FREEBORD: STREET ILLUMINATI

Crew of Freeborders take over an SF street to create a real life video game. http://www.freebord.com.

The" Israel" Brand

The public relations (PR) industry has made exceptional use of the communications revolution. But for all the globalizing effects of multinational campaigns, many brands seem inextricably tied to their home country. Injecting products into foreign markets has, to a certain extent, acted as a driving force in the way nation-states are perceived internationally. Coke, Marlboro and Starbucks are inseparable from their provenance, and Brand America is intimately tied to its products. But consumerism alone doesn’t tell the story of how America is perceived in the world; military adventurism and moral exceptionalism undermine the feel-good aspects of consuming Americana. A nation’s brand is inextricably tied to its actions in the world.

Nations, like products, are perpetually re-branded for the international market. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), for example, spends millions on targeted PR campaigns in a number of Western cities designed to shift associations away from war and occupation.

In March 2009 New York-based GfK Custom Research and British “place branding” consultant Simon Anholt released the global Nation Brands Index (NBI). It rates countries based on international perception of various categories, including tourism, investment, and immigration and governance. Germany ranked 1st overall, the UK 3rd, Canada 4th, the US 7th and China 28th. Iran placed 50th and Israel failed to make the top 50. While it’s tempting to dismiss nation branding as an example of the PR industry’s cynical commodification of the world, its assumptions can shed some light on Israel’s self-inflicted inability to re-brand.

Nation branding reveals the inherent contrivance of the concept of “nation” – a European invention born of a disastrous period of 15th-century religious warfare, leading to a centralization of violent power in the hands of a sovereign. Nationalism is a product of 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism, and every bit a human artifice. It helped radically reconfigure Western political identity toward our seemingly immutable system of nation-states. Israel came late to the game and has, from its beginnings, undertaken a conscious and very public project of constructing a national identity of godly strength. The pre-state Zionists dreamed of constructing the masculine “new Hebrew” of Palestine in contrast to the anemic “Galut Jew” of the diaspora – all at the price of creating the Palestinian refugee diaspora. Israel’s brand has suffered since.

Nation branding is also premised on the fact that no single actor can simply dictate political perception. People have to agree on, or be convinced of, political facts in order for them to become reality. Conscription and astronomical military spending project Israel’s tough guy identity to the world, leading to a dominant perception of violence and aggression. Go figure.

As Anholt admits, “Places can’t construct or manipulate their images with advertising or PR, slogans or logos … Places can only change their image by changing the way they behave.” Nation branding is doomed to failure unless action substantiates pomp.

• • •

In August 2008 the Israeli consulate in Toronto launched a one-year test market for a re-branding campaign. Roundly derided by human rights and peace groups, the campaign idealized Israel as a hub of high-tech research and development, cultural history and glitzy beach life. When asked directly about the goals of the campaign, Consul General Amir Gissin stated, “Israel’s branding process is first and foremost an internal process aimed at answering the question: Who are we as Israelis when we are at our best? The [Toronto] pilot was therefore not a PR campaign but rather an attempt to test the public opinion response to Israeli answers to this question.” While Mr. Gissin dodged questions about the impetus for the campaign, his public remarks are infinitely more candid. In September 2008 he told a group of supporters: “It’s not that our audience is ignorant. They feel they know too much … The Western media narrative is the poor Palestinians, Israeli tanks and Israeli guns. We’ve been portrayed that way for years.” He continued, “I offer you a framework for winning the public relations war.”

When Israel, with its influence on the North American media, complains of an overemphasis on its negative aspects, it proves the difficulty of reconstituting a national brand without real action. While portraying Israel as a single-issue country would betray a lack of knowledge, the fact is that in 2008 Israel spent $2,300 per person on its military – the highest in the world. When asked about this, Mr. Gissin rebutted, “[The] question reflects a school of thought that assumes that Israel is not allowed to be viewed outside the framework of the conflict. It is absurd. The conflict is a major part of Israel’s brand, and we are not hiding it. We believe, however, that Israel is more than the conflict, and we will continue to share information about that.” Perhaps.

Other than destroying southern Lebanon in the 1980s, clashing with Hezbollah and bombing Syria, Israel hasn’t fought anything close to a state army since 1973. So the world’s highest per capita military budget is arrayed toward the world’s longest-running occupation of an often indigent and defenseless population. The December 2008/January 2009 assault on the civilian infrastructure of Gaza was perhaps the clearest possible message Israel could have sent to the world.

It was easy enough to sell the assault to a society instilled with the belief that intergenerational war and occupation are normal. A Tel Aviv University poll showed almost 90% support for the slaughter, so Mr. Gissin’s worries about Israeli self-esteem seem misplaced. External perception, of course, has fared much worse. Spurred by international outrage, the United Nations has launched an investigation into war crimes and illegal use of weapons: the independent press and human rights groups (both Israeli and international) have brought serious allegations against Israel; soldiers who took part in the war are speaking out; and even the American State Department is beginning to understand the occupation as a detriment to Israel’s, and consequently its own, national brand. Bikini models and one of the world’s most accomplished high-tech sectors can’t grab the spotlight long enough to distract the world’s attention from the brutality of the occupation.

This hasn’t stopped the MFA from trying. In terms of Anholt’s branding criteria, human rights abuses cannot be taken completely out of the realm of international perception, but they might be superseded by generically sexier issues. Israel’s latest stunt to woo the Canadian audience – a Jewish hockey tournament in northern Israel – was dutifully covered in the mainstream press. That same week Amnesty International released Operation Cast Lead: 22 Days of Death and Destruction, a detailed and gruesome report of the various war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli state against Gaza’s civilian population. It received virtually no mainstream media attention, but grassroots media, civil society and academia have refused to let the issue go.

The offensive on Gaza will continue to affect Israel’s brand. As the American political scientist and coauthor of The Israel Lobby Stephen Walt wrote after Gaza: “The way a country regains the world’s admiration in the aftermath of misconduct is to stop doing it, admit it was wrong, express regret and make it clear that it won’t happen again. Restoring Israel’s image in the West isn’t a matter of spin or PR or ‘re-branding’; it’s a matter of abandoning the policies that have cost it the sympathy it once enjoyed. It’s really just about that simple.” The dissonance between Israel’s re-branding campaign and its consistently negative image shows that contemporary reality matters. Mr. Gissin isn’t convinced. When pressed on Anholt and Walt’s emphasis on concrete action, he referred to Israel’s negative brand not as a reflection of reality but as the result of propaganda: “Israel is not a regular brand in the sense that there is an active and powerful worldwide campaign aimed at hurting Israel’s image. Few countries or places need to cope with such an environment, and taking [these] statements at face value in regard to Israel is missing the bigger picture.” Given Israel’s place behind Iran on the NBI, it would seem that the bigger picture of the world’s largest, most enduring refugee population and a destructive 42-year occupation is exactly what shapes the Israeli brand.

Our political opinion may now be the target of the same sophisticated marketing techniques that produced corn-fueled obesity and SUVs, but the difference is that nation-states are irreducible past their human components: our perception matters. Sixty-plus years of co-opting social and behavioral psychology to ram products down our collective throat have yet to overwhelm our political or moral compasses. We are still able to judge nation-states by their deeds rather than by their spin.

Pharmaceutical Marketing

Volkswagen’s Viral Video Serie: The Fun Theory

In September, Volkswagen launched www.rolighetsteorin.se, an creative initiative to test if fun could change the behavior of people. The campaign has become a huge success in the last couple of days with a tremendous amount of views for the videos that Volkswagen subtly seed with this campaign.

Read on for the full statistics on the campaign and my personal view on this already strong marketing case in social media.

Last Friday, Niels wrote the following summary, here on ViralBlog:

With this new campaign, developed by DDB Stockholm, Volkswagen turned a subway staircase in Stockholm, Sweden into a giant piano as part of their ‘Theory of Fun’ campaign. The effort is just one stunt that appears on the carmaker’s Rolighetsteorin.se website, which showcases efforts to get people to change by simply making things more fun. The Giant Piano clip got over 500,000 views on YouTube in just over two weeks.

The videos are aiming to change peoples lazy behavior by showing them the fun side of acting environmental responsible. As for the carmaker’s own contribution, “Volkswagen’s answer to the theory will be presented at a later stage on a separate website amongst other media,” says DDB Stockholm creative director Andreas Dahlqvist. “The site will display their whole range of environment technologies and cars—many, many fun ways to do something for the environment.”

Let’s take a look at the already launched videos:

Piano Staircase

The video received 1.200.000+ views in 4 days. Plus various copies with over 500.000 views. Minor detail: The original Swedish version - Pianotrappan - rolighetsteorin.se - “only” got 680.000+ views in 20 days.

The World’s Deepest Bin

This video received a bit less views, 88.000 views in 4 days. Minor detail: The original Swedish version - Världens djupaste soptunna - rolighetsteorin.se - “only” got 129.000+ views in 20 days.

Bottle Bank Arcade

About the platform

The platform bundles the videos and encourages people to submit their own ideas. The winner will be granted with a cash prize of 2500 euros. I sure do hope that Volkswagen promotes these actions and let people vote, share and encourage others with micro interactions. This way, the behavior change also comes from the people within.

Statistics on the videos

Lets take a look at the conversation market. What did the campaign do to the conversations? To check this out, we’ll have a look at Twitter.

Trendistic statistics on the word “piano”

It’s incredible, when you look at the statistics, you can see a minor trend on the word piano, just shortly after the launch of the videos. This means that people started to talk more about pianos then before the campaign. Next to all the regular conversations about pianos, a lot of the ones including a link direct to the advertisement page. Source: Twitter Search.

Trendistic statistics on the word “fun”
Another nice detail is that Volkswagen is being associated with fun a lot on Twitter. Looking at these results, you can see that Volkswagen is being mentioned several times per hour with the word fun and a link to the campaign.

YouTube statistics on Piano Staircase

Unfortunately, the extended statistics have been disabled for both the Swedish YouTube videos, so we couldn’t find out whether these videos spread globally as well as the English ones. However, the English versions did show the extended statistics. Let’s check out the ones from the piano stairs video to see the popularity in a global perspective.

YouTube statistics on the video: viral growth

Even though the image above is from such a short period, its still incredible to see the large growth in such a short time. Also the amount of ratings, comments and favorites show people like the video.

YouTube statistics on the video: global reach

When you look at the global reach, you can see the video has worldwide popularity, which is an interesting fact. Humor and interests aren’t human aspects that have the same values on every person on this planet. It’s good to see the video has been liked in America, Australia and Russia.

Comparisation with Ray Ban

Earlier this year in April, I wrote about Ray-Bans success with their Never Hide campaign. The strong viral videos, starting with the videos of “Guy Catches Glasses With Face” from NeverHideFilms had a few strong elements that made it a viral success.

Looking at the aspects of the Volkswagen videos, it leaves no doubt that the Never Hide films gave some good inspiration to DDB Stockholm, the agency behind the films. The films are also not based on the core message of the brand, they could be a start of consistent line of communication, are highly entertaining, aren’t just about the product and could have been done by average Joe.

Could it be that Volkswagen is following Ray-Ban’s successful footsteps by creating successful, fun and creative videos to feed the entertainment market? I certainly love this campaign of Volkswagen and hope they’ll receive the viral success they deserve!

Make sure to also check out the article on Creativity-online.com, which includes an interview with the creative director from DDB Stockholm and take a look at the fun behind the scene photos on Flickr.

Sources: ViralBlog.com, Creativity-online.com.

The official launch of the new PS3

The campaign site, playface.jp will feature a collection of game expressions captured by the ‘Playface Caravan,’ a series of events touring Japan in which players can demo the new PS3 and have their emotions captured in 360º by a series of 20 cameras simultaneously. Participants’ playfaces are entered into the Playface Derby where individuals can earn points. At the end of the campaign, Japan’s top ranked playface with the most points will win PlayStation games for life.*

* Enough games to last a ”lifetime” means five 5,000 yen games a year for 100 years, which will be worth 2.5 million yen.

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE PLAYFACE!!!

The out of home portion of the campaign will feature posters of 25 unique playfaces, highlighting Japan’s emotions through gaming. The posters will take over major Tokyo train stations at Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro.

Marketing on $700 a Year

Last month, Intuit, the personal finance software firm that owns Quicken, paid $170 million in cash for Mint.com, a two-year-old personal finance site with 1.6 million users. That corporate embrace comes after much frustration on Intuit’s part. At one point the company wrote Mint a letter demanding “substantiation and evidence” of the rival site’s rapid-fire growth. Compounding the vexation was the cost of acquisition for those consumers, whose numbers are currently growing by more than 130,000 each month: virtually nothing.

Donna Wells, Mint’s CMO and a former exec at Intuit, is a veteran marketer used to the big media budgets she had in previous jobs at Charles Schwab and American Express. At Mint, however, she may well represent a new breed of CMO who is spending very little on brand building and bypassing advertising in the process. Thanks to new social media and communications technologies, partnered with adept PR strategies, Wells showed that building a so-called Web 2.5 brand doesn’t need to cost much these days—and the experience is liberating.

“We built this brand on the cheap. In two full years at Mint, I spent what I would have spent in two days at Expedia,” laughed Wells, who was previously svp-marketing at the travel site. “Mint was my fourth startup, and the tools that are available to me now, even since my last startup in 2000, offer amazing reach and adoption through places like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and iPhone apps. It’s a phenomenal time for a marketer.”

Mint’s start kicked off with a well-read, popular blog—launched in March before the site’s product launch in September 2007—and key exposure when Mint launched at TechCrunch 40 and won top honors. Wells created a Facebook page where Mint now has more than 36,000 fans and attracted a following of 19,000 on Twitter. Free applications like WordPress power Mint’s blog while another free tool, the user-friendly Google analytics, lets staffers track site traffic. Mint does pay for some other off-the-shelf services for its site, spending all of $700 a year.

Wells estimates the marketing costs at Mint over the past two years to be around $2 million. That amount primarily includes salaries for the marketing staff which now numbers five, including herself, and out-of-pocket expenses like hiring an outside PR agency. She also experimented with search initially, spending about $50,000.

“The idea that you need a huge amount in marketing and advertising dollars is simply not true,” said Laura Ries, president, Roswell, Ga., consultants Ries & Ries. “That was a major fallacy in the dot-com boom where companies went out and spent millions and got no benefit. Companies like eBay and Amazon did it by being first at something, by standing for something and having a credible strong idea that generated the PR and word of mouth necessary to get into the minds of consumers.”

As a free money management tool, Mint obviously has a compelling appeal in the current economic climate. But Ries also noted the site’s quirky name and compelling blog, which in a world of forgettable corporate blogs won the award for best blog at the Online Media Marketing and Advertising awards last month. That communiqué reinforces an identifiable voice with the brand that initially attracted 20 and 30-somethings, Ries said, particularly in contrast to the older-skewing Quicken, with a less-defined image given the number or products associated with the brand.

Wells admits she will modify her marketing strategies as Mint goes more mainstream under Intuit but, even with new financial resources, vows to keep using the cheap tools that launched the brand and keep nontraditional media at marketing core.
Other creators of recent popular Web 2.5 brands share Wells’ reluctance to spend on advertising—and it’s not because they don’t have the money. Pandora.com founder Tim Westergren said his four-year-old Internet radio site expects to bring in $40 million in revenues this year, more than double that in 2008. But while he spent “maybe $100,000” on search in Pandora’s early days, he’s not interested in traditional marketing. Instead, he’s focused on customer service and bonding, no easy feat given the 35 million U.S. registered listeners to Pandora’s automated music recommendations. Westergren, a musician and composer, said a primary focus of the site’s marketing, and a major expense for the site, is a team of eight people who respond to every listener inquiry. In a busy month, Pandora’s “listener advocates”’ might deal with 30,000 e-mails, with topics ranging from new site features and new bands to complaints. Additionally, Westergren travels around the country talking to listeners at “town halls” held in coffee shops, community centers and bookstores. (He’s not just interested in what urban hipsters have to say—upcoming trips take him to places like Sioux City, Iowa, and Billings, Mont.) He said that while that might sound “old school,” it’s critical.

“Each town hall includes just a small number of listeners, obviously, but it’s a powerful cementing tool. They become ambassadors for you,” said Westergren, who cautioned about the need to take in the bad with the good. “In this day and age, it just takes a few enthusiastic people to do some damage to you on the Web; there are so many ways to evangelize.”

For his part, David Karp, the 23-year-old Internet entrepreneur who founded short-form blogging platform Tumblr, said more traditional marketing communications couldn’t achieve what his own team could do in viral product design at the nearly two-year-old site.

 “We did an experiment with outside PR, but we found people couldn’t explain it as well as we could,” he says. “The marketing is all on Tumblr’s site. We thought, ‘What features can we build, what design changes? How can we get visitors to further engage and share the experience?’ We always looked at the product as inherently viral and designed it that way. As it becomes more social with the Tumblr dashboard (which quickly lets users add other users to lists of friends), you can follow friends, publish and repost.”

 Last week, Jinni.com, a Pandora-like recommendation service for movies and TV, launched in public beta. The site’s co-founder, Yosi Glick, who’s clocked in time as a marketer at tech companies like Orca Interactive, said his lack of interest in advertising the new site strikes some acquaintances as odd. “‘How do you do zero-dollar marketing?’ People from the b-to-b environment find that intriguing,” he said. “Is it possible, they ask? It is indeed possible.”

Glick’s optimism about grassroots marketing may be premature. Still, sites like Jinni, along with Tumblr and Pandora, have all the advantages that accompany marketers who are the first in their categories. It’s a lot harder for others who later jump in and play catch up to the pioneers.

But even those companies with a head start like Amazon and eBay ended up using traditional advertising once they became dominant players and needed to protect their leadership status. So while marketers like Wells have launched successful sites on a dime, their experiences may still be the exception, not the rule. Advertising will remain a critical marketing support at launch—and thereafter, some observers contend.

“In general, you need more than one tool to launch and maintain a brand,” contended Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates. “If you’re the third one out there (in a category), you’re going to need more. Successfully doing it on a shoestring is not an average situation—it’s more like winning a lottery ticket.” 

Nokia:GAME OF DEATH case study

WHOPPER SACRIFICE case study

Success on Facebook

Success on Facebook comes from a blend of sheer size of fan base, record of publishing useful content and the extent of consumer interaction that is offered.

We looked at eight major product categories to find the brands that gained the most traction on the site, comparing their Facebook pages to those of competitors to determine which were best and worst at taking full advantage of the platform.

Some big-name players -- Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Starbucks and Microsoft among them -- are performing especially well on the social-media site. Others, however, including Burger King, Walmart, Dell and Geico, might be missing some prime opportunities to interact with their current and potential customers.

Contents:

• Consumer Packaged Goods ... Retail
• Restaurant/Food ... Technology
• Apparel ... Insurance
• Automotive ... Airline

CONSUMER PACKAGED GOODS: COCA-COLA

The granddaddy of Facebook brand pages wasn't even started by the soft drink giant. Two fans created the page in August 2008 and it went on to become the top product page on the site. Perhaps Coke learned its lesson from the Diet Coke-Mentos phenomenon, when it objected to the use of its product in a viral Web video hit. This time out, instead of playing the corporate heavy, Coke brought the two consumers to company headquarters and invited them to continue to run the page with backing from Coke.

Stats: 3.7 million fans; regular promotions include one that solicits videos for a shot at appearing in a Coke commercial.

Missed Opportunity... Pepsi. The company makes a disappointing showing on Facebook, given that it's a digitally and socially savvy brand. The Refresh Everything page has 250,000 fans, a fraction of rival Coke's. The company mostly uses it as a channel for pumping out updates of marketing activities.



RETAIL: BEST BUY

At a tough time for electronics outlets -- witness the demise of Circuit City -- Best Buy is pushing the envelope with social shopping. Its Facebook page doesn't just tout products, it lets visitors browse from the site and get feedback on items from Facebook friends. It's also using the site to get general feedback from its customers, sometimes to a fault.

A recent post asking users what they thought of the company offering a BestBuy.com in Spanish ignited a firestorm of hostile and offensive comments. The company acted quickly by taking the post down.

Stats: 842,000 fans; one of the richest retail pages on Facebook, featuring "shop and share" and "gift ideas" applications.

Missed Opportunity... Walmart. The retailer might be the biggest on the face of the Earth, but you wouldn't know it on Facebook. The company clearly has its work cut out for it in the give and take of social media, but hiding is a dubious strategy. Its page has less than 17,000 fans and no content.

RESTAURANT/FOODS: STARBUCKS

The chain has flexed its brand muscles on Facebook, running several ad campaigns to plumb its fan base, even to the point of offering free ice cream this past summer. Some say luring fans in with freebies means fleeting success, but Starbucks' fan page is growing over 3 percent per week, according to AllFacebook, putting it on track to overtake Will Smith in popularity on the site.


Stats: 4.5 million fans; ice cream and pastry giveaways clearly resonate with consumers; the company's social strategy was enough for Altimeter Group to rank it the No.1 most-connected brand.

Missed Opportunity... Burger King. Not many ad icons nowadays have the appeal of Burger King's mascot, but the brand is curiously absent from the social networking platform. That's too bad because it clearly has cachet among users as evidenced by the avalanche of responses to the short-lived "Whopper sacrifice" campaign last January.



TECHNOLOGY: MICROSOFT

Unlike its nettlesome rival Apple, which is so beloved it doesn't need a Facebook fan page, Microsoft typically has to go the extra distance. The company has a sophisticated Facebook strategy with fan pages for several different product lines. This helps build focused fan bases for Internet Explorer, Windows, Surface and its MVP Award Program of product evangelists. The approach lets the behemoth act smaller.

Stats: Over 300,000 fans; used the Bing page to solicit feedback on features the new search engine needs.

Missed Opportunity... Dell. Despite a concerted effort at social media, Dell hasn't cracked the Facebook code. It has about 40,000 fans who get a regular stream of product releases. What's missing is the feedback loop Dell started with its Ideastorm site in 2007.

APPAREL: ADIDAS

For a brand used to playing second fiddle to big-spending rival Nike, turnabout is fair play. Adidas Originals is a Facebook powerhouse thanks to its trove of quality content and event information. The brand has a "your area" tab that populates with localized content.

Stats: 2.1 million fans; posts photos and videos; updates a few times per week.

Missed Opportunity... Nike. As the ultimate passion brand, Nike would figure to be quite popular on Facebook. And it has amassed 382,000 followers. But talk about anti-social. Nike hasn't updated the page since July. Just do it, Nike.



INSURANCE: AFLAC

For some brands, fan bases are best built around characters. That's been the case for Aflac, which has attracted fans for its trademark duck's quirky updates. The brand gets the character's voice right, mixing charity pleas with offbeat takes on news from the duck's perspective.

The company, seeing how far it can go, has taken the duck to Twitter where he's attracted over 3,000 followers.

Stats: 161,000 fans; mixes updates with charity pitches and contests; posts daily.

Missed Opportunity... Geico gecko. If a duck can do it, a lizard can, too. Yet the Geico gecko has never found his footing on Facebook. The page has just 6,800 fans. The lizard's droll tone doesn't carry over to the site. Instead, his updates sound a lot like the voice of a PR pro.

AUTOMOTIVE: FORD

The automaker has lately fared better across the board than its domestic peers. It's also beating its competitors in social media, including on Facebook. Ford Mustang has built up a loyal following, and Ford is an active updater on the company's official corporate page.

Stats: Over 370,000 fans on the Ford, Mustang and Fusion pages; mix of product and event information with photos and videos.

Missed Opportunity... Toyota has nearly 50,000 fans, yet it hasn't updated its page since June.



AIRLINE: SOUTHWEST

It's hard to find anyone who's a fan of air travel nowadays -- but there are plenty of them on Southwest's Facebook page, which succeeds with a personal approach. Rather than craft a brand voice, for instance, Southwest introduces "hosts" Lindsey and Christi. Frequent polling keeps interaction high. Southwest has more Facebook cachet than hotter brands like JetBlue and  Virgin America.

Stats: 80,000 fans; high customer engagement thanks to fun promos.

Missed Opportunity... United Airlines. Not exactly a passion brand, United Airlines could stand to have something more than an empty page with 11,000 intrepid fans. 

16 Top Augmented Reality Business Models

VIA:

I am developing and producing a range of Augmented Reality (or if you prefer AR, ‘blended or layered media’) applications at the moment. I have also been asked to present at a few conferences and create a detailed white paper on the implications of AR for government & business looking at privacy, legal, copyright & crime issues.  As readers of this blog will know I also lecture, run workshops and work with creative teams to come up with future ‘social entertainment’ based around virtual worlds and augmented reality.

But the purpose of this short post is to simply list and try to categorise the many types of business Augmented Reality apps appearing in the market. The first manifestations of AR appeared in the late 60s, became real in the 70s and by the 90s were already being used by major companies. Now portable computing is finally powerful enough to deliver AR to anyone who has a smart phone or latest generation PC or console. But first my simple definition of Augmented Reality.

Information, 3D models or live action blended with or overlaid onto the physical world in real time. A camera & attached screen is used to view the combination of reality & real time virtuality. Devices or systems commonly used for AR include

But the purpose of this pretty detailed post is to simply list and try to categorise the many types of business Augmented Reality apps appearing in the market and to try to identify opportunities.

According to wikipedia, the first manifestations of AR appeared in the late 60s, became real in the 70s and by the 90s were already being used by major companies. Now portable computing is finally powerful enough to deliver AR to anyone who has a smart phone or latest generation PC or console. For those unfamiliar here is my simple definition of Augmented Reality.

Information, 3D models or live action blended with or overlaid onto the physical world around us, in real time. A camera & attached screen is used to view the combination of real world and metadata or rich media. Devices or systems commonly used for AR include:

• Mobile devices with inbuilt cameras such as iPhone, DS Lite, PSP or Android
• A head mounted display HMDs (eg: glasses or futuristic contact lenses) attached to a wearable networked computer
• A PC or Mac with webcam
• A games console with camera accessory
• A large TV screen with advanced Set Top box and Web cam
• Others in development

Before the more detailed list I embed my summary flickr chart whose purpose is to try to categorise types of business orientated augmented reality apps so to identify opportunities. The graph places 16 on axes of commercial value (likely revenue or marketing potential) vs adoption (scale of popularity vs a niche, client user base). It is a starting document to aid classification of this emerging commercial sector that I hope you find useful. The AR types, color key linked to each model is suggestive only.

Mobile Augmented Reality boosting Proximity Marketing

Proximity Marketing as described by Wikipedia is “the localized wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place.”

The commercialization of location will get a boost by the power and opportunities offered by Mobile Augmented Reality applications.

Have a look at the first real-time Augmented Reality proximity marketing platform by Insqribe:

Two disadvantages of conventional proximity marketing are that users need to enable the mobile device to receive location based information/ messages, secondly not each and every message received is welcome or relevant for the receiver.

Messages can be perceived as irrelevant and spam, users can receive too many promotional messages which will backfire proximity marketing as a tactic because devices can and will be disabled again to not receive any messages again.

Enabling a mobile device to receive information is a primitive form of acknowledging the interest on the location, the possibilities offered by Mobile Augmented Reality will boost and enhance the primitive form when it comes to location based promotions (Point of Sale promotions – POS) nearby initiated by the user.

Mobile Augmented Reality makes it possible what users want to see and when they want to see the information .

Augmented Reality powered Proximity Marketing is much more gentle, it becomes more of a pull mechanism instead of a push mechanism. The pull mechanism increases relevancy towards the users because the users control when he/she activates the system to scan the surroudings. This is the difference. Enabling bluetooth is not synonymous to being receptive for all and any kind of promotional messages. The new Proximity Marketing is exactly the other way around, by activating the system the user shows -initial- interest and decides what message can be further explored and not.

Of course permission systems do exist before messages are being send out, but the concept is the same, push versus pull.

Will Proximity Marketing be fueled and made more fun by Mobile Augmented Reality?