Last Monday, instead of spending the public holiday afternoon in a sunny park enjoying one of the many music festivals, I stayed inside the Rode Hoed to listen to some very famous speakers giving their vision on mobile. Two of them inspired me most: Andrew Gill and Robert Rice. On the mobile device as a means for personal advertising and for viewing the world with a 7th sense (or is it still 6th sense?).

The age of personal advertising

For Andrew Grill, it’s time to completely rethink the advertising space. Less is more from now on. It doesn’t make any sense that advertisers are still paying so much to reach millions of people who are just not listening.

If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. And they’d be right about doing so.

I completely agree with Andrew when he says that the mobile phone is the ideal way to reach customers on a personal level. Basically this is the same message I stated at the previous MoMo: loyalty programs should be on your mobile phone rather than on a plastic card. But for many people in the advertising market it’s still hard to grasp when the number of customers you reach is so low compared to the numbers “reached” by a TV ad. 50% of 5000 is still less than 1% of 1 million. How can the value be so much higher then?

Andrew firmly believes that these 2500 potential customers reached via their mobile phone on their own request are much more valuable than the 10.000 potential customers who got the message via the TV ad. The chances that they end up buying a product are much higher: They actually asked for the information! And since you know them, you can also better adapt the offering to close the deal. You don’t know anything about the 10.000 people who show interest after seeing the ad on TV. You can’t even measure them.

So it’s time to think about the personal ad. The company that realizes that first and also knows how to fulfill Andrew’s 3P’s of mobile advertising (Permission, Privacy, Preference) will have huge success.

The age of augmented reality

Robert Rice has been in this field for the past 15 years. I think I started to hear about AR as a serious technology only about 3 years ago, before it was more science fiction to me. Now the first applications are actually live, it’s time to think about a future with AR.

• Wikitude is a travel guide that tells you more about the building that you see right in front of you.
• ING has an application to showing the nearest ATM superimposed on your screen when point the camera in various directions.
• Layar will soon be launched for Android phones. It allows any company to superimpose locations on top of the screen. There are now layers for Funda and Hyves.

These are a few examples of what’s been developed the last couple of months and it’s starting to grow fast. So how will this evolve? Robert doesn’t want this to become another geek technology. His nightmare is if AR becomes associated with weird people with strange masks on their heads walking around and waving strangely with their hands. The masses would freak out! It has to become something natural, easy to use: Fashion items like sunglasses or a watch.

But above all, AR should add value to our lives. In Robert’s mind, it will become an essential intelligence that we’ll be able to use as our 7th sense: It will change everything: The way we interact with each other, the way we perceive our environment, the way we handle our privacy. Combine face recognition, all the information about someone available online and AR tools and you can start to get a glimpse of what this means in the social world…

Robert is optimistic about that new augmented reality, but also warns that it may be crushed if we do it the wrong way: complex technology, privacy issues, strange behaviour… It’s a thin line and easy to get wrong.

More reading

• MMO Evolution by Robert A. Rice Jr.
• London calling: Andrew Grill’s blog
• The videos and slides of momo#11

Tags: advertising - andrew grill - ar - augmented reality - loyalty - mobile - mobile advertising - momoams - robert rice