Top 5 ways brands can utilize augmented reality
Augmented reality is everywhere right now - the newest 'bright shiny object'... is it a fad or is it a viable tool for marketeers? There are lots of technical bugs and some very ill conceived campaigns (what's the point? who cares?) but used strategically and creatively it can be a powerful experience for brands and audiences.
Some of the best ways I've seen brands using AR are:
1) Enhancing traditional print campaigns:
instead of just having a small 'www' invitation to a brand website on a magazine ad, entice audiences with an offer or content they can only see using the printed piece to unlock the information online. Both Best Buy and Walmart have used AR with their weekly circulars - Best Buy 3D highlights their new Twitter service 'Twelpforce' and Walmart's 'Your Zone 3-D' demostrates the creative options for their teen furniture line.
2) UGC:
with a webcam and cool 3D graphics brands can empower consumers to create their own cool videos. Molson's beer bottle fans controlled animated party messages which could be recorded and uploaded to the (age-verified) website.
3) Facebook apps:
use the active social media audience to expand the reach of a campaign. Kia created 'Go Hamster Go!' to promote the new Soul car with an interactive branded game that uses face recognition to incorporate the gamer directly into the environment.
4) Try-it-before you buy it:
AR can be used as a new techie way of sampling. Ray Ban created an application that allows fashionistas to try on several sunglasses styles.
5) Enhancing a product purchase:
Rewarding consumers with additional experience for purchasing a product. Mattel is including 'web tags' with each of it's new Avatar action figures, extending real-world toy with additional online character biographies and animations. The 3-D images will react to each other when two of the tags are on screen together.

Microsoft Tags - the future of shopper marketing?

Cool Alert! Microsoft is currently in beta with Microsoft Tags which they are touting as being the catalyst to transform physical media (print ads, billboards, packaging, instore media) into live links for accessing information and entertainment online. Connect POS to the online world by 'snapping' a tag with the camera of a web-enabled phone.

5 potential ways tags could be used:

a) deliver product information in the retail aisle

b) send offers and information to people driving by

c) tie promotional content to in-store purchase

d) test the effectiveness of advertising

e) real time interaction with shoppers eg. send shoppers on a retail 'scavenger hunt'

IBM brings tennis fans phone apps and twitter updates

For Wimbledon 2009 IBM developed a mobile app for the T-Mobile G1 phone that featured location-aware visualisation technology combined with augmented reality which acted as a real time guide and interactive map of the tournament. Users were able to view the tennis courts and grounds through their camera phone and the app would identify court number and display details about the current and subsequent matches.

They also created a twitter app (downloadable at www.wimbledon.org/ibm) that enabled fans to recieve tweets from players, commentators and a team of IBM scouts at Wimbledon. The scouts gave first hand accounts about queues, seat availability, travel information and live match updates.

Shopper marketing isn't about finding new ways to reach consumers but about finding new ways to meet their needs.....

Shopper marketing is about the "power of the retail environment"; the sea change in perception within the marketing community that has led to the store being viewed as a brand-building venue; the trend among retailers to build their own brands by taking greater control of the messages presented in their stores; the resultant move among product manufacturers to align their own marketing strategies "to work through the voice of the retailer"; and the realignment of traditional category-based merchandising to reflect shopping behavior and product usage.

The store is the final frontier of mass media, the place where brands can reach the tens of millions of consumers that television and other channels used to deliver before the days of media fragmentation, active consumer media consumption and personalization.

The shopper marketing industry conversation has moved beyond that concept to encompass a deeper understanding of the store as an ideal venue for connecting with consumers in timely, relevant ways that can't be delivered through mass media.

Cool New Tweeting Campaign from music label... Twitter provides a perfect 'teasing' media.

For Eminem's new album, "The Relapse," the marketing team at Aftermath/Interscope Records has mounted an audacious campaign that playfully smears the lines between the rapper's troubled past and the nightmarish, fictionalized world of his latest work. By using Twitter to dispense short, often disturbing thoughts and links to multimedia components revolving around a mental institution.

Some of the tweets are behind-the-scenes updates leading up to the album's release tomorrow ("They are still editing my video") while others are seemingly non-sequitur paranoia ("There's no place to hide ..."), complete with links to images that suggest Eminem is in a mental hospital and/or rehab facility called Pompsomp Hills.
Other tweets have included a link to the album's cover, a mosaic of pills that form an image of Eminem's face; a screenshot of his upcoming paid iPhone and iPod Touch game set in Pompsomp Hills; a link to a blood-splattered video for his single "3 A.M." that's set in the fictional clinic; and a link to an interactive web experience that's set there as well.

For the release of Japanese singer-songwriter JuJu's song "Sunao Ni Naretara" (wish I could be true to myself), record label Sony wanted to target women in their teens and twenties. Sony created a brand new type of mobile movie, a "Pair Movie". This is a mobile movie that can be enjoyed with friends by placing two mobile phones next to each other. Half of the movie is shown on one screen and half on the other screen. Two people visit a mobile site and download one half of the movie (either the left of the right), then must sit together to view the full film.

JuJu’s music video for the song was divided up into 5 episodes and was made available for free from www.sonymusic.co.jp/drama/juju. Visitors to the site could either take a picture of a QR code to get the series on their mobile or download directly from the mobile site.
As a result the Pair Movie was played 320,000 times in the first month. The total number of downloads is now 2,200,000 and still growing. More than 150,000 copies of the song were sold and the song Sunao Ni Naretara became JuJu’s biggest hit.

A massive ethnographic study by the Council on Research Excellence released in March found that more than 99% of time people in the U.S. spend with video still comes the old-fashioned way -- on the tube -- and only 0.5% takes place online. A recent study by Advertising Research Foundation Chief Research Officer Joel Rubinson of more than 300 studies on TV effectiveness found that despite the rise of DVRs and other forms of commercial avoidance, there has been no erosion in return on investment from TV ads.