Interactive Advertising: With New Products Comes A Need For New Marketing Techniques

The roots of advertising began in 3000 B.C.E. in Babylon where shop owners would hang signs carved in wood or stone so that customers could find specific stores. The tradition of advertising continued with the Egyptian criers who would announce when boats came in and what they were carrying, and continued on all the way to the ads posted in the Boston News-Letter beginning in 1704, subliminal advertising of the 1950's and the television and internet advertising of today. (Campbell, Martin & Fabos, 2011) The question remains, what is next for the advertising industry? As society changes, so will consumers and as consumers change, so will the products that they use. As products change over time, so will the medium used to market them. With products becoming as advanced as they are, and today's youth becoming increasingly tech-savvy, advertisers must create new and exciting ways of keeping customers interested in what they have to say. It is because of this that new, interactive advertising techniques are necessary to appeal to the next generation of buyers and keep up with the increasingly advanced products being sold.

New advertising techniques will let consumers better understand what companies are about and what it is they are trying to market. In the article, The Future of Advertising- Traditional and Interactive by Andrew Losowsky (2011), Estaban Montes states, The more a tool is customized to the user, the more powerful it will be and through the use of these tools, people will better understand what it is what the brand stands for. The message will appear in the context of whatever it is you need in that moment (p. 74). Businesses are customizing to the user through an incredible innovation know as AR or augmented reality. In Fleur Britten's (2011) New York Time Article, Brands Embrace An 'Augmented Reality,' Britten speaks about Banana Flame, a clothing company that lets online shoppers try on cloths before they buy them without having to travel to a store. Users simply use they webcams on their computers and the article of clothing that they are looking at will track where their body is in the camera frame and adjust its position so that the article of clothing looks like it is on you right on your screen. (Britten, 2011) In the article, Britten speaks with Elizabeth Cardy, a first time user of the technology on Banana Flame's website. She then goes on to tell Cardy's story, By gesturing, she operated the virtual controls, adjusting the garment's position, color and size, and then photographed herself to show friends. In the end, she bought the dress: 'Seeing it on helped me decide.' (p.1) Augmented reality has made it possible for consumers to experience a company's product without leaving their home and it is done in a fun and interactive way that makes people want to shop.

Another way in which interactive advertising could help consumers understand what a company is trying to market is through the company understanding the consumers, each individual consumer. Corning, a material manufacturing company recently released a video called A Day Made of Glass that was created to depict our not-so-distant future. In the video, a woman walks into a clothing store and is greeted by a computer that knows her name. She then taps the computer and is lead to a database of their latest fashions (Corning, 2011). Although it is not stated within the video, it could be implied that the computer was leading her to fashions based on her fashion interests. After all, if the computer knows her name, what is stopping it from knowing further information and preferences that she may have? This type of technology would be made possible by sensors at the entrance of the store that use wifi to enter the saved information in your wireless devices such as your phones internet or tablet. If you put personal preferences and information on a social networking site, hypothetically there is nothing stopping this technology from accessing your information, seeing that your favorite color is red, and showing all the clothing options that come in red in the store.

With all great advancements in technology come great threats with technology and nothing comes with more of a threat than online shopping. It is because of this that fraud should not go unnoticed when speaking about the exciting world of Augmented Reality and other advancements in online shopping. In Britten's aforementioned piece on augmented reality she states, The founder of Banana Flame, Chandra Saria, says he simply wanted to bring customers closer to the product: 'By engaging customers, you can achieve more sales.' Since adding the tool in August, the number of unique visitors who put something in their carts has increased 182 percent over last year's totals (p.2). This is great news for Saria but it is also great news for online frauds who are clever enough to lure in young audiences with the appeal of AR. Advertising is geared more and more toward children with fun features like using web cams to see cloths on yourself so this means younger and younger children will be getting hold of their parent's credit cards to make online purchases. This is a dream come true for online frauds who can target this naive audience and steal their money away. In Engaging Online Consumers With an Interactive, Cost-per-action Advertising written collaboratively by B. Andrew Cudmore, Jenny McCoy, Joe Shuhy, and Jim Taylor (2009), the authors provide a disheartening statistic provided by L.A. Lorak in his article from The Journal of Advertising, Defending Against Fraud, Hacking. The article states, Industry analysts estimate current click fraud rates to be 14.1 percent of CPC Internet ad charges, or roughly $900 million (p. 291). Since 2002, when Lorak's article was published, this number can only have gone up, either because the percent increased or because online sales have increased. Now, with the release of augmented reality, this number is likely to skyrocket unless spy wear and blockers for computers continue to advance with the rest of online technology.

After examining the marketing strategies of the future and considering both the good and the bad, I began the form my own ideas for inventions that will suit today's consumer driven, instant gratification society. I had the idea of linking augmented reality and the ability for stores to read your personal information and combined them to make a convenient user experience. One would simply wear AR glasses that were linked wirelessly to a bracelet with a watch-like interface that contained general information about yourself. (Not social security numbers or credit card numbers, just general information.) This way, instead of walking into a store and having to go up to a computer, each shelf in a store would be marked with a code that your AR glasses could read and if the information on your watch stated that you liked the color red, your AR glasses would track all the AR codes in the store that corresponded in some way to the color red and would make those shelves glow in your vision so you would know to go to these shelves. This combination of watch and glasses would have other great applications as well such as tracking down other people you have things in common with. If you are looking for a website to shop from your watch, based on your preferences, could send a website suggestion to your AR glasses and the web address would show up in your vision within the search bar so you could then try that suggested address and find new stores to shop from.

We see advertising used everyday, everywhere we go. Whether it is sitting on the right side of our Facebook pages, before popular Youtube videos, on billboards or found on more unexpected things in a desperate attempt for companies to gain recognition. In the text entitled Future of Advertising: New Media, New Clients, New Consumers In The Post-Television Age, author, Joe Cappo (2003) tells a fascinating story about a marketing strategy, In Denmark, a media marketing agency called Nymedie is offering new parents free baby carriages decorated with advertising messages. Parents can choose from the styles of 'Push Prams' offered at the company's website and used them free of charge for two and a half years (p.185). Advertiser's will always be looking for new, ground-breaking ways to push boundaries and make the best user experience possible. In order to keep up with the tech-savvy youth of today and the ultra-advanced technology appearing on the market, companies need to become increasingly cunning in their strategies of getting consumers to purchase their products. I do not imagine it will be through strollers, but instead through advances in Augmented Reality as well as smart computers that learn peoples preferences creating a quicker and more convenient shopping experience for all people. Christmas shopping will no longer be a problem when you can walk into a department store, enter a loved ones name and the store's online directory will find that person's preferences and locate all the products they carry that they think that person would life. Companies will continue to find more and more ways for you to spend money on their products as easily as possible and for as long as online fraud is kept at bay, these new strategies will continue to be successful in drawing in consumers who are hungry for the latest trends.