Tissot now uses the high-tech display at events in the States, as well, such as at the MotoGP motorcycling championship at the Laguna Seca raceway in California, where the company is the official timekeeper.
But the space where you’ll be seeing more AR is mobile.
According to this infographic created by the U.K.-based AR developer Hidden Creative, AR is now being used for a wide range of marketing activities—in everything from riveting displays at conferences and for sales pitches to loyalty programs at the Point of Sale. Hidden says 35 AR apps are launched every month.
And some of them look pretty amazing.
Junaio has iOS and Android platforms that brands can use to customize AR for their customers’ needs.
Valpak, for example, has a channel on the Junaio app that launches the smartphone’s camera and GPS to overlay a set of 3D icons in real time showing the available Valpak coupons in the vicinity as the user scans the surroundings, with a radius varying from five feet to 20 miles away.
5. Mobile: Codes and Spot Targeting
Quick Response (QR) codes are the little black-and-white pixilated squares commonly found in print ads, on products, displayed on TV, and even stitched into fabric. If you have a phone with a camera and the right kind of reader app, you can scan a QR code to display text, contact information, or open a Web page.
People are also scanning UPC bar codes—especially the ones found on products you’d find at a grocery or drug store—for product pricing and information.
According to David Javitch, VP of marketing for New York City-based Scanbuy, the company has seen an 800 percent increase since a year ago in the number of barcode or quick response (QR) code scans it processes and is now doing more than one per second.
While Scanbuy currently has 8 million people using its ScanLife app on their phones and has worked with big companies such as The Home Depot and Taco Bell on huge code campaigns, the company is rolling out a platform that will allow regular people and small businesses to create their own QR codes starting at $25 a month.
While pricier than QR codes, StarStar Numbers might be a titch faster from a consumer perspective since it only involves one step. They’re branded vanity mobile numbers that let consumers call a brand’s name. For instance, if you’ve got a craving for Samoas or Thin Mints, you can call (not text) **GSCOOKIES and you’ll instantly receive a text message with a link to a Girl Scout Cookie Locator app.
In addition to smart phones giving consumers near-instant access to marketing or product information and digital content, they also are empowering businesses to do local spot targeting that only serves ads to people near a certain geographic location. For instance, a movie theatre could broadcast show times to only those smart phone users within a mile radius who happen to be doing things like playing Angry Birds, listening to Slacker Radio, or other similar activities.
Millennial Media, a Baltimore-based mobile ad platform, delivers such ads to consumers who are browsing the mobile Web or using apps. The company says advertisers can use a variety of formats such as banner ads, rich media ads or interstitials.
6. Video
Gartner’s Andrew Frank says the video space is seeing some interesting innovation, particularly in the area of what he calls “dynamic creative” that lets a company or advertiser change video content in real time.
“For example, you might re-edit a movie trailer on the fly depending on whether the viewer is male or female or in the North or in the South,” he says, holding up Tumri and Teracent as examples of ad platforms that can do it.
Cloud-based Flite is another ad platform that allows for real-time editing of ads. It can incorporate real-time content streams such as videos, polls, and other interactive elements into an ad, and even pull in social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—all of which can be switched up at any time.
For instance, a restaurant having a slow couple of hours could update its display ad with a flash deal that includes a poll and its Twitter stream that mentions the promotion.
Flite's pricing is about $1 CPM (cost per thousand views) but it depends on what you set your ad up to do. Simpler ones are cheaper but ads with customization such as sweepstakes or video galleries are more.
But what if putting things like YouTube in your ads sounds like a great idea, but you don’t have any content?
Near Networks just launched an online video channel platform for local businesses across the country. For $1,499 it will send a professional camera crew to your location and create a 90 to 120 second high definition micro-documentary for your business.
Once the video is done, Near Networks helps its clients create and manage a video channel on YouTube that can be embedded on a Web site, blog or on social media outlets.
7. Incentives and Virtual Currency
Gartner’s Andrew Frank says incentivized ads in games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Angry Birds tap into a huge audience of social gamers who play every day. “It’s the idea of giving people game credits or virtual goods or other things that they can use in a game in exchange for watching ads or interacting with them or otherwise engaging with the sponsor’s content,” he says.
“Virtual currency,” is what Chicago-based Lab42 calls it.
The year-old start-up not only creates some of the great infographics showing up lately on media outlets such as Mashable or HuffPost Tech, but it also offers an online market research tool that uses social networks to do market research.
