingers.
2. Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
3. Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
4. Every time you get an email, shout ”email”.
5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
6. Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, “dagnamit, it’s happened again!”. Then do it again.
7. Introduce yourself to a new colleague as “the office bicycle”. Then wink and pout.
8. Call I.T. help desk and tell them that you can’t seem to access any pornography web sites.

Five-Point Dares

1. At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
2. Walk into a very busy person’s office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3. For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as “Dave”.
4. Announce to everyone in a meeting that you “really have to go do a number two”.
5. When you’ve picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ‘’she can abort it for all I care”.
6. After every sentence, say ‘Mon’ in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in: “The report’s on your desk, Mon.” Keep this up for one hour.
7. In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, “Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!”
8. At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, “As God is my witness,I’ll never go hungry again!”
9. Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: “Do you hear that?” “What?” “Never mind, it’s gone now.”
10. Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
11. During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
12. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
13. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
14. Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
15. Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, “I’ll see you tonight”.

There’s a great summary of the Motrin social media mishap titled “Crashing Motrin-gate: a Social Media Case Study” on AdAge. It does an excellent job of mapping out the starting point for the chatter and then the tipping point at which it explodes on twitter.

I have to questions whether I think this was worth pulling down for the brand though. I’d be interested to see what percentage of the 300 blog posts (301 counting this one) are from marketing or social media blogs/sites. I think this is a hot subject right now in marketing, but was it really that big when you look at it’s impact on pop culture. Only a couple of hundred thousand people viewed this ad on YouTube. I feel like this might be media going nuts again and making a big deal out of a small fire.

Maybe there was a more intelligent way to respond to the community then issuing a very corporate apology, pulling your site down, and pulling this commercial. Based on some very interesting conversations I’ve been having with our own corporate communications department I’ve been thinking about the best ways for businesses/brands to respond to feedback in the social media space.

This could have been used to engage all of the naysayers into a bigger conversation and in the long term turn them into vocal brand advocates. They should personally message each of the people that commented on Twitter and ask them to get involved on their next ad (in terms of early feedback). Imagine the groundswell of buzz they’d be able to create…

Today was a great day. I really feel like I truly understand hip-hop music now.

The freestyle championship below is shown in it’s translated form. The original can be found after the jump.

Classic….

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As Rob pointed out in an earlier post Adobe announced that Flash 10 would be released for mobile devices with an ARM processor in 2009. It’s easy to skate past this fairly technical sounding press release if you’re in the marketing world, but the implications of what this will do to the mobile marketing landscape are amazing.

For starters ARM devices will be able to view the same Flash sites that traditional Internet users do as opposed to the Flash Mobile only sites they see now. This is somewhat like what the iPhone browser did for regular website browsing.

Smart marketers will still offer experiences that are designed for a mobile experience (i.e. smaller screens, potentially slower bandwidth) but now they won’t be limited in terms of the complexity or media richness. Flash 10 will allow rich mobile experiences that will easily stream video (HD and regular) and integrate with systems like Flash Media Server 2 for collaborative multi-user experiences.

Kevin Lynch from Adobe shows a demo on a G1 after the jump. Now I just want to see it on a iPhone!

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