Interactive branding

Move beyond the traditional advertising – the terms below the line (BTL) and above the line (ATL) advertising are passé. Advertisers are coming up with new ideas incorporating latest techniques to provide the leading edge to their clients.

Nicely decorated kiosks, larger than life billboard with products oozing out of the frame, live models posing in the latest launched apparels, sensory testing at the trade fairs, painting the town with the colours of the newly launched brand – all of these ideas seemed creative and sometimes crazy. When I once saw a huge billboard with a real Enticer (a brand of Yamaha motorcycles) attached to it, I thought the advertising guys are going nuts. Then I noticed some live models in lingerie inside showcases in Europe and thought well the brands are getting livelier, with a human touch!

When the brand “Hutch” owned by the cellular service provider Hutchison Essar was launched in Delhi, the whole of the city was filled with the hoardings and banners with the message “Hi” for many days and people were left wondering what the hell is being launched. When the variants of boards were replaced with “Hutch”, the brand registered in the minds of Delhites strongly and within a short time, the brand gained the numero uno status in Delhi.

Now shifting towards the social advertising, who can forget the lissome models posing for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)? The stunts done by the PR and advertising agencies are now getting more and more creative and outrageous these days.

Let’s take the case of young achiever Anup Tapadia from India who owns the creative firm TouchMagix (www.touchmagix.com). His idea is just fantastic – with products like Magix Floor, Magix Wall, Touch Table, Touch Window to name a few, he has added another dimension in advertising and brand building. With the three keywords, interact, engage and communicate, Touchmagix allows the consumers to engage in a whole new experience interacting with the brand. It offers variety of interactive display solutions that attract the audience to experience interactive content in the most memorable way. Unlike other available technologies today, TouchMagix combines an advanced optical hardware sensor, MagixSense together with sophisticated movement recognition software that interprets the user interaction into high resolution events on the display. The interactive floor projection converts any floor into an interactive projected surface which gives the consumers the chance to touch and feel the brand.

Now move beyond this. It’s the turn of 3D holograms. Provision Interactive Technologies has announced that it has enhanced the capability of its 3D holographic display platform to be fully interactive with Mobile Mouse, an Apple iPhone application (www.marketingvox.com).

Grocery store shoppers, now will be able to interact with a floating 3D hologram via an enabled Provision 3D display that consumers access though their devices. When they click on the image they can get more information about the product or see it from another view or even receive a coupon. The app uses the built in accelerometer to translate a person's hand motions into mouse movements on the 3D hologram.

A Canadian firm, RabbitHoles Media, specialising in 3D holographic posters, embeds up to eight seconds of 3D video footage into a poster – an image which can be viewed in 3D without special glasses.

Marketing agency Grain&Pixel designed a life size book on Christian Dior which could be flipped pagewise by the wave of hands. It used the interactive, gesture-controlled hologram technology called AirStrike that was developed by LM3 Labs.