360DigitalInfluence

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
Jul 29

Panel Discussion: Traditional, PR and Digital Playing Together

Dirk Shaw

by Dirk Shaw
Category: Best Practices, Digital Influence, Events, Fresh Thinking

qrcode

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel with some great folks from various agencies. The topic was on integration of channels and the role digital plays to compliment traditional marketing, advertising and PR. There were several excellent questions asked by our moderator Andrea Ehresman from The Coca-Cola Company.  Here are a few that stuck out for me.

The first one was: “How are ‘traditional’ channels digitizing?” the example I shared is the introduction of QR codes into physical space to augment reality. QR codes consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, links or rich media. We are seeing QR codes and augmented reality popping up all over the place. A great example of this was when Calvin Klein was forced to remove an edgy billboard. They replaced it with a large QR code where people could access additional content.

Another question that yielded a great deal of discussion was.   “What are some ways to augment a mostly traditional marketing program with digital initiatives? “ One thing I think we all as a panel agreed on is that just because of hype over a marketing tactic it does not mean you should jump in heads first. Getting back to the fundamentals of marketing and understanding who your customers are, where are they and how do they want to engage with you should inform your digital initiatives.

This topic of understanding customer preference spawned another discussion on the importance of experience planning when scripting multi-channel interactions. The example of not scripting an experience was mentioned by an attendee who worked for a large retailer. He described a situation where employees in their retail stores were totally unaware of a Foursquare promotion they were running, similar to the Starbucks incident. These experience scripts need to take into consideration the points in time your employees interact as well.

And finally no discussion these days would be complete without a question on location-based marketing. A question from crowd was “What is the future of location based marketing”. This question had everyone on the panel itching to answer. The gist was that when you combine the power of Facebook’s open graph for behavioral data, with location, push messaging overlaid with an opt in from the consumer you have reached a marketing Nirvana.  We are still a little ways from this but are inching our way there one check in at a time.

Thanks to my friends @RedDoor interactive for hosting me this morning it was a great discussion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Digital Influence, Events, Fresh Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


7 Responses to “Panel Discussion: Traditional, PR and Digital Playing Together”

  1. Stan Timek Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 8:44 am

    Augmented reality is moving very quickly into the mainstream. The campaigns for Doritos and Dos Equis show the technology’s value in advertising and marketing. In the world of the average consumer applications on smart phones like the iPhone and Android platform are taking the technology on the road to help people locate a good place to eat or almost anything else they need.

    My company, Atomic Greetings, has taken a slightly different tack on augmented reality by combining it with QR Codes and a few other technologies to create a patent-pending system called EVX. What EVX does in our greeting cards is allow people to send personal and private video messages -inside- our regular paper greeting cards. The written message is inside and the video message is also… so all the sentiment is where you expect to find it!

    Check us out at http://atomicgreetings.com

    Stan Timek
    Atomic Greetings

  2. Stan Timek Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 8:46 am

    PS. Our cards and EVX system is also being used by businesses for traditional communications and marketing.

    Stan Timek
    Atomic Greetings

  3. Scott Esmond Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 11:13 am

    Big thanks to you, Dirk. Really appreciate you making the time to share insights and experience.

  4. John Parsons Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 4:18 pm

    QR Code enthusiasts are on the right track, but there is one major caveat. Creating the tag, while simple, is only the first step; the challenge is the mobile experience behind the tag. Compared to desktop or laptop environments, mobile browsers are a different beast entirely. To successfully build a satisfying mobile Web ‘micro site’ one must contest with tiny screens, less memory and storage capacity, bandwidth limitations and, above all, the absence of run-time applications and (on Apple devices) Flash. Fortunately, companies like Warbasse Design (http://www.warbassedesign.com) and others are pioneering these issues. It’s a brave new world — again.

  5. dirk shaw Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 9:22 am

    Stan. I like the Atomic greetings idea. when i saw the Hallmark attempt at this last year i felt the personalized greeting was the missing component.

    Do you all offer a white label solution?

  6. dirk shaw Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 9:25 am

    John.. Totally agree. Was just having this conversation with someone yesterday. I guess we did not learn much from the early browser war days when apps could cost x’s 2 simply because of the multiple platform support and with Apple not supporting flash so much for that being a common delivery platform..

  7. Stan Timek Says:
    August 4th, 2010 at 10:55 am

    Dirk,

    Thank you for the compliment. So far our customers are feeling the same way as you. They enjoy saying how they feel and say that writing the same thing out felt harder to do.

    As to your question about a white label solution, right now we’re working on a co-branded solution that gives primary prominence to the client’s brand. To be honest we haven’t had anyone ask about white label so it wasn’t on our radar.

    Thanks again.

    Stan Timek
    Atomic Greetings

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