Last week I was one of several people who have a passion for Direct Marketing who were asked to do a talk on behalf of TNT about direct marketing in the digital age. One of my fellow speakers certainly won the prize for the brightest pants… bright red… and with his boundless energy and positivity you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a children’s entertainer!

As well as winning the prize for the brightest pants on the day, Stephen Shaw from BlippAR also won the prize for totally exciting me creatively with the BlippAR iPhone app which takes Augmented Reality to a whole new level. Launched in the summer of 2011, BlippAR is a free smartphone app that uses the in-built camera to recognise things in the real world and instantaneously provides you with digital connections, information or interactive entertainment on your phone screen.

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Marketing is not a nostalgic business. With the constant emergence of new technologies, advertisers need to keep bang up to date to avoid being left behind. Just think back a year. At the beginning of 2009, Twitter was still a relatively niche social network, Spotify wasn’t yet available to the general public and search engine Bing didn’t even exist. One year on and all these technologies may be fundamental to creating a successful advertising campaign.

So what’s next? What will the ‘big thing’ of 2010 be? Well, I’m not going to try and predict that, but I will tell you what will make the next ‘big thing’ happen – and that’s the Ubiquitous Network. In fact, I’m confident it’ll change the future of advertising and marketing forever…

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Direct mail may still hold a slender lead as the most dominant form of Direct Marketing, but things are definitely changing. Recent technological developments are giving marketers more and more opportunities to get their message directly to their audience. In years to come both mobile marketing and social networking may be the most effective forms of Direct Marketing, but right now the biggest rival to the DM pack is undoubtedly email marketing.

The practice of contacting customers and prospects through email has really taken off in recent years. In fact, The Direct Marketing Association estimated that US firms alone spent over $400 million on email marketing in 2006 – and the technique has only grown in popularity since. The reason for this is simple… email marketing has a number of benefits over traditional DM and door drops. Read more…

It’s staring at me on the arm of the sofa but I have promised that I won’t use it. I even turned it face down so I am not tempted to check my Facebook to see who has commented on my status in the last fifteen minutes, or to download the “Fish Tycoon” application I have heard my friend talking about. You can nurture and breed your own fish then sell them for virtual money. Truth is I hate fish, but the iPhone application looks fun…!!

An addiction?
Needless to say, my iPhone has become a worrying addiction – and the application store on iTunes is starting to cost me a lot of money! The store is what really makes the iPhone so unique and is the biggest advancement in mobile technology in recent years. It’s accessible via iTunes and holds over 25,000 applications ranging from the really useful to the completely pointless and bizarre. Read more…

On October 29th 2008 a 30-minute infomercial entitled ‘American Stories, American Solutions’ aired on virtually all of America’s TV Networks. This infomercial was the glittering jewel in Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign and garnered him over 30 million viewers and significant news coverage around the world… largely due to the $3 million it cost to air.

Obama’s Campaign, though, was newsworthy for more reasons than just this 30-minute infomercial. He was the first Presidential Candidate since John F. Kennedy to embrace a new medium successfully. In Kennedy’s case it was television… in Obama’s it was Web 2.0.

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Research conducted by the leading Market Research agency GfK NOP and Limbo revealed that iPhone users are more than twice as likely as non-iPhone users to browse the mobile web on their phone. And they are more than three times as likely to use location-based services, including maps, restaurant locators and friend finders.

As the popularity of GPS and web enabled phones increases, more and more applications are being created that allow people to make connections and interact with the world (and brands) in ways they never imagined. Many of these new applications are a Marketer’s dream; and whilst many are currently not available in the UK, it’s useful to see what the future holds and highlight the possibilities that GPS and web enabled phones open up to Brands and Companies alike.

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