on the shore of the ultimate sea

Boss Paul sez:

Contagious devotes a lot of attention to the intersection of brands and technology, so we’re extremely excited to be curating The Hive at Eurobest. Our aim is to create a dynamic, experiential space where delegates get to play with the latest gadgets and gizmos as well as learning how technological innovation will shape the marketing campaigns of the future. Paul Kemp-Robertson, Editorial Director, Co-Founder, Contagious

In 2010, Eurobest has teamed up with Contagious to gather together the most exciting technological innovations and innovators to engage, entertain and stimulate visitors to the Festival in The Hive. Discover a whole range of technology from interactive art works, to apps, robots and augmented reality. Companies already involved include Dentsu London, Prime & Strip Digital, metaio, and Total Immersion. Plus Google Creative Lab and Freestate

If you are interested in showcasing your product in The Hive, please get in touch.

via Eurobest – Europe’s Creative Advertising Festival and Awards.

Phew, it’s been too long. I’ve been busy. I’ll catch you up as we go along. But expect more here. The organizers of Cannes’ Lions Daily newsmagazine were looking for the U.S. perspective for this year’s festival in June, so here’s an article I did for them. It hasn’t aged too poorly. Enjoy.

‘Everything is clean and shiny but oddly threatening’. / J.G. Ballard, 1999

Although J.G. Ballard was actually talking about technology, this late, great chronicler of Cannes-based mischief came pretty close to explaining what’s happened in the United States and Canada since its ad folk last convened on the Riviera.

Budgets and spending are beginning to come back, but there’s the sense things won’t be the way they were before last year’s slump, both in outlay and style of communications and messaging. Optimism is returning, but how to connect with the NEW new media is still baffling to many. Why should my home plumbing fixture brand be on Facebook? What’s the value of creating a badge on Foursquare for a paper goods company?

The realignment currently taking place is forcing us to reconsider the fabric of our communications landscape, and it’s taking very interesting forms.

FINELY FORMED PLATFORMS /

The first of those is platform-building, the digital terraforming smart marketers are engaging in. This is an evolution from the act of adapting content to work on the web to creating or steering content that works within the Internet’s connective tissue.

Electronic retailer Best Buy has seen its Twelpforce program, which encourages employees to help customers on Twitter, service a massive amount of people. But, all that data it’s pumping into Twitter ultimately belongs to Twitter. And it’s finite, given Twitter’s propensity to hide tweets from search after 1.5 weeks. So what did Best Buy do? It built BBY Feed, a site that scrapes all the interactions from the Blueshirts, threads them into easy-to-read interactions and tags them for search engine optimization. If a month from now, I can’t remember how Best Buy’s folks told me to put the SD card in my camera, when I search for the answer it’ll show up on BBY Feed.

Meanwhile, brand communications platforms are growing up and evolving. Gatorade’s fantastic ‘Replay’ effort through TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles was initially shot as episodic online content by an advertising production company. The conceit was simple, and on-brand: any athlete’s performance can be enhanced by Gatorade, so why not convene and re-play crucial games that ended in ties, or were called because of injury, ten or fifteen years later? The idea of older athletes getting back in shape appealed to many, interest in the property grew, and Gatorade partnered with Fox Sports Net for the second round, with the cable sports network producing it just like it would a big-league game, and simulcasting it on the web.

Parallel to platform-building, disruptive hacker behaviours have begun influencing marketers looking to place content not only on their own platforms, but in unexpected and intriguing places as well. A great example is the ‘Lost’ flight on Kayak.com. The travel search engine listed Oceanic 815, the flight around which the TV series centred, in its search database. Word spread among Losties, and thousands looked up the flight on Kayak, performing all the behaviours of any other user, an introduction to the brand’s great interface through the thrill of finding the ‘Easter Egg’ of content—the actual flight listing for the mythic Lost flight. Great content, presented in its natural environment, is set to spread, and to maximize PR value.

Similarly, Burger King put a message on Digg’s failed search page, which is served over 600,000 times per month. When you look something up that isn’t there, you get a message from Digg and BK playing on the humorous ‘Tiny Hands’ campaign for the company’s double cheeseburger: ‘Looks like your search had a typo. Maybe you’ve got tiny hands?’

MAKER CULTURE & LASHED-TOGETHER TECH /

This maker culture, along with the rise of electronic hobbyists building projects to interact with the universe, places emphasis on solutions and speed, in the classic Bernbachian sense of ‘It’s ugly, but it gets you there’.

In fact, just over forty years after the moon landing and that classic piece of Volkswagen print, Nike and the Livestrong Foundation’s Chalkbot, from Wieden + Kennedy and the robot-making punk rockers at Pittsburgh’s Deeplocal, fits the tagline–the trailer-pulled robot sets a standard for the post-digital transition in its employment of ‘guttertech’–using the lowest available technology to solve the problem. The robot, towed along the route of the Tour de France, sprays messages of cancer support and memoriam people have tweeted onto the course. The system then takes a photo, geotags it, and sends it back to the participant on the other end of the connection. Chalkbot’s no-frills, simple-yet-elegant setup and movement through digital and physical elements nimbly skitters like Wall-E around a landscape where tech bandwagon-jumping is in danger of creating a proliferation of clutter and junk.

The sensor array in our smartphones is currently the fastest track to bringing about the ‘internet of things’ – the practice of integrating digital capabilities to the most ordinary of objects. Ranchers are using RFID to track beef from pasture to abattoir and researchers at the Asthmapolis project are using GPS-triggering asthma inhalers to learn more about pollutants, and all are contributing to the proliferation of data. The objects around us are becoming networked, either through built-in communication hardware or software elements fitted on top.

MASSAGING THE DATALAYER /

A company called Stickybits, which had its coming out party this year at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, allows you to add content–a video, a comment, a photo–to any barcode scanned with its app. Essentially the company has turned every barcode-carrying product into a media node.

Keep an eye peeled this week for Contagious’ special Stickybits treasure hunt, centered on our Issue 23 cover (which you can scan from the illustration here), and has Euro RSCG London’s new Dulux spot attached to it. Find the pink bits around town this week, scan them with your Stickybits app, and win Contagious prizes.

While our Stickybit challenge is but a small example, building games is, to me, the most exciting element of future-facing marketing efforts.

Think of the devotion a good videogame commands: players often log days at quests, or facing rivals online. And unlike a film, or a magazine, the hefty price you pay for a console game doesn’t even guarantee you get to experience all the content–you have to be patient, persist, and earn the ending.

THE POINTS ECOLOGY /

Location-based services like Gowalla and Loopt and Foursquare represent a simple employment of game motivations using the sensors we carry. Get the most points. Be seen the best places. Unlock achievements.

Ultimately, brands are developing new ways to register loyalty and reward people choosing them, while enticing possible conversions from nearby consumers–nearby both in physical location and adjoining mental space (think of a hairdresser who promotes on check-ins at the beauty supply store).

Will location-based service companies wind up being overgrown, social-enabled supermarket points schemes? No one can tell yet. But as the unique user behaviour, the check-in, the acknowledgement of presence in a space-time-byte matrix, spreads and becomes more familiar, and our sensor-augmented actions begin to throw off more and more data, the smartest marketers will be engineering access to it, and in turn creating experiences and narratives all the more relevant.

Returning to Mr. Ballard’s quote, there’s good reason for these shiny things to feel threatening. The firmaments of this business are shifting, and we can’t see where they’ll settle yet. But without threat, we drift to complacency. Now is the time, more than ever, to re-examine what is useful, relevant and entertaining as the world keeps turning.

Banksy “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit” at the free exhibition of his work in Covent Garden, originally uploaded by pomphorhynchus.

There are probably a few spoilers in here, or not. Read at your peril.

Plot-wise, the movie mostly stars a Frenchman named Thierry Guetta. Thierry becomes obsessed with chronicling things via video, and fixates on street artists, adoring of the danger and spontaneity.

Thierry is clearly obsessed and mentally unbalanced, but in that endearing Man On Wire, French way. His marriage miraculously stays intact while he follows Shepherd Fairey across the globe, plowing through thousands of tapes–ostensibly, to the artists, for a documentary–which fill dozens and dozens of boxes in his house.

Theirry’s camera eventually, after much pursuit, intercepts Banksy, and several close scrapes bring the two together, as friends. Theirry gets comfortable in Banksy’s inner sanctum. Only in this short section do we get to see the artist working; otherwise he narrates in hood, face obscured, with robo voice. Scenes from his studio are really interesting; at one point he takes Theirry to his attic and shows him boxes of £10 bills, with Lady Di’s face printed on them, and explains how they printed £1,000,000 worth and have been passing them to vendors at festivals.¹

At various points in the film, the question of whether Thierry is real or not came to mind. It seemed, thematically, that his obsession with videotaping everything melds perfectly with the themes of surveillance and voyeurism prevailing in Banksy’s work. But the dating of the footage appears to have been too elaborate to fake. Fairey looks younger, wearing baggy, of-the-era late ’90s clothes in footage purported to be from that era. Speaking with a few people more familiar than I, it’s true, he’s a real guy. Guetta’s character, though, is so surreal and outlandishly appropriate to the subject matter, that what happens next is completely conceptually seamless to the point where the rational mind rebels.

Banksy asks Theirry to show him his film, Life Remote Control, and, surprise, the final product of his insanity and obsession is intolerable. You can watch a few bits of it here.

So Banksy decides to make the movie about Thierry, and, in the meanwhiles, tells Thierry, who has been experimenting with stickers and wheatpasting, to do an art show–and Thierry dubs himself Mr. Brainwash.

Given this mandate by his hero, Thierry can’t help but make it massive: he puts his life in hock (supposedly) and hires a team to create art (a style-less mish-mash of Fairey, Banksy and Andy Warhol) and leverages endorsements from Fairey and Banksy to get the punters (Fairey calls them suckers, which is maybe more appropriate) out and buying.

And they do. His Life is Beautiful show sells a million dollars in product and runs for months (I wasn’t able to independently verify
this). Theirry is an art star, and has had a subsequent show here in New York in February.

And there we have it. But what do we have? Well, the great street art swindle. Like John Lydon said, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

The Sex Pistols did it first. The KLF wrote The Manual on how to do it. Now Banksy is doing it: creating a story to spur demand, lending authority to it in a rapidly popularizing subculture, satisfying the hunger and laughing while everyone eats it up.

It is almost a performance edition of the piece pictured above.

Thierry’s the ultimate idolator, a King Toy of the graf world, but in an endearing, ‘let me hold the ladder and learn to do it’ savant-ish sense rather than cynical or ill-meaning way.

In him, Banksy has a tool to make us aware of our desire to belong and understand, nudging him forward, enabling his rise, only to gloat over the result. The art fans, clad in Ed Hardy, lined the sidewalk to see Life is Beautiful and take home a piece. But once everyone catches on to the gag, what happens to the work? And Thierry’s (clearly unbalanced) ego? If Banksy was affiliated, does that mean it has value (in an artistic or financial sense)?

Banksy is certainly a fascinating character, and this film will raise more interesting discussion on the nature of art in our times. But as opposed to his pieces on the wall in Gaza, indicting a system of oppression and bringing power and hope and positive messages to the world, and the Disneyland incident (which is explained in harrowing detail in the film) it feels like there’s been a turn in Banksy’s work toward the cynical.

Here, in helping make Mr. Brainwash into something of a star, he’s turned to lampooning the general public, ordinary people whose minds have been opened to the sort of surprise and wonder great street art fosters.

The film is out April 16 in the States, and if you’re interested in the culture of street art and image-making in cultural affairs I’d recommend you seek it out.

Animal New York has a post revealing some Fairey admissions, and that throws up a few good rumors and explanations about Theirry owning property and having family connections that let him do legal graffiti. It’s worth a look.

1. I think this is a crime, counterfeiting, and admitting to it on film, with the evidence, would be trouble, at least in law-abiding Britain. Which makes me think its not entirely true. [↩]

This went out to some folks over email but I wanted to post it here as well.

I’ve got big news I wanted to share: I’ve taken on the responsibilities of opening an office here in New York as Contagious Communications’ North American Editor.

The official press release is up, and I’ve done a quickie intro on contagiousmagazine.com.

If you don’t know Contagious, I’ll give you the quick primer. It’s a London-based marketing intelligence company founded in late 2004 and led by the flagship product, a quarterly magazine. It also produces FEED, a bespoke subscription service for specialized pulses of information, an events division offering custom conference programming and Contagious Insider, a consultancy that has helped think on a bevy of interesting challenges from a wide variety of top-notch clients.

Contagious started around the idea of chronicling and considering how non-traditional efforts were impacting marketing; it has grown to a robust clearinghouse of innovative approaches, unique insights and all manner of interesting ideas from around the world of marketing and beyond. (Download 2009′s Most Contagious report for a taste.)

It’s extremely exciting to be able to bolster such a robust and focused team. Contagious has a diverse and deep pool of talented writers, researchers and collaborators as well as a can-do startup mentality.

A while ago I was reading a blog post BSS&P’s Ed Cotton had written about the need for a creative-thinking version of McKinsey, about how stimulating ideas and creative revitalization can be more beneficial to growth than cost-cutting. I think Contagious has the potential to serve as that energy- and idea-giving entity for any of today’s companies interested in what’s next.

So in the next few months I’ll be building our presence on this side of the pond at conferences and events, paying visits to lots of companies and, most importantly, watching closely and taking observations and insights to the print magazine and website.

If you’re not already, get in touch. Sign up for our e-mail newsletter, follow us on Twitter (@contagiousmag) and submit your best work.

Contagious is well known in Europe, and has been very successful around the globe so far, but we’ve still got a challenge in helping it find a bigger audience in the Americas. I hope you’ll be able to play a part and contribute to what’s fast become a vibrant community of forward-thinkers.

This week saw the auspicious launch of a new agency called Victors and Spoils, founded by former Crispin Porter + Bogusky folks, Evan Fry and John Winsor as well as Claudia Batten, a former VP at Microsoft-owned in-game advertising facilitator Massive.

Fry, in the Times piece, makes an impressive statement:

“Crowdsourcing is looked at as a trend du jour,” Mr. Fry said. “We want to be the first agency that gets it right.”

I want them to as well. But perhaps in a different way than they do.

Advertising execs have been in love with Clay Shirky’s ur-crowdsourcing text “Here Comes Everybody” since it made its debut last year, but they haven’t been able to get it right.

There’s a reason why; marketers have focused on using executions from the crowd (eg Doritos’ tone-deaf Super Bowl spots) to replace things they’d usually pay specialists lots of money for, like logos and commercial scripts, instead of the easy tasks everyone can complete, like drawing a sheep (as in Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market) or retyping a blurry word (as in Luis von Ahn’s CAPTCHA).

So, to succeed, Victors and Spoils has to find the middle ground.

And, by the power of the crowd vested in this tiny node in a remote corner of the internet, I have it for them. Here’s your assignment, guys.

Build a community around the DARPA network challenge and one of the “household-name brands” you allude to pitching for in the Times, win the challenge by finding the eight balloons first, and donate the $40,000 in prize money to charity in the name of the brand.

I’d hire a mathmetician to figure out the best way to allocate your immense brain wattage and flex it to comb the country for the eight balloons. Issue incentives to players, keep them honest, allow the whole thing to develop near-realtime with streaming content and all sorts of extra goodies.

It’ll be tough, because you’ll be competing against ultra-efficient networks, the likes of 4chan, which is unfortunately the closest thing we have now to an effective megalith of distributed energy that has the get-up-and-go to mobilize quickly. But what they boast in adolescent drive they don’t necessarily hold in technical expertise.

In as much as advertising has become a highly-efficient substrate for many of our emotional responses, so too will you have to be the surface underlying the network, giving it nutrients and making it robust.

Leafing through Advertising Age‘s Small Agency Awards issue last week I was struck by this simple ad from MDC, one of the Awards’ sponsors: a group shot of Crispin & Porter Advertising in 1992.

Now, you all (probably) know what happened to little old Crispin & Porter. And nostalgia is great. But the underlying message of this ad–that you can go from a 13-person creative department to employing over 200 creatives over several continents in 17 years–is a fundamental testament to the spirit of entrepreneurship, as Alex Bogusky wrote for us when the idea of the Small Agency Awards became urgent. (And yes, I know that’s not a massive jump, considering the ascent of agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, but, whether you like its ads or not, CP+B has managed to maintain a strong culture, unlike mega-networks put together via merger & acquisition.)

It isn’t very often ads in our magazine jump out, so I thought I’d try to give this one a little more light, and maybe see if there was some “where are they now” info on the people in it. I managed to put names to a few faces, but if you’ve got more info, by all means, contact me, or leave a comment.

1. Chuck Porter, now CP+B co-Chairman
2. Alex Bogusky, now CP+B co-Chairman
3. Markham Cronin, founded Markham Unlimited
4. Sarah Gennett, now CP+B VP/Dr. of Production Services & married to Markham
5. Dave Swartz, now CP+B VP/Creative Director
6. Mrs. Ana Bogusky, still Mrs. Ana Bogusky

It’s pretty amazing this many years later almost 40% of the people in the creative department are still with the company. I’m also digging the “good enough sucks” sign on the back wall.

UPDATE: The missing links have been found. Thanks, caller!

In the far back, next to Dave Swartz, is copywriter Steve Horowitz.

To Sara Gennet’s left is copywriter Michael Bettendorf (see his business card?) with art director Diane Durban to the left of Mrs. Bogusky.

That trio to the right contains Gloria Schmall (production), copywriter Shawn Wood (with the baseball hat) and intern Emily Chase.

In the front to the left of Porter, Bogusky and Cronin is Aileen Lopez, from the studio.

MC Hammer, of all people who’ve mastered the dark arts of social media, wrote an Op-Ed piece for Ad Week extolling the virtues of Twitter for connecting to fans without intermediary media. (Though some have suggested it was the work of a ghost writer.)

While new social media platforms seem to pop up every day, I’m strongly behind Twitter, a micro-blogging tool that has become a game changer for me. The platform offers celebrity brands the means to build and develop relationships in an intimate and personal way. The friendly and efficient interface links to video and audio and integrates with various other social media outlets with ease. That means my brand can live on a wide variety of platforms where fans might find me.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, ten days later, his cousin, a co-star of his reality show, is accused of raping a woman who he met via Twitter in a Livermore, CA hotel room. I will refrain from a lay-up, empty-netter of a joke out of respect for the gravity of the situation.

This just came over the e-wire regarding Barack Obama’s presidential campaign winning Integrated and Titanium Grand Prix awards at Cannes over the weekend…

June 30, 2009

Statement on receiving Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival Grand Prix Titanium and Integrated Campaign Awards:

“The Obama Media Team is honored to accept these amazing awards in recognition of the outstanding work done by so many people at the Campaign, in particular the New Media Group, alongside the multi-agency consulting team led by AKPD Message and Media and GMMB.

“The communications agency roster includes: Dixon Davis Media Group, Murphy Putnam Media, Shorr Johnson Magnus, Squier Knapp Dunn Communications, Message, Audience and Presentation, FUSE, Blue State Digital and The Strategy Group. Research firms include: Benenson Strategy Group, Anzelone-Liszt Research, Bendixen and Associates, Bennett, Petts and Blumenthal, Brilliant Corners, David Binder Research and Harstad Research. All of these firms and the Obama for America staff share in this incredible honor.

“But we couldn’t have done it without all those volunteers, who knocked on doors, hosted events, made phone calls, contributed whatever they could afford and stood in line on Election Day to make their voice heard. Most of all, we must thank President Barack Obama, the best client anyone could ever hope to have.

“It is humbling to receive this recognition among so many groundbreaking campaigns around the world.”

In addition to being the highest profile political campaign ever awarded at Cannes, it is likely the most collaborative. I count 19 communications and research firms sharing the Lion, at least the ones that were mentioned on the email I got. Maybe the trophies will travel around like the Stanley Cup to each partner company, but if I were running a political communications, design or research agency, it would be worth the €1999.00 to get advertising’s highest honor for the office shelf¹.

Someone may have left Chicago’s Mode Project off the list, though–according to Mode’s website it had a pretty big role: “[Mode Project was] one of the main creative partners in the campaign, assisting its longtime client and the lead agency, AKPD Message and Media. Mode Project oversaw the design of the now famous Obama logo and produced more than 200 broadcast commercials and additional digital content during the course of the primary and general election.” You may remember them from this space previously, as they commissioned one Aaron Draplin to collaborate on some recovery logos.

It’s a conspicuous absence, and maybe strikes at the heart of the creative-versus-rational debate Bob Garfield gets into here when the cool, interesting company that designed the logo is left out of the celebratory dogpile: “the messaging was as creatively barren as it was tactically brilliant. There was no ‘Morning in America’ in this campaign. No ‘Daisy.’ No any single thing that stood out. Cannes has just awarded two Grand Prix to a back office.”

Well, a very talented back office, with political geniuses David Axelrod and David Plouffe running the show, but still one that required the iconic ‘O’ (that ironically headed the email as you see here, yet whose creators weren’t given any dap). Mode Project even produced the video that introduced David Plouffe’s Cannes appearance, made possible by Omnicom’s DDB (watch it at the studio’s site). The Guardian’s Mark Sweney reports here Plouffe dispelled the myth the campaign was 2.0–Plouffee called it “old school,” surely one for which a logo is integral.

So, I’ve asked the spokesperson from GMMB (also an Omnicom agency) a couple more questions about its Cannes strategy and will see if the Mode snub is just an oversight. Maybe it is. Hopefully this isn’t this year’s BBDO-Big Spaceship credit fracas; it would be a shame to ruin the further celebration of optimism and choice with squabbling and politics.

Funnily enough, in the course of dashing off this post things seem to have developed. A colleague received an emailed release from Mode just a few minutes after I received the release from GMMB:

OBAMA FOR AMERICA CAMPAIGN WINS TOP PRIZES IN CANNES
Mode Project, Creative Partner to AKPD Message and Media, Part of the Winning Media Team

Chicago, IL – (June 29, 2009) — The advertising and marketing campaign that helped propel Barack Obama into the White House has been honored with the two top prizes — the Titanium Grand Prix and the Integrated Grand Prix — from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Chicago-based Mode Project was one of the main creative partners in the campaign, assisting its longtime client and the lead agency, AKPD Message and Media. Mode Project oversaw the design of the now famous Obama logo and produced more than 200 broadcast commercials and additional digital content during the course of the primary and general election.

Of the Cannes win for Obama for America, Mode Project’s Colin Carter says, “We were honored to be a part of the Obama for America campaign and congratulate everyone on the Obama Media Team in this historic, game-changing endeavor. The Cannes honor is the highest in advertising and knowing we contributed to the successes of the campaign gives us a sense of accomplishment, second only to the election’s outcome.”

Mode Project (http://www.modeproject.com/) is a Chicago-based creative production studio providing motion design, production, editorial and interactive solutions to agencies and brands such as AT&T, ecko unltd, Obama for America, Sunsilk, Tropicana, Kellogg’s, Gatorade since 2002.

So, got any info as to why different agencies and companies involved in the historic campaign may be playing politics in the wake of the Cannes awards? Or is this just an innocent, simple oversight where the email I got was the one that forgot to give praise to the creative parts of the campaign, reserving that for another PR list? Let me know…

1. maybe that’ll help the Lions keep the lights on after this year’s fest was reportedly off some 40%, but surely they had some cash salted away [↩]

UPDATE: Last night’s meeting went great. I schlepped on about becoming a better geek, Matt from McCann introduced some tools to make anyone into a rabid Twitter fiend and James from Saatchi poked the crabby bear that is the age-old debate on advertising’s merits as art and the ethics of creative borrowing. Good times. Hopefully the ladies enjoyed as much as we did.

check out the slides and resources links

As we approached our CaT: Creativity and Technology event last week (which went swimmingly, thanks for asking) I began to think more and more about the prevalance of augmented reality in the panels and presentations that we were putting on. AR, along with data visualization, was one of the day’s most discussed topics; at least four of the presenters on the agenda spoke of the technique.

We had a few practitioners together, so I wanted to ask them what I’m sure many attendees were thinking: Is this a fad, or what? I’ve seen the rumblings and mutterings to the same effect, and a post today by Iain at Crackunit is prompting even more debate.

While I’m in general tilting toward the cynical side when I see a tool get hyped quickly, I’m pretty confident as we extend the size and strength of mobile data networks, get larger screens at home and become more comfortable interacting with webcams that we’ll see applications of Augmented Reality move away from cool visuals and into a realm of great utility. Already, mobile apps like Wikitude are making use of the technology but once data streams there get larger expect even better stuff. (Tangentially, I talked with the creators of a bunch of apps for a recent Creativity story.)

Obviously, as in everything, advertising professionals stand a good chance of ravaging the practice, but I don’t think that’ll matter. Even if they do, useful, interesting applications stand stock apart from tawdry gags. The USPS box simulator Tait mentions from AKQA is a good example of this and the Ikea example below it is great and traditional as well.

My.IKEA from Robin Westergren on Vimeo.

But what are they keys to deeply significant AR projects, other than a growing infrastructure of fast mobile connectivity, increase in display size and webcam adoption?

• Coordination with product/package design across multiple areas to create unique activators: Consider being able to pullall the Kraft products from your cupboard, place them with their tags facing the webcam and then seeing the different hot meals you could combine them to make. The sort of heavy interplay across multiple product lines that’s necessary for this to be good won’t come from a one-off project, though.
• Dynamic, rapid interplay with other backend parts on the visualization tip: Wieden + Kennedy did a virtual Easter Egg hunt in its office with Photosynth and Google Street View’s just introduced Smart Navigation. Both services are good at imitating 3D-like experiences from flat images. I can’t imagine we’re far from finding a bridge. Imagine going to Disneyland or a National Park and being able to bring your trail map to a viewer location and pop out an AR map to note landmarks and see what you’re in for. This won’t work, though, unless the stuff in back comes together seamlessly.
• Useful and compelling content and interactions: This last one may be the most obvious but it’s also the most important. Any Crystal Pepsi/Pet Rock scenario begins with people thinking of the AR applications as tired and a waste of time, developing a resistance to the technology and ignoring it. There are already a few barriers to engagement, namely the amount of time and technology it takes to fire up the interaction. As those come down, you’ve got to make sure what’s on the other end counts.

Wikipedia has an exciting list of potential AR stuff (such as, when projectors get really cheap, you can do cool stuff like this: “Any physical device currently produced to assist in data-oriented tasks (such as the clock, radio, PC, arrival/departure board at an airport, stock ticker, PDA, PMP, informational posters/fliers/billboards, in-car navigation systems, etc. could be replaced by virtual devices that cost nothing to produce aside from the cost of writing the software.”)

Thinking AR stuff will quickly go away or decline in quality is a normal cynical reaction (and one I had at first), but it doesn’t seem like, in this case, it will. Advertisers will certainly make thorough use of the novelty and entertainment aspects, but the rate of innovation inside the AR community will allow more and more meaningful interactions should brands choose to dedicate resources to well-thought-out projects.