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Richard’s Miscellany
September 19, 2008

Happy Friday! Today’s post will comprise some random items from my inbox I found of interest and wanted to share.

Digital Marketing

If you don’t subscribe to eMarketer’s daily newsbrief, get thee to their Web site! While there isn’t a media platform they can’t be overly bullish about, it still is a good source of data and statistics on a wide variety of old and new marketing platforms. They do some original research, but typically concatenate a large number of other studies and surveys, and one can get a good sense of what the areas of interest around the marketing interest are. In one of last week’s issues, they drew on some outside sources to determine how much marketing these days was digital:

More than six out of 10 CMOs and senior marketing professionals surveyed in the US said that digital tactics (including mobile) accounted for more than one-quarter of their agency marketing, according to a July 2008 study by Zoomerang for Sapient.

Respondents also said digital marketing was growing in importance. Nearly one-half (45%) of those polled had either switched agencies or planned to switch during the next 12 months to gain access to more digital expertise. Almost eight out of 10 said that agencies' interactive and digital aptitude was important or very important.

Granted, as eMarketer points out, there are some methodological problems with this survey; the sample size was less than 100; not exactly the most projectible in the world. Still, in a qualitative sense, it doesn’t contradict anything else I have ever read about marketing trends. So, if you are a marketing agency, take heed of where the interest is going, and be sure to acquire as large a skill set and tool box as possible.

Goin' Mobile

Another daily e-letter that I find extremely valuable is the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s daily SmartBrief. One item this week caught my eye:

Revenue from mobile advertising will reach nearly $2 billion in the U.S. by 2012, according to a new study from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

The source is MediaPost Communications, and one gets used to these kinds of forecasts after a while, and to take them with a grain of salt. Given how quickly things change, there is no way anyone can forecast with any certainty as far as two years hence, let alone four years. Still, enough of these forecasts make the rounds, it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as everyone says, “Oh, everyone else is doing this, we should do it, too.”

Where Have All the Book Gone?

If you want to get depressed, check out New York magazine’s story called “Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It?”

Actually, there are kernels of good news in the article; large corporate New York publishing may be in a perilous state—and having started my post-college career back in the early 1990s in a major New York City trade book publisher—I can’t entirely say that I’m sad to see it go. I think what we’ll see a lot more of are small, on-demand, and self-publishers. Demographics are already bearing this out. The barrier to book publishing for years has been distribution, and the Internet is taking care of that problem. The other problem is marketing—self publishers will need to learn effective marketing strategies if they hope to sell their wares. But then, as any second-tier author for a major publisher could tell you, this is hardly a new problem.

Augmenting Reality

Anyway, I will close out this post with something really cool, from one of my posts over at PrintCEO blog:
The current print issue of Scientific American has an article about something called “augmented reality,” which is nearing what some feel is its commercial breakthrough. What is augmented reality? Check this out:

Rich Jenkins opens a child’s picture book and aims a camera phone at a page depicting a cartoon panda bear that is gesturing toward a set of Chinese characters. As Jenkins and I view the page through the cell phone screen, the printed panda suddenly erupts into a 3-D video version that points at the first symbol, pronounces it in Mandarin and then defines it in English.

Jenkins, who leads Media Power, a New York City–based firm that develops mobile communications applications, smiles at my rather startled reaction. “A software application that we’ve downloaded into this phone reads cues that the book designers have embedded into the graphics,” he explains. “It then calls up the video segment appropriate for that page from the network server. The result is like a pop-up book on steroids.” Jenkins notes that this new kind of animated content could help kids learn and that these “magic books” could become available by the end of this year. The company will also be introducing cell phone–enabled museum exhibit tours based on the same technology, as well as the means by which consumers can trigger delivery of targeted advertising by directing camera phones at brand logos.

It does seem to be a unique twist on “multichannel publishing/marketing.” Think of it: elements of print media can function as actual hyperlinks that can trigger a jump to additional content using a different medium/device. There is more to it than that; the idea behind augmented reality (AR) is “the timely overlay of useful virtual information onto the real world.” That is, everything in physical reality can become a hyperlink to an alternate reality. Pretty freaky, huh?

The article ends with this potential application:

Widespread use of AR, though, will probably depend on integrating AR with social networking, [Mark Billinghurst, director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand] states. Such a mix, he says, would, for example, “allow users to leave annotation notes—advice or opinions—for their friends on the network at sites such as restaurants or scenic spots all over the world.” Reality would take on a whole new meaning.

Think of what graffiti artists could do with this technology.

Posted by Richard Romano on September 19, 2008 | Comments (0)