Alternative marketing thinking

If it wasn’t bad enough that stores were already tracking the purchase decisions and buying patterns of their customers, it now seems that Philips is developing a way for stores to track the interests of people who haven’t even come inside. Using a set of video cameras and eye tracking software the system will be able to tell what someone looking at a window display has been staring at the longest, and will then provide more detailed information about the product via a passive, or even interactive, video display, in hopes it will push them towards making a purchase decision. From OhGizmo.

David Armano propounds another one of his amazing insights into the digital age. He believes that the issue of our time is not how right brained or left brained we need to be. But how we need to be light brained to quickly and successfully adapt in an era of rapid and dramatic change. Click here to read more and look at an infographic, Armano style.

Editorial from the August 2008 Issue of How Magazine by senior editor Megan Patrick.

I’ve been wondering for the last few months what kind of effect Web 2.0 and social networking might have on design, both online and in print. It feels like there’s a huge shift just percolating under the surface, but I wasn’t able to articulate what was coming until now. I just got back from the 2008 SXSW Interactive Conference and the ideas all of the speakers shared are starting to gel in my brain.

What we’re facing is a radical shift in the roles designers play in our culture and economy, a shift from creators to facilitators of participation, conversation and collaboration. And it’s already starting to happen.

Check out the Poetic Licence website. Instead of creating a single look for the site, the designers instead made an engine that allows users to customize their experience. Not only that, but if you play with the site enough, you’re rewarded with a coupon for a 10% discount.

In the fashion world, NikeiD lets users create their own shoes. But not everyone has been happy with their creations, so Nike developed a NikeiD Studio at Niketown in New York City, complete with computer stations and design consultants. And in the realm of product design, the Japanese company Muji solicits new ideas from its customers, who then vote on which items should be put into production.

So how might this play out in other kinds of design? There are several scenarios. How about a customizable brochure that contains only the specific information each customer wants. As print-on-demand technology improves, this is becoming more and more possible. Even easier would be a customizable PDF. The user could choose from a selection of text and images to create a totally personalized magazine or newsletter. The possibilities are endless.

And that’s exactly the role designers will play in the future: as engineers of possibility. So don’t worry when amateurs mess around in Photoshop; it’s just a tool. And don’t close yourself off from consumer feedback; dialogue with your end customer will make your work that much stronger.

There’s an uncomfortable but exciting tension right now between creator and consumer, creativity and technology. That tension shaped the stories in this issue, which focus on the role of the handmade in design. It’s a trend that’s been building for the last several years, but even more interesting is the trend of using technology to bring a handmade or customized feel to a mass-produced object.

It’s an exciting time to be in the business of communication, and I look forward to seeing how Design 2.0 develops.

Microsoft is to launch a global brand, called Microsoft Advertising, to house all its advertising-related operations. The new brand, unveiled at Microsoft’s advance08 advertiser and publisher recently, aims to simplify the increasingly complex range of advertising businesses that the software giant runs. Microsoft Advertising will bring together diverse ad-related offerings such as the $6.1bn aQuantive acquisition with the its existing ad delivery platform AdCenter, as well as in-game advertising firm Massive and mobile ad operation ScreenTonic. More from The Guardian.

Jan Chipchase is a really smart man. He is a “human-behavior researcher” at Nokia. He has travelled the world trying to understand how humans interact with technology. Jan has many stories to tell. You can read them on his personal blog. And you can see him speak in places like TED.

New York Times columnist Sara Colbert tracked him down recently using his cellphone, off course, and was privy to many of his observations. Like his fascination for women’s handbags. Not the bag, silly, but what she carries inside. A photograph of the contents of a woman’s handbag is a window to her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. There’s more fascinating stuff that Jan knows. Like prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth. Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

So who are you really? Some people think you are what you search. In August 2006 some of AOL’s search data leaked out and a user under an anonymous number ”4417749” turned up 62 year old Thelma Arnold a widow in remote Lilburn.

With cellphone number portability you can buy your phone number and carry it around switching carriers at will. Yet the digital remains of your every conversation, every SMS message you send stays etched in a bit of silicon on some server, someplace.

There are other attempts being made to nail your identity down in one place. Google bought-out GrandCentral is a digital phone central that brings together all your phone numbers down to one number from where you can access all your phones and voice mail boxes. The service is now available in the US, where users can go and reserve their number. Others, like Meebo, bring together all kinds of instant messaging applications on to one dashboard. Twine on the other hand is like a social network central. A place to organize, share and discover stuff you like.

Perhaps the most ambitious experiment of all of them is a service that’s been getting a lot of buzz. OpenId. One place that manages all your IDs and passwords for just about every site. OpenId is open at the moment so may be it is a good idea to go and get a username that could become the one that you can use across many, many sites in the future. To understand how OpenId works, listen to Dick Hardt at Identity Conference, talking about identity and the need for Identity 2.0.

So who really is brand you? Are you your mobile number? Your mail id? Or have you built a tag cloud around that can tell the world a rich story about yourself and the specialities that make you?

MIT’s media lab and Bank of America are coming together to create a banking research and development laboratory, with investment worth $25 million from the latter. This innovation hub will engineer and transform the ways of modern banking in an environment which banks increasingly understand to be dynamically changing. The MIT media lab is known to bring together some of the brightest minds of the world, in a quest to invent a better future. Read more here.

In an interesting chat with Vikram Akula, the founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance, India’s fastest growing microfinance institution, Wharton reports on the emerging trends in microfinance. Akula talks about how once the RBI recognises the full potential of mobile banking, regulations will be eased so that time and money are not wasted in traditional brick and mortar infrastructure. Akula also talks about the constraints that come up, the dispute about high interest rates charged from the poor and how the future is looking for SKS.

When the marketing team at Unilever UK released their campaign Onslaught for Dove that asked mothers to protect their young children from the onslaught of the fashion industry, not everyone was impressed. Filmmaker Rye Clifton offered a response to the film, with a mash-up short of his own that went on to notch up over a 100,000 views. Now Greenpeace has joined in the act, with Onslaughter a film that shows how pristine forests in Indonesia and Malaysia are being cut down to grow palm oil that goes into Dove products. Now Dove has come out with a response to the palm oil allegation saying that the company will sustainably source its ingredients.

Google is testing an ad system that works on the lines of its web based AdWords system. It plans to sell spots based not only on price but on how well an ad performs. Better-quality advertising — advertising the audience deems most relevant — will be rewarded, as marketers will pay less for the same spot. The system, still a few years away, could go a long way toward answering who is responsible for bringing viewers in and who is responsible for retaining viewers, the network or the advertiser? More from AdAge.

Generation Y is making bankers take notice and is now seen as a very distinctive segment altogether. It is the most demographic group on the horizon with great spending power. The annual spending is projected to be around $24.5 trillion by the year 2015. From now on any strategy or plan that does not have the needs of the Gen Y in mind is a complete non-starter when it comes to long term impact. To read more click here.