I’m back from presenting at the AAAA Conference in Miami. Dang that place is hot – 90 at 11pm at night? Whew. I presented along with AKQA Group Planning Director, Kelli Robertson. Our presentation, entitled, “Emerging Technologies Can Create Powerful Brand Experiences” focused on a number of new technologies and how to use them to help create/inspire new marketing ideas. It can be difficult to present new technologies with the idea of pushing creative potential, without appearing too “gimmicky:” technology for technology sake – if you know what I mean. It is the great idea that leads over any new techie trend, however, just as a paintbrush and a canvas influences a painting, technology can inspire and enhance a creative vision. That said, we wanted to show new technologies, and then explain how they could be used within a marketing context.

As the audience was primarily non-technical marketing folks, we kept things high level and divided our talk into two main areas:
Location-based marketing: Serving up unique content to a user based on his/her phyisical location.

• GPS (new iPhone, Jotyou.com, loopt.com)
• Triangulation for Non-GPS Devices (Google’s MyLocation)
• Bluetooth broadcasting
• RFID (McDonald’s Japan, Mini)

Everyone can play

• Google’s Open Social
• Augmented reality (Total Immersion)
• Radiohead Lasers: DATA, it’s all about the data!

Actually, the Radiohead example got to the heart of what I wanted to get across: DATA. It sounds so “un-sexy”, but it is the ultimately where the creative power lives. The idea of being able to use a single data source to manipulate and create new “views” (presentations) of this data, is, in my opinion, the way to really begin to harness the power of technology for new innovative ideas. More on this in my next post!