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Most trend predictions that forecast beyond a year into the future are doomed to inaccuracy simply because of the pace of change and unpredictability of innovation. The rightfully skeptic among us are therefore likely to condemn a report that promises to predict how the world might look in 2020 as a work of optimistic fiction at best, and an exercise overstretched vanity at worst. That was the lens I brought to a report that some colleagues of mine at Ogilvy CommonHealth recently shared with me called 202020 VISION, a digital-health report outlining 20 scenarios of what digitally driven healthcare might look like in 2020. The report is surprisingly brilliant.

Reading through the scenarios, it was easy to imagine a distant future where technology and healthcare finally begin to work together to create a better world of care for us all. Though we cannot share the full report here (see the bottom of this post for details on how to get the full report), this post highlights seven of the most powerful ideas from the report along with some potential implications for anyone in marketing and communications. continue reading

It is hard not to notice the sponsored #MikeInTheWindow trending topic on Twitter and wonder “what in the world is this?” For those who don’t know, Mike in the Window is a campaign currently being conducted as part of Downy’s “Clean Sheet Week” Challenge where Mike Birbiglia, comedian and author of the New York Times best-seller “Sleepwalk With Me,” has been sleeping in a Macy’s store window to encourage consumers to test out the “long-lasting” freshness of Ultra Downy® April Fresh.

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Yesterday, HTC announced that they will be debuting two Facebook-branded smart phones, complete with the official Facebook colors (of, obviously, blue and blue). The company is reportedly planning to unveil the Facebook phones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

Of course, Facebook denied the rumor that they will be working with HTC – just like they’ve denounced every other rumor about a Facebook-branded phone. According to the Mashable piece, Facebook’s head of business development, Dan Rose, said the device is “just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way.”

Even without the Facebook seal of approval, the device could be quite appealing. What can users expect? Word is that Facebook phones will integrate with your personal Facebook address book, making it easier to call and email your Facebook friends via the information that they make public. With the site’s growth stronger than ever, it ought to appeal to a wide variety of users who use it as their main connectivity hub.

So why the hesitation for Facebook to give its official nod to a smart phone? It seems like a no brainer for them to invest in a mobile phone platform — after all, many people are increasingly using Facebook as their browser homepage, so why not make it their go-to on the road as well? From a business side, a Facebook-branded phone would allow a larger margin of revenue and more creative advertising opportunities. And, for those of us who are simply Facebook addicts, it could help take the social connectivity of the site to the next level. In fact, we’re so excited to see the phones, it just might be the thing to get us off our Verizon-iPhone fixation.

Stay tuned… We’ll keep you posted.

Contributors: Brian Smith and Betsy Lowther

They are an undeniable part of our culture. From “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” to The Most Interesting Man in the World, to the GEICO Gecko, you can’t deny that - when done right - fictional brand characters can live well beyond a campaign and become a memorable part of our lives.

And with the rise of the social web, we’ve seen a number of these characters try their hand at becoming a part of our online lives as well. The question is…can that be effective? continue reading

There is this new startup on the block aptly named Hipster. You probably have not even heard of it yet, but that’s okay because once it has gone mainstream it may be obsolete to its audience anyway. Even so I think this one actually has a chance.

This social networking site is currently creating quite a buzz, while still catering to a young audience that revels in irony, rejecting mainstream culture, listening to noise rock, wearing cardigans from American Apparel, and generally being edgy in all the same ways. Just dropping this term creates a lot of differing opinions and loyalties. But this new site is coming onto the scene with confidence and may well be the talk of the town at SXSW this year. The site boasts itself saying, “hipster is the best resource for anything and everything in your city.”

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The late Jack LaLanne of The Power Juicer (May He Rest in Peace)

First, we got Lean ’n Mean with The George Forman Grill. Then, we were dazzled by the Bedazzler. Oh, the 21^st century infomercial has provided us with so many titillating, and downright hilarious, consumer goods.

So what, you ask, are the top-selling among them?

Weight loss remedies, exercise equipment, kitchen appliances, and skincare products.

Thanks to off-peak advertising space and late night shopaholics trolling the broadcast networks at 3am, we have… the infomercial. And yet, these days, the infomercial isn’t just saved for the 3am crowd. The infomercial has finally made it to the mainstream. In fact, by 2009, most US infomercial spending was during early morning, daytime, and evening hours and, if that’s not shocking enough, over $150 billion worth of consumer products in the U.S. are now being sold through infomercials.

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Last Wednesday I attended the Business Development Institute’s (BDI) Mobile Healthcare (mHealth) Conference, hobnobbing with everyone from executives at Manhattan Research to influential healthcare bloggers from Pixels and Pills. In such a regulated industry where everyone is trying to understand the meaning of simply being “social,” let’s face it, mHealth is a bit 4.0 or beyond.

But that is not to say that the event did not produce some great learnings; with 41% of consumers wanting mobile healthcare information¹ and with forecasts like 81% of physicians will have smartphones by end of year², we continue to stress that the mobile market is one which Pharma should know how to approach, and approach right.

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This week, Starbucks launched a free Starbucks card app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and Blackberry owners. The app, which is currently accepted in 6,800 Starbucks and 1,000 Target stores in the United States, allows customers to pay with their smartphones in lieu of cash or credit cards. Customers can also add money to their cards, check their balances, locate stores, and earn rewards stars for free drinks.

As a coffee lover and iPhone user, I felt this new app might be a good fit for me (although potentially cause my caffeine addiction to spiral even more out of control, but I digress). Fellow NYC DI member Maya Swedowsky and I decided to test out the app and see if it made our Starbucks experience more efficient.

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To post, or not to post: that is the question. Once a post, message or tweet is published, it is virtually impossible to undo. In these digital days, information becomes public in the blink of an eye. But, how much of ourselves do we really want publicly shared? As much as we’d like to think we’re in the age of ‘life as an open book’, privacy and digital surveillance are very hot topics.

Take the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from unreasonable search and seizure when we have a “reasonable expectation of privacy”. However, some argue that living out our lives and communications digitally forfeits that reasonable expectation of privacy by the very nature of us putting ourselves out there in the public domain. Since we have entrusted our personal information to the various social media tools we’ve signed up for, essentially we agree that we don’t consider that personal information private – right? Oh, and since we’re also aware that surveillance exists, we expect our personal information may be tapped at any time – or do we?

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The forces behind DC Digital Capital Week — the 8-day tech fest that debuted to much fanfare last summer in the nation’s capital — knew that for round #2, they’d have to make an even bigger splash. So they chose 1/11/11 to unveil the 2011 incarnation of the event, scheduled for Nov 4-11, 2011. Cofounder Peter Corbett, head of D.C.-based interactive firm iStrategyLabs, sat down to give the scoop on five key updates for this year’s DCWeek, v2.0.

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