Erik – Good speaking with you and hearing about the coming Experiential Storm (EpicenterX). Looking forward to watching it unfold in the coming weeks/months!

We’ve completed some great research on using photos in the experiential realm in a variety of ways, and I’m pleased to share it in a number of posts. I’ll cover when you absolutely MUST use green screen vs. regular backdrops, video vs still photos, RFID bracelets vs barcode scanners, how to create the perfect photo opportunity in sixty seconds, and much more.

Also, per your arm twisting, I’ll put together a special pricing package for EMF members for our new FotoZap Smartphone App.

But for now…I simply wanted to share an infographic

http://pct.re/37×8

This is for an auto manufacturer, and is a splendid example of how powerful photos are at events….and how well they amplify social engagement. A few cameras, some smiling brand ambassadors and ‘presto’ ….30,000 unique visitors to a branded web site and 5 million Facebook views. Over 50% of the photos taken were viewed online. About 50% of the viewers posted that personal photo to their Facebook wall. The rest is statistical history.

Adding photo capture to any event is sooooo easy now. Experiential marketers are crazy not to consider it for many of their activations.

If any of you readers are interested in joining the active and knowledgeable group of experiential marketing professionals at the EMF, you can take a look at their site: http://experientialforum.com/

And of course, if you join their happy ranks, that arm-twisting discount for our awesome new FotoZap App applies!

Add to this: meditating on programming hacks, building firmware faster than Japan, and getting people to smile as a business model. And hello, that’s us! What would you add to this list to make it your version of a crazy creative life?

Check out these great shots and videos from the bash!

And a couple more links for good measure:
http://pct.re/2r2w
http://pct.re/2r5S

Props to @voltierdigital for this awesome graphic!

Take a look at the the research graphic below to read more about how we and our fellow awardees qualified for the list. If you look closely, you’ll notice that of the top 100, only 5 were from Marin… it’s a small, exclusive little club that we’re quite honored to be a part of.

We made this infographic to illustrate the amazing social network results that the FotoZap system has generated at haunted houses. You’re just a few clicks from turning 4,000 photo visits into 45,000 page views. Scary cool.

This handy little graphic illustrates the success we had with Rogers for their Rock on and Win campaign on Facebook. Click for the big picture (literally).

Take a look at a few of our favorites so far, or head over to http://cinemagraphs.com to see the whole collection.

TracyLocke ranks No. 12 on the 2011 PROMO 100 and also appears in the No. 4 spot on PROMO’s breakout of agencies with a specialty in retail marketing.

Picture Marketing recently executed a campaign with TracyLocke: HP’s Year of the Hero campaign invited employees at Best Buy’s Spring Sales Conference to dress up as superheroes and strike a pose for the cameras. They all look very dashing in their capes and masks.

Course, TracyLocke has some nice company on the PROMO 100 list – none other than yours truly. Picture Marketing ranks a cool No. 84 among the “best and brightest agencies in the promotion industry.”

To see the rankings and take a look at the other great agencies on the list, visit PROMOmagazine.com. Congratulations to everyone who made the 2011 PROMO 100 list!

If you don’t remember this spot, or the awesome Twitter engagement campaign that followed shortly thereafter, you were probably in a hole in 2010. The man your man could smell like could have rescued you from that hole. But we’re here instead, telling you to visit Old Spice’s YouTube channel to see all of the crazy things that man got up to.

Read more about the win at CannesLions.com.

Of course, all of the gents at Picture Marketing smell like the man our man could smell like. We sniffed a lot of body washes, and yep, that’s what these guys smell like. Oh… you… just want to take our word for it? We understand.

Bing used the launch of Jay-Z’s memoir/lyric book, Decoded, as an opportunity to broaden the “cultural relevancy” of its Search and Maps tools. They put pages of the book in cities all over the country… but not just any cities: they placed the lyrics in context, with each story displayed in the city, neighborhood, and location where it actually took place. The pages weren’t just pasted up; from billboard to billiards tables, restaurant plates to boxing bags, each page was printed in a form appropriate to the location or story being told. Then they wrapped an interactive game around the displays, inviting users to tag the stories they saw in the real world (which they followed clues to uncover), and allowing people to follow the story each day for a month. Online, users could search for pictures of the lyric displays to find street-level images, read the pages, and watch the scavenger hunt unfold. The grand prize was a trip to see Jay-Z and Coldplay perform live in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve.

Click here to see the official winner’s page at canneslions.com.

And now for their (lengthy but interesting) writeup. Check out their official Cannes win page here.

Our challenge was to drive interest for Volkswagen BlueMotion – a range of car innovations that lowers environmental impact without compromising on the joy of driving. Our original solution to this was The Fun Theory – that fun can change human behaviour for the better – a global success we wanted to build on. Our competition, The Fun Theory Award, had previously received hundreds of amazing competition entries from over 35 countries. But the winning idea had come from Kevin Richardson, a San Francisco-resident who came up with the Speed Camera Lottery. Kevin’s idea revolved around fining speeding drivers and rewarding those that obeyed traffic regulations through a lottery, where the winnings came from the speeding drivers fines. We decided to give back to the Fun Theory community and test if the Fun Theory could make a difference in keeping drivers safe, by making Kevin’s idea reality. The Speed Camera Lottery was launched in Stockholm.

The Speed Camera Lottery reduced the average speed of traffic on a busy Stockholm road by 21.6% – equivalent to 6.8km/h. The campaign sparked debate around how fun could change behaviour on the roads for the better, both in Sweden and around the globe – generating amazing PR for Volkswagen. And Volkswagen’s share of the eco car market in Sweden grew by 84%. (source: bilsweden.se) We had increased the Fun Theory’s momentum, rewarded our loyal fans by realizing an idea directly from the global Fun Theory community, and continued to reinforce the visionary thinking behind BlueMotion Technologies.

The Speed Camera Lottery was implemented in collaboration with Sweden’s National Society for Road Safety on a busy road in Stockholm. Over a 3 day period, 24 857 cars passed our speed camera. In a sense, this was our only media channel. But as we had planned, the idea was picked up by the media and the blogosphere, who were also inspired by the idea of using fun and rewards to increase traffic safety. The Speed Camera Lottery was discussed in leading local newspapers, the local TV news, the New York Times and automobile blogs. The Fox News morning show did a special feature on the Speed Camera Lottery. The Lottery was also covered on the BBC World Service, reaching 45 million listeners. A Google search on “Speed Camera Lottery” gave 0 hits before the campaign started. Just one week after it gave 36.600 hits. Today, it’s 287 000 hits.

Art for art’s sake sure is beautiful, but that’s not what marketing is about. Here’s to IMPACT! Truth is, these fantastic creative executions have already been judged by the marketplace as pretty darn awesome. That’s the whole idea behind this category. But now, the happy meal comes with a toy!

Course, we’re not going to pick entries from the Creative Effectiveness category alone. Just thought you should know it existed. So, in the spirit of neat photo applications that Picture Marketing loves, check out the following Lion-winning video from Google’s Demo Slam project. They’re using Google Goggles to recognize Mt. Rushmore… just not the Rushmore we’re used to seeing.

We sent our June Newsletter out today… if you didn’t get to see it in your inbox, check it out here!

To land a spot on our mailing list, punch in your details below. Our emails are fun, semi-frequent, and always filled with the latest and greatest from all quarters of Picture Marketing (including some pretty sweet deals, like the free Video Activation offer in this month’s newsletter).

Get on the list:

Here’s a highlight from this month’s newsletter, which was all about FotoZap® Video Activation. We also gave a shout-out to our friends at SponsorPark, and announced our recent big splash on the 2011 PROMO 100 list.

This spring we introduced FotoZap® Video Activation and completely integrated it into our product line. The FotoZap Camera is primed to take videos of your guests, and we’ve made it just as easy to capture and display fun videos as it is to point-and-shoot traditional still photos.

If you request a quote for FotoZap Video within the next 30 days, we’ll include it in your photo activation package at no additional charge. There is a lot of creative horsepower in this functionality, and with an add-on price of zero as a special introduction to this amazing capability, you really can’t go wrong.

To get to the quote engine and stake your video claim, go to:
 PictureMarketing.com/pm/FREEvideo

Want to know more?

Visit this link to view or download a one-sheet that describes
FotoZap Video: http://pct.re/19p

Or go here for a quick online example featuring the fine agency Motive and their client Mountain Dew as they celebrate their most EXcellent win at the recent EX Awards Ceremony (excuse the self-promoting web banners on this one; they offered us some limelight, too!): http://pct.re/22r

Go here.

Scan the QR code onscreen.

(no, don’t scan it here… scan it there!)

Take control. (When you tap one of the colored boxes on your phone’s screen, the open QR Takeover browser window on your computer changes color to match!)

Update:
You might have to have the most recent version of the iOS software on your device for this to work… it’s totally seamless for us in the Chrome browser, but we did talk to a couple people for whom it didn’t work perfectly. Frown.

Go Elliott!

Best Practice Sponsorship – How to be Extraordinary

Nobody wakes up and says, “Gosh, how can I be ordinary today?” The truth is that most of us are invigorated by the possibility of being extraordinary, memorable, and impactful both personally and professionally. Specifically regarding sponsorships, sales have been a really tough, ultra-competitive last few years, and we don’t land partnerships with sheer luck – it takes talent, and the application of well-timed, extraordinary best practices implemented consistently and intentionally. So, that being the case, let’s go over some best practices that will make you stand out as an extraordinarily talented sponsorship professional:

1. Ensure you are pursuing mutually beneficial relationships.
The best way you can ensure that you’re being taken seriously by a sponsor is to demonstrate that you know their business and have a reason to believe you’re a good match for their brand. This might mean that you have to take off the rose-colored glasses and realize that you are a great fit for someone, but not everyone. Since you can’t be everything to everyone, there’s a target group of sponsors you need to pursue knowing what you have to offer is most valuable to them. We always ask our new sponsorship opportunity representatives on SponsorPark what sponsors they have an interest in and why, and you can always tell who has the sponsor in mind, and who is more concerned with their own needs being met. Always remember – sponsorship is not a donation or charitable contribution; it’s a marketing platform for sponsors to reach their target audience through leveraging a partnership with you. Answer the question for how you meet this need for them, and you’ll have their attention – and their respect.

2. Connect purposefully
Let’s face it; there’s no easy wave of a wand that will guarantee you an audience with the most appropriate decision maker. But you can be purposeful in your efforts and here are a few suggestions: Ask for referrals from current connections (my favorite!); pick up the phone, nothing will take the place of a prepared for and well-timed phone call – not as easy, but definitely useful. Network like a champ; these days it’s crazy not to use social media as it has definitely made people more connected – it can open some doors when used appropriately. Attending industry-specific events puts you in the right place at the right time with the right people. Think outside the box. What would get your attention if someone were trying to gain an audience with you? Dare to be different – sponsors are inundated with stacks of the same old thing. These are just a few ideas, but remember, it usually takes time. I can’t say I often connect with the right person on the first attempt – unless it is handed to me. Have patience and be persistent.

3. Cast a vision based on credible research
Charisma and credibility are the dynamic duo when it comes to sales; though they rarely come out of spontaneous conversation- it takes preparation and measurable support. When you make it clear that you have done your research about their recent marketing campaigns, note trends or changes in trends, their previous efforts with a charity, a new product launch, etc.; this shows that you have specific and informed interest in them, as opposed to anyone who will offer you money. And when you’re telling the story of your event or program, include your sponsor in the picture of what could happen if they were involved. What about your audience’s experience would be impacted in a positive and memorable way because they were present? The ability for them to impact an experience valued by their target audience is tremendously valuable to their brand. With enough qualitative and quantitative support paired up with a verbally competent, charismatic voice, you’ve likely won yourself a distinguished place in their evaluation of your value.

4. Honor their time and invite a dialogue
Honoring a sponsor’s time commitments is both respectful and attractive. And remember, they didn’t agree to offer their valuable time with you to learn all about you necessarily; they’re there to learn about why a partnership is a good idea for their brand. That means you need to focus the conversation on their brand vs. your opportunity. Even if they ask about who you are and what you’re doing, make sure to be aware of how much time you spend talking about yourself knowing that you will put out any spark of interest if you produce a monologue about who you are, why you’re amazing, and why they should partner with you (for your benefit). Your ultimate goal is to engage them in a dialogue that intertwines your efforts. At the end of the conversation you want them to see how valuable they are WITH you. Separate yourself from 99% of other sponsorship requestors and engage them in their goals and objectives.

5. Get creative – avoid outdated activation ideas.
Dinner and a movie… yawn. Logo coverage on a banner… double yawn. When you’re trying to make a real impression, innovation is the key. Consumers bore easily in our fast-paced culture, and brand clutter or the “same old thing” just won’t make an impression anymore. You can start off by getting innovative with your assets and ideas while you’re pitching them, but ultimately you want to invite them into the conversation so that their ultimate interests are met and the creativity potential explodes. If they’re excited about the new and creative way they’re impacting through innovative activation efforts, they become more reliable and loyal.

6. Prepare to offer helpful ROI
Measuring your efforts for dynamite ROI is something I’ll always advocate as a best practice, but keep in mind not all numbers are helpful. You want to make sure you’re reporting back information your sponsor can use. It proves the value of the investment. Do this by asking your sponsor what they want. Do they want more brand recognition? Do they want to see sales of a particular product spike? Do they want to reach a new target audience? Do they want to see more test drives? You then take this information and create an activation strategy that gives you the ability to measure outcomes more ingeniously!

7. Do what you say you’re going to do
Have you ever heard empty promises from a partner? Or maybe started fulfilling your end of a deal when suddenly the charismatic counterpart ended up renegotiating his piece halfway through the deal? Or worse – they don’t deliver at all. If you want a bitter partner with a mouthpiece, being unfaithful to your promises is the fastest way to paint a target on your back. If you follow through faithfully and do everything in your power to put action steps in place to honor your promises, your sponsors will be not only singing your praise, but count major points in the positive towards considering a contract with you for following years – being reliable is invaluable. But don’t stop there; go above and beyond when you get the chance. My husband once told me we should take a quick vacation with the 15 days I had between jobs. I thought he would take me to Des Moines to see his family, or maybe Kansas City for a weekend getaway – he surprised me with tickets to Cabo. The reaction was undeniably favorable; he had big points in my book for a very long time. When you’re able to find ways to add value to a sponsor’s partnership without requiring more of them is a fast way to earn points and distinguish yourself as a partner.

Implementing these best practices is a great way you can rest assured you put your best foot forward as an extraordinary sponsorship professional!

You can read more of SponsorPark’s excellent sponsorship tips and insight at the SponsorPark Blog. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Google is taking its own digital+live approach to brick-and-mortar businesses with the (somewhat vanilla-named) “Business Photos from Google.” The idea is to bring its 360-degree Street View technology off the pavement and inside the walls so that guests can see inside a business before they ever visit. Individuals will be able to visit a location’s Google Places page online or on a smartphone, and from there take the full tour of the business’s interior. Google photographers are currently visiting a few dozen cities and metro areas worldwide, Street Cam in tow, to build up the database.

This certainly feels like the first baby step in what may herald a whole new era in online shopping. Imagine: interactive tours of thousands of retail locations, a sort of online augmented reality experience where you could see an item on a shelf, select it, and find out more about it on the spot… maybe even purchase one. At the very least, you bet you’ll be seeing ads related to the content featured in the tour. Done wrong, of course, an AR shopping experience just feels like a clunky old flash site weighed down by too many whiz-bang animations. But if Google can pull off something as ambitious as mapping the insides of our cities, why not turn that information into dollars for the stores it’s mapping? Why not turn that view into a click, and a click into a sale? Or at least a way to get more information about that particular product? Might not work for every business, but we’re seeing a lot of shiny guitars on that wall up there that merit a closer look.

Barcodas lets you scan any EAN or UPC barcode, and turns it into a musical pattern. From there, you can select a harmonic scale for your ditty to follow, change the BPM (go slow for Tolstoy, fast for a pack of gum), and share your musical co-creation on Facebook.

Yes, you’ll want to start digging through your trash to create new tunes. We’ve already exhausted a bookshelf and a stack of photo access cards.

Click here to snag the app on iTunes for a quick $0.99. And if you need some extra barcodes to round out the 7-movement symphony you’re about to mastermind, just give us a shout.

Check out the mosaic here, where you can search by photo or owner, zoom in for a look at the rugged rides, or upload your own and become a pixel in the Jeep story. It’ll be growing and changing by the day as the photos roll in.

Jeep owners are some of the most loyal brand fans out there (who doesn’t love their Jeep?), and this photo mosaic captures the idea that each individual’s passion is a part of the larger community of owners: zoom in on your photo, zoom out to see what the whole community has built.

We’ve long felt that allowing individuals to weave themselves into a brand story, or better, telling the story through the fans, is one of the most powerful things a brand can do. In fact, that’s why we take photos in the first place.

A few days ago, one of our cameras was on the road with the National Guard (they use Picture Marketing in conjunction with their recruiting efforts). Along the bumpy ride, the case fell out of the NG truck and on to the highway.

Couple days later, we got a call from a fisherman. He’d found the case on the side of the road, rescued it, and was trying to help the camera get back home. We put the story together, and the fellow did double-justice to his label as a good samaritan by returning the camera to the National Guard crew!

We’re most impressed by how awesome this guy was to help us get the equipment back in the right hands. But the second best part of the story? After the whole ordeal, the camera was fine! A couple scuffs on the case were the only evidence of this FotoZap’s crazy adventure through the air and on to a zooming highway. We released it back into its native photo-taking environment today, and it’s happily snapping away like a pro. What a champ!

GaryVee holding the Picture Marketing cube (screen grab from video)

Gary Vaynerchuck (@GaryVee) was in town promoting his new book, The Thank You Economy (highly recommended). The book discusses how–like it or not–brands are now living in a transparent environment thanks to digital social platforms. Brands can no longer push their message out without regard to the conversations customers are having with each other. But while brands no longer control the conversation, there is a huge opportunity for brands to win fans by using the platforms to listen to customers and deliver meaningful experiences. He says that intent matters in this world, because people have amazing BS detectors and can sniff out when a brand is not being authentic.

He tells a great story of an employee in his wine company’s Customer Service Thank You Department, who converted an important customer of Wine Rack to a brand fan for life by delivering a gift that was personally meaningful. First she listened to what the customer cared about by following his Twitter account, and then seeing that he loved Quarterback Jay Cutler, she purchased a signed jersey on Ebay and sent it to the customer as a surprise gift. Note that the gift wasn’t free wine, the gesture has to be something meaningful to the customer not the brand.

As you can tell from his example, and as he so elegantly rants in the video below, this one-on-one marketing stuff ain’t easy for brands. You have to get the experiential stuff and the digital stuff to all line up. You have to scale it up to make an impact, but the gestures have to be personalized in a meaningful way.

Our take:
Picture Marketing believes we have a way for brands to deliver a meaningful gift to their customers in an authentic yet scalable way. By taking a photo or a video of a customer at an event, a brand can capture a fleeting interaction for later enjoyment and recall. People appreciate the gesture and after they have viewed it online privately, some number can choose to share it to social platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. A true win-win. We believe that by making every part of the interaction customer-centric the brand organically benefits in the long run (and even the short run).

Picture Marketing Introduces FotoZap Video Activation

Novato, CA - The number of people who watch and share videos online nearly doubled between 2006 and 2009. Two years later, the number continues to climb upward. Over half of those videos get uploaded to social networking sites like Facebook and Google. Why are the videos so popular? The spread of broadband, social networking sites, and a strong community of users are all part of the mix. Importantly, users noted that the “easy and fast” process of creating digital content and posting it online was key to their adoption. In the age of YouTube, anyone can be a star.

Experiential marketing campaigns now have their own platform for fast and easy video content creation, with the ultra-scalable solution introduced today by Picture Marketing: FotoZap Video Activation. Using the same technology they have seamlessly integrated into their photo activation products, Picture Marketing powers the creation of branded video content that puts fans in the spotlight of any experiential campaign. The process is simple:

1.    Picture Marketing helps a brand create an experience that captures consumers at a memorable event or setting
2.    The brand invites guests online to view and share the video
3.    The process generates online buzz and word of mouth for the brand every time fans share their event memories on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube

Picture Marketing CEO Ron Tonini says it’s really all about empowering brands to deliver memorable experiences to their fans. “By creating a scalable, simple platform for these videos, we’ve been able to sort out the puzzle for brands looking to connect with their fans and put them at the center of a memorable, sharable piece of video content,” Tonini noted.

The logistical headaches of traditional video activation and the risk of creating high-expense video campaigns that fail to produce sufficient ROI have been obstacles to success for brands. FotoZap helps companies put those concerns to rest by offering a seamless path from real-world event to digital experience in a way that brands can replicate for each consumer they interact with. Tonini added, “When these efforts fizzle because of insufficient technology on the back end, it really hurts the brand. They’ve spent a bunch of money on something that ends up feeling inauthentic to their guests. This is a way, in the world of video, to queue up brand-positive content in a truly scalable, cost-effective manner.”

The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Tim Hoyt, said, “Videos aren’t new… when you see the rapid growth in this area of user-generated content, it quantifies the fact that the gateway to video creation is open and accessible. What we’re trying to accomplish with FotoZap Video Activation is to help brands connect with consumers through that content creation, in a very natural way. And the result of that process is amazing: people love it when the brand delivers a memorable experience for them. The brand, in turn, appreciates it when that customer becomes a fan and shares the memory with his or her friends. It’s truly representative of the Thank You Economy that the internet and social networking have created.”

—

About Picture Marketing, Inc.
Picture Marketing, a developer of internet marketing applications, offers a patented system that dramatically increases the efficiency of the multi-billions that companies spend each year on face-to-face marketing, part of the $50 billion per year Branded Entertainment marketing sector. Picture Marketing’s easy-to-use marketing tools make experiential campaigns, branded activities, and brand ambassadors more effective. Picture Marketing helps brands deliver a seamless digital+live experience that starts with a positive brand impression and results in a powerful connection with fans and their networks.

Picture Marketing’s patented technology has been used by major brands including Diageo, Budweiser, Chrysler, Nextel, and Starwood Westin Hotels through agency partners such as BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, Wunderman, GMR, and Octagon. The company is privately held and headquartered in Novato, CA. For more information, visit http://www.PictureMarketing.com.

Picture Marketing™ and the Picture Marketing logo are trademarks of Picture Marketing, Inc. and FotoZap® is a registered trademark of Picture Marketing, Inc.

Take another look at the resolutions below, and think about how you’re fulfilling on the Chief Marketer dream.
And hey, if you’re having trouble so far… we’re always here to help.

In a recent article in Chief Marketer, entitled “Five Marketing Resolutions to Make – and Keep – in 2011,” author Jeff Rohrs describes a multi-pronged approach to implement a successful interactive marketing program throughout the new year.

The Five Resolutions:

1) Make data the foundation of marketing.
2) Use mobile to connect with customers.
3) Market to customers like individuals.
4) Make social media a real part of the marketing mix.
5) Use automation to save time and to better meet customers’ needs.

We thought it was interesting how well the “Five Marketing Resolutions” matched up with some of Picture Marketing’s key capabilities…

1) Resolution: Make data the foundation of marketing.

This past year, you’ve likely heard a lot of industry buzz around becoming more relevant. Customer data are at the heart of relevancy in today’s real-time Web.

But let’s be clear: This concept isn’t new. Simply put, many marketers are missing opportunities to engage with customers because their information and processes have become outdated before the customer engagement metrics are aggregated and sorted. Making a change to the way you use click-through rates, online browsing history, shopping cart abandonment, previous purchase history, and other customer information starts with an assessment.

Understanding what tools you have before you take action will pay off in the long run.

Picture Marketing Capability: Custom Reporting

All raw campaign data is available for real-time access. Managers can log in at any time to a secure site to view photos, assess or download consumer responses, and even track a particular photographer’s performance.

Reporting can also be customized to the particular needs of a sponsor or campaign so that summary information is emailed to a specified address on a daily or weekly basis.

2) Resolution: Use mobile to connect with customers.

As consumers become more and more available regardless of their location, it’s easy to see that we’ve become a “now generation.” In fact, nearly 30% of Americans now own smartphones, according to the Nielson Co., and 43% of all U.S. adult cell phone users have mobile apps, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. And the rates will only continue to rise.

What does this mean for marketers? One of the best ways to reach your subscribers now (and at any other point) is through their mobile phone.

You must incorporate mobile into your interactive marketing. Not only should you resolve to use mobile to connect with your customers, but in general you should talk to your consumers through the channels they’re using.

In 2011 it’s no longer a choice.

Picture Marketing Capability: Photo Pickup Using Mobile SMS

Consumers can use SMS messaging to retrieve an event photo on their mobile phone. The branded Photo Access Cards display instructions for online photo pickup, and can also direct participants to use mobile pickup to view their photos immediately on any SMS-enabled phone. For example, the card can request that users:

“Text PHOTO to 65579”. Once they text in the keyword “PHOTO” they receive a message asking for the photo code printed on their Photo Access Card. When they send the code, they get a link that allows them to download the photo when it is ready. Users can also enter their email address if they would like to have the photo link sent via email.

Once a consumer has begun a text conversation with the brand, it is natural to offer to extend the text conversation by inviting the consumer to opt-in to a brand’s mobile promotion. Promotion options can include: downloadable apps, coupons, sweepstakes, trivia, voting, or text alerts.

3) Resolution: Market to customers like individuals.

Not only should you honor your subscribers’ unique preferences, but your marketing messages should provide more impact and value, rather than the standard “one size fits all” communication.

Listening to subscribers via social media and setting up preference centers that allow customers to identify their personal interests, preferred channels, and appropriate messaging frequency and content is applicable to their lives is essential.

Let your subscribers tell you about themselves and create trust by honoring those preferences.

Picture Marketing Capability: Custom Online or Onsite Survey Options

Consumers pass through the branded survey before viewing their photo. Surveys are completely customizable to suit your marketing goals. Consumers are typically asked the best way to be contacted, as well as given the opportunity to opt-out of future communications.

Brand managers can preview or download real-time survey results from a secure site.

Once survey results are gathered, Picture Marketing makes it easy to market to your consumers as individuals with tools such as the Ultra-Personalized Direct Mail Piece.

4) Resolution: Make social media a real part of the marketing mix.

Conversations about your brand are happening whether you’re participating in them or not. In 2011 it’s up to you as a marketer to either contribute to the conversation about your brand or simply let it be dictated it for you. Customers today have megaphones to speak about your company through interactive tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. Marketers must respond to those conversations and provide the value of your brand by engaging with customers.

This isn’t the responsibility of one person or one department. Engaging with customers should be an organizational effort. Socializing your organization and empowering multiple employees across customer service, marketing, public relations, and even sales to interact with customers will actually amplify the voices of the online customer conversations. The result is a more relevant and meaningful brand experience.

Picture Marketing Capability: Social Networking Integration

Brands can select which social networks are included on the campaign Microsite. Each time a participant clicks on one of the banners, a 
link to the photo display page, along with text customized by the brand, is posted to the social network for friends or followers to see.

The options for integrating Facebook into your next campaign are extensive and measurable! Increase your “Likes” by adding a “Like Button” or a “Like Box.” Increase brand awareness by adding a “Comment Box” or “Live Stream Box.”

5) Resolution: Use automation to save time and to better meet customers’ needs.

With automation, routine tasks, segmentation, and messaging programs become easier, allowing you to focus on more strategic projects.

Automating birthday email campaigns and recurring newsletters are simple ways to free up time and energy.

In 2011 automation can’t just stop there. With the onset of the real-time Web and consumers’ expectations regarding near-instant gratification, it’s critical that subscriber preferences and new customer data become integrated into each and every communication you send.

Bring in social data, web analytics, customer ratings and reviews—richer data will help you better serve your subscribers with more relevant messaging.

Picture Marketing Capability: Camera-to-Web Automatic Uploader

FotoZap® Cameras can be configured to automatically transmit all captured photos to an internet-connected netbook computer, which 
can instantly upload the photos to the Microsite for immediate processing and viewing. Consumers can view and share photos during or immediately after an event when excitement and interest is at its highest.

Combine that with the Onsite Survey iPad, which is a creative and engaging new tool to immediately collect consumer’s feedback, and you have a very powerful, automated marketing campaign.

Repetto – Vitrine interactive from Marcel on Vimeo.

While the vid is designed to showcase the elaborate production and seamless final product, we’re predicting that this sort of installation will become more common, and more open, in the near future.

Instead of the highly-produced ballerina, imagine being able to flip through videos that fans have posted to the brand’s Facebook page, or a curated reel of clips that were tagged with the brand on Twitter. The tech impact stays big, and the consumer engagement goes up a notch because yes, your video could be featured next. The Adidas store with a wall showing yesterday’s killer penalty kick… and their kicks on your goal-scoring feet. Flip forward and you see Johnny waving hello in his new tennis outfit, Mike putting on his helmet for the homecoming game, and Sally lacing up for her first marathon. When Adidas goes to the race expo, their brand ambassadors capture videos of each athlete’s “I’m running for…” moment. Those videos go up on the wall, too, and become part of the brand’s legacy of inspiration and performance.

Of course, we’re playing to our strengths here. With FotoZap® Video Capture, all those brand moments are automatically uploaded, shared, and immortalized. What does the future look like? Show us your sidewalk, and we’ll show you the love.

The House was smart in voting to let the Pentagon continue using taxpayer dollars to sponsor NASCAR race teams.  Brands flock to connect with the teams for a reason, it works.  The U.S. Army, National Guard and Air Force will spend about $30 million combined this year to sponsor Sprint Cup teams.  About the cost of one F-15 Eagle.

The digital marketing to NASCAR fans can especially pay off.  For example, during the 2010 race schedule a snack food company used our core services trackside.  Over the course of the year, more than 8,500 photos were shared to Facebook. Going by this recent valuation of a Facebook wall post at $14 (in gross revenue per action), just the Facebook portion of our services was worth $119,000.  We are expecting even better results in 2011 as more people join social networks and almost everybody gets online.

We hope everyone survived the opening weekend at Daytona!  And congrats to the youngest winner ever, 20 year old Trevor Bayne.  We’ll see you all in Phoenix!

Via: Online Schools

As a new way to target content and deliver ads out of context, it’s a cool approach. But from a digital+live perspective, we’re more excited by solutions that use context to a brand’s advantage. The power of an emotional, experiential connection with a user will always breed a stronger brand relationship than purely reward-based behavior. After all, coupon clippers are usually loyal to whatever brand is giving the best discount.

The Five Resolutions:

1) Make data the foundation of marketing.
2) Use mobile to connect with customers.
3) Market to customers like individuals.
4) Make social media a real part of the marketing mix.
5) Use automation to save time and to better meet customers’ needs.

We thought it was interesting how well the “Five Marketing Resolutions” matched up with some of Picture Marketing’s key capabilities…

1) Resolution: Make data the foundation of marketing.

This past year, you’ve likely heard a lot of industry buzz around becoming more relevant. Customer data are at the heart of relevancy in today’s real-time Web.

But let’s be clear: This concept isn’t new. Simply put, many marketers are missing opportunities to engage with customers because their information and processes have become outdated before the customer engagement metrics are aggregated and sorted. Making a change to the way you use click-through rates, online browsing history, shopping cart abandonment, previous purchase history, and other customer information starts with an assessment.

Understanding what tools you have before you take action will pay off in the long run.

Picture Marketing Capability: Custom Reporting

All raw campaign data is available for real-time access. Managers can log in at any time to a secure site to view photos, assess or download consumer responses, and even track a particular photographer’s performance.

Reporting can also be customized to the particular needs of a sponsor or campaign so that summary information is emailed to a specified address on a daily or weekly basis.

2) Resolution: Use mobile to connect with customers.

As consumers become more and more available regardless of their location, it’s easy to see that we’ve become a “now generation.” In fact, nearly 30% of Americans now own smartphones, according to the Nielson Co., and 43% of all U.S. adult cell phone users have mobile apps, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. And the rates will only continue to rise.

What does this mean for marketers? One of the best ways to reach your subscribers now (and at any other point) is through their mobile phone.

You must incorporate mobile into your interactive marketing. Not only should you resolve to use mobile to connect with your customers, but in general you should talk to your consumers through the channels they’re using.

In 2011 it’s no longer a choice.

Picture Marketing Capability: Photo Pickup Using Mobile SMS

Consumers can use SMS messaging to retrieve an event photo on their mobile phone. The branded Photo Access Cards display instructions for online photo pickup, and can also direct participants to use mobile pickup to view their photos immediately on any SMS-enabled phone. For example, the card can request that users:

“Text PHOTO to 65579”.  Once they text in the keyword “PHOTO” they receive a message asking for the photo code printed on their Photo Access Card. When they send the code, they get a link that allows them to download the photo when it is ready. Users can also enter their email address if they would like to have the photo link sent via email.

Once a consumer has begun a text conversation with the brand, it is natural to offer to extend the text conversation by inviting the consumer to opt-in to a brand’s mobile promotion. Promotion options can include: downloadable apps, coupons, sweepstakes, trivia, voting, or text alerts.

3) Resolution: Market to customers like individuals.

Not only should you honor your subscribers’ unique preferences, but your marketing messages should provide more impact and value, rather than the standard “one size fits all” communication.

Listening to subscribers via social media and setting up preference centers that allow customers to identify their personal interests, preferred channels, and appropriate messaging frequency and content is applicable to their lives is essential.

Let your subscribers tell you about themselves and create trust by honoring those preferences.

Picture Marketing Capability: Custom Online or Onsite Survey Options

Consumers pass through the branded survey before viewing their photo. Surveys are completely customizable to suit your marketing goals. Consumers are typically asked the best way to be contacted, as well as given the opportunity to opt-out of future communications.

Brand managers can preview or download real-time survey results from a secure site.

Once survey results are gathered, Picture Marketing makes it easy to market to your consumers as individuals with tools such as the Ultra-Personalized Direct Mail Piece.

4) Resolution: Make social media a real part of the marketing mix.

Conversations about your brand are happening whether you’re participating in them or not. In 2011 it’s up to you as a marketer to either contribute to the conversation about your brand or simply let it be dictated it for you. Customers today have megaphones to speak about your company through interactive tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. Marketers must respond to those conversations and provide the value of your brand by engaging with customers.

This isn’t the responsibility of one person or one department. Engaging with customers should be an organizational effort. Socializing your organization and empowering multiple employees across customer service, marketing, public relations, and even sales to interact with customers will actually amplify the voices of the online customer conversations. The result is a more relevant and meaningful brand experience.

Picture Marketing Capability: Social Networking Integration

Brands can select which social networks are included on the campaign Microsite. Each time a participant clicks on one of the banners, a 
link to the photo display page, along with text customized by the brand, is posted to the social network for friends or followers to see.

The options for integrating Facebook into your next campaign are extensive and measurable! Increase your “Likes” by adding a “Like Button” or  a “Like Box.”  Increase brand awareness by adding a “Comment Box” or “Live Stream Box.”

5) Resolution: Use automation to save time and to better meet customers’ needs.

With automation, routine tasks, segmentation, and messaging programs become easier, allowing you to focus on more strategic projects.

Automating birthday email campaigns and recurring newsletters are simple ways to free up time and energy.

In 2011 automation can’t just stop there. With the onset of the real-time Web and consumers’ expectations regarding near-instant gratification, it’s critical that subscriber preferences and new customer data become integrated into each and every communication you send.

Bring in social data, web analytics, customer ratings and reviews—richer data will help you better serve your subscribers with more relevant messaging.

Picture Marketing Capability: Camera-to-Web Automatic Uploader

FotoZap® Cameras can be configured to automatically transmit all captured photos to an internet-connected netbook computer, which 
can instantly upload the photos to the Microsite for immediate processing and viewing. Consumers can view and share photos during or immediately after an event when excitement and interest is at its highest.

Combine that with the Onsite Survey iPad, which is a creative and engaging new tool to immediately collect consumer’s feedback, and you have a very powerful, automated marketing campaign.

Since we’re all about simplicity, we’ve made it our mission to internalize a lot of these moving parts and get them working together behind the scenes. Then, when a brand comes onstage, everything’s seamless. It’s a cool process, and we geek out on the “it’s complex but we’ve made it easy” aspect of the whole thing. So… we’re going to dedicate a few posts a month to the subtle things that factor in to making a big impact onsite.

Today’s exhibit: The Custom Camera Wrap

Small modifications can pack a powerful punch, as is the case with the Custom Camera Wrap that we’ve bundled with the Ricoh FotoZap® Camera. Here are our favorite three reasons for adding a custom wrap to your camera for any photo activation campaign.

1. The camera is a blank slate for your brand

The FotoZap Camera, unwrapped, is a subtle slate color designed to keep eyes on your brand, not ours. It can easily blend in at an event to allow your other branded elements to shine. Which also makes it the perfect place for you to step in and add visual impact.

2. It’s “your” camera

You’ve got ambassadors in t-shirts, lots of event signage, branded giveaways, and a solid footprint for your photo opportunity. Branding the camera itself solidifies your ownership of the experience; there’s no other  brand (yes, we’re talking about ourselves) competing with yours for attention. You wouldn’t put your event staff in a different brand’s t-shirt, would you?

(For the alarmists, see point 1 for a reassurance that the unwrapped camera is still pretty subtle. This is just an easy opportunity to put an even stronger fingerprint on things.)

3. Be a camera-chameleon

To take any guesswork out of the equation, we ship the camera pre-skinned with its custom wrap so that event staff can get to work in a matter of minutes after opening the box. But when you want your camera to be a quick-change artist, it’s as simple as ordering a new wrap design and applying it to the camera in a few simple steps. We’ve helped brands do this in cases where they’re running multiple event markets for a campaign and want the camera to match up to the theme at different event locations. The camera gets a beach wrap for 3 days of a spring break activation, and then heads up to the mountains with a new chilled out look for the second half of the week.

Happy 2011!

We rang in the New Year with Heineken in Miami. Dutch electronica artist Tiësto provided tunes and thumps for the evening, which made for a seriously rockin’ New Year’s Eve, as they say.

Heinekens in hand, partygoers (over 21, of course) were invited to have a photo taken with their friends and enter to win a VIP trip to the Ultra Music Festival, where they’d have a chance to meet Tiësto in person.

(Check out the cool aluminum bottles in the guys’ hands – making it a little easier for everyone to drink -or drop- responsibly throughout the night.)

One of our favorite things about photo activations at big parties like this one is that as the night goes on, everybody is making new friends to take photos with. With a great photo op and one or two roaming photographers, people end up having their picture shot dozens of times throughout the evening. We scan each person’s card over again with every new photo, so when they get home in the morning they can see a photo diary of the entire evening with a single click-through.

Making so many new buddies brings us to the next part of our story… Facebook integration.

Heineken opted to run most of this promo directly through Facebook, which ended up having a few neat effects:

To pick up their photos, participants went directly to Heineken’s Facebook page (which we printed easy directions to on the Photo Access Cards for the event). Que a jump in Facebook views, of course.

Then, we added a “Like Gate.” Heineken wanted to boost page likes, and we found a simple way to do that by requiring users to click the Like button before moving on to the next step. As any good amigo would do, Heineken provided VIP concert ticket info and the New Year’s Eve photo view in exchange (in fact, their page is now pushing 1 million likes!).

After clicking through, users were at the campaign microsite, where their photos were displayed along with lots of sharing options.

We doubled-down on the social networking integration portion of the activation by looping directly back to Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace (as well as adding options for emailing, printing, and downloading the photo). So users who started at Facebook to get their photo, Liked Heineken in the process, and viewed their pictures… naturally turned around and posted the photo back to their own Facebook Walls. It’s a pretty cool feedback effect that results in lots of Likes and contest entries on the brand page.

All in all, a great New Year’s Eve party with tons of friends and awesome music. Thanks to Heineken and Tiësto for making us feel cool the whole night. For the party-hardy among you readers who are already planning next year’s bash… give us a buzz! (Because as geeky as it is, nothing makes us feel cooler than having our phones ringing off the hook.)

Here at Picture Marketing Headquarters, our phones have been ringing off the hook with questions about Facebook: how can I best incorporate social networking into my next marketing campaign? What are the options, and what’s the latest and greatest in Facebook integration? Can you link the photos from my next event to my page, or even require fans to Like my page before they view their images?

Whether the fever pitch of Facebook requests is here to stay or a passing fad, it’s clear that brands and agencies consider the social network to be an essential aspect of the campaigns they’re currently developing for 2011.

The right approach to Facebook integration will enable your brand to build community around your campaigns, and use that community to boost customer happiness and drive product demand. The wrong approach… well that’s just a waste of time and goodwill.

For the newly initiated and the die-hard networker, we’ve developed a multitude of Facebook-ready solutions for your next photo activation. These turn-key integrations can supercharge any experiential marketing effort… and light up your social network along the way.

Here’s a small peek at how we can use photo activation and experiential marketing to generate Facebook traffic, links, likes, and looks.

Like Gate

Fanatic about growing your fan base? Ask guests to “Like” your brand before they move forward at any point during their photo experience. For example, fans might have to click Like before seeing their photos, entering a contest, or requesting a free sample. We can even execute the process onsite – so that friendly brand ambassadors have an opportunity to interact with fans and deliver the call to action.

Photo Posts on a Consumer’s Facebook Wall

To encourage online photo sharing, add a banner to the photo display page so that at the click of a button, fans can post their event photos to their Facebook Walls. Posted photos link back to the Microsite so that each click generates additional traffic for the sponsor. The photos also retain their branding (such as logos, watermarks, borders, or other effects) so that your message travels with every share.

Photo Posts on a Brand’s Facebook Wall

Attract views and interactions by using photo activation as the digital+live bridge between your Facebook Page and your onsite event presence. Once fans are viewing their photos online, invite them to post the photos, along with comments, to your brand’s Facebook Wall. You can also set a predetermined phrase to appear before or after the consumer’s caption so that your message earns extra mindshare with every post.

Like Button or Facepile Box

A simple Like button can prompt users to proclaim their love for your brand. The Facepile Box lets visitors see how many users already like the brand, and which of their friends like it.

Activity Feed or Wall Feed

Let users see a stream of the most interesting recent activity taking place on your site. The Activity Feed displays stories, recommendations, and shares based on recent interactions on your Facebook page. The Wall Feed shows a live stream of items you’ve posted to your Wall. Both are great windows into an active, vibrant social media presence – and they’re enriched, of course, by the Likes and Photo Posts that you encourage during and after your sponsored event.

Now that we’ve written about all the cool things you CAN do with Facebook integration… what about the stuff you should ignore? We’ll follow this post up with some road-tested advice next week. Hint: Stand by your brand.

The linked icons will send you over to our product pages for more info about integrating social networks with your next campaign.

Sure, the technology isn’t totally new. But the Facebook stage puts it at a pretty grand scale. And for the die-hard taggers out there, it’s probably a significant timesaver.

(via PC Mag)

We wanted to share some fun results from a small activation we ran for a holiday party last week. Photo activation has a bit of a reputation as a “name brand” thing – an addition for marketing campaign budgets that run in the multi-thousands or more. After all, camera costs, website setups, and staffing add up to a big bill… right? Not necessarily. Small businesses can harness the emotional impact and digital+live mojo of Picture Marketing, too. In fact, one of our biggest goals at PM has been to keep photo activation simple. It’s one-to-one marketing – so it ought to work for events of any size.

Take, for example, the holiday party at Grass Roots Group. We set GRG up with a Santa’s Workshop full of digital+live goodies: the Ricoh FotoZap Camera, a quick Microsite, and a FotoZap Wireless Event Printer.

(click the icons for more info)

As the party got into full swing, everyone stopped by to have a photo taken with Santa.

The camera automatically sent each photo to FotoZap wireless printer, which popped out a glossy print with a festive border. Then, the real fun began. In-the-know friends got to help Santa fill up his Naughty or Nice list with photos of their coworkers.

When everyone went home full of eggnog and pie, they could see all the night’s photos in a colorful online gallery.

Lipton has rolled out a campaign for its Brisk Tea that uses Stickybits to turn urban murals into interactive experiences.

Murals in New York and Los Angeles feature artists’ riffs on newly designed 24 oz. cans of Lipton Brisk. The interactive part? A scannable Stickybits barcode that pulls up a time-lapse movie of the mural being painted. Once the video has finished playing, users are invited to scan a Lipton Brisk can with the Stickybits app to earn a chance at winning an Xbox.

Stickybits’ main differentiator in the mobile barcode space is that it allows users to upload their own content to an existing barcode – so when legions of Brisk fans scan their cans, they can attach pictures or comments; in effect, they create a mini-social network around a real-world object.

Well, Sunday night’s hacker group made short work of Gawker, exposing some of the site’s source code, hijacking Twitter accounts, and generally allowing the Gawker leadership to make fools of themselves. But if the intelligence of the publication can be measured as a function of its readership, looks like they were in trouble all along. Start your password spring cleaning, everyone. Similar passwords to those above, though less common, are no more difficult to crack! (infographic via WSJ Blog)

The kids included the Quest in a ton of their drawings, too. Afterward, we gave everyone print-outs of their drawings to take home with them, along with an invitation to view the photo online and spread the happy.

Check out this video of the Fun Zone footprint taken by none other than our very own Marv Moskwa. (The video wall makes the footage a bit blinky, so filter that out with your imagination.)

Take a look at some more photos of the Fun Zone on Nissan Quest’s Facebook album for the event. Or see Marv hamming for the camera on the live Microsite pickup page (yep, all those buttons work… so careful you don’t email a pic of Marv to your grannie!)

Seth Godin mentioned three critical elements that elevate live experiences above purely digital ones – reasons someone might pay hundreds more to see a concert rather than (or in addition to) buying the CD.

There are people around you, fellow travelers, magnetic energy, shared joy.

Something might go wrong. The artist is like a tightrope walker, taking big chances and the drama it creates is engrossing.

You might be surprised. Something new and wonderful might happen and it might jar you awake.

The instruction is not to avoid these unknowns because they’re hard to control (as so many marketers make the mistake of doing), but rather to embrace them. To quote ourselves: Your event is providing you with an incredible opportunity to connect with your fans in a very fundamental, human fashion. The magnetic energy, the drama, and the element of surprise are factors that you can leverage to elevate your interactions with your fans.

So… if Live is so great, why add Digital? What are the particular strengths of Digital+Live over either channel alone?

If Live allows you to encounter fellow travelers, Digital+Live allows you to maintain those connections and create an ongoing community.

If Live allows you to witness mistakes or something unique, Digital+Live allows those unique experiences to be shared and relived among a wider audience. Digital+Live enriches the experience with information. It also allows attendees a measure of “fame” among their circle of friends.

Digital+Live is different than either Digital or Live alone – when those factors are integrated, the Digital+Live experience as a whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. That’s good math, whether you’re a participant, creative director, data head, or the budget committee. Participants experience the energy of an event, create connections, and share the memories. Creative directors can weave a dynamic relationship from two fabrics of experience. Data crunchers get great participation numbers onsite, and then have the ability to track that activity and drive a call to action. And budget committees can review event ROI and plan for the future with minimal cash lubrication (in other words, adding a digital element doesn’t put too much pressure on event budgets – even though it creates a tangible return).

The perfect digital+live wrapping paper has arrived, just in time for this year’s geeky gifts. The QR codes, veritable nerd snowflakes, link to 50-odd holiday amusements in video form. We can’t think of a better gift for our loyal PMers than some of this paper wrapped in… some of this paper. Of course, we can think of a better name than QRapping paper (say it out loud). Just in time for QRistmas.

Seth Godin wrote recently:

There are at least three reasons why someone might pay five or ten or a hundred times more to see a concert than the CD costs (not to mention the value difference: you can listen to the download again and again but the live gig is gone forever):

• There are people around you, fellow travelers, magnetic energy, shared joy.
• Something might go wrong. The artist is like a tightrope walker, taking big chances and the drama it creates is engrossing.
• You might be surprised. Something new and wonderful might happen and it might jar you awake.

And yet, people in the ‘live’ business–restaurants, people doing presentations, the concierge at the hotel–often work hard to avoid getting anywhere near any of the three.

Your event is providing you with an incredible opportunity to connect with your fans in a very fundamental, human fashion. The magnetic energy, the drama, and the element of surprise are factors that you can leverage to elevate your interactions with your fans. And yes, that’s what they want from you. That’s why they’re at your event. And that’s why it’s always going to be important for your brand to keep a footing in the “real world.”

Digital is cool, but digital+live gives you power, amplifies your impact, and makes you extraordinary.

Steven speaks to the power of technology that’s allowed us all to connect and share our ideas – to borrow each other’s “hunches,” combine them with our own “hunches,” and turn them into something new… which is where great ideas come from.

Update: November 30, 2011

More ideas coming from more places! Check out this post on “Where Ideas Come From” from Seth’s Blog:

Where do ideas come from?

Not exactly “experiential”…but this QR code use is too cool not to share. DNA 11 has created a new kind of ancestry portrait that encodes your genetic lineage into a smartcode attractive enough to hang on your living room wall. As the folks at DNA 11 so aptly put it:

Unlock the secrets of your ancestry with a personal, scannable barcode that crosses over from physical to digital to trace your maternal lineage.

By scanning your augmented artwork with a camera-equipped smartphone your portrait becomes the gateway to a personalized ancestry page tracing your origins back thousands of years.

Just in case you were wondering what’s on our wishlist…

To participate, go to:

http://survey.confirmit.com/wix/p1458770234.aspx

Erik sez:

The time is finally upon us – I literally have goose bumps as I type this. I know the impact that this research is going to have for all of us now, and the foreseeable future. This is the first step in what will be the best, constant global source for Experiential Marketing research. We (EMF/IMI) want to invite you to participate in this historic survey. We’re asking you to be involved in the largest study we’ve ever conducted. This is your chance to be part of something EPIC.
…

The findings will provide a pulse on the issues facing marketers and agencies in today’s environment. The research will allow you to get a better understanding of opportunities to drive your success. We have people from every country in the world involved.

The forum will be distributing the survey results to its members, so hop on over to the EMF website to sign up and become a member of the EMF’s active community of industry experts.

The scary part: at 300 million members, Facebook already clocks over 125x the number of potential Places users than the average of all the others – and about 18x the rest combined. Granted, it’s still got to get those people to use the Places app…

Image credit: @markfidelman

It’s also worth noting that huge promos like this do the work of actually creating an event experience…the lines, the crowd draw, the group activity. As such, brands should adopt an event-centric marketing mentality to pull off a promo like this one. The crowd benefits, the brand benefits, and the marketing opportunity is amplified when the experience is allowed to take on a life of its own (under the careful but subtle curation of the brand, of course).

The promo

Here’s the text from Gap’s Facebook page:

This Friday we’re giving away 10,000 pairs of jeans! Check-in at any Men’s & Women’s Gap using Facebook Places and you could win*. Just show any Gap employee your check-in and you could score a free pair. If you’re too late don’t worry, we’ll let you shop with 40% off any regularly priced item**.

Learn how to use Facebook Places on any web-enabled devices, iPhones, and Android devices: http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17390

Check out how Facebook Deals works here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=446183422130

The Picture Marketing Take

1. Location
Location, location, location. We’ve been saying for a couple years now that location is the next big digital+live element that’s going to transform the way experiential marketers craft their campaigns. Now that Facebook is joining the party, the “check-in” mentality may make the leap from niche technogeek cool to the mainstream.

2. Facebook Places
Places is just starting to stretch its legs. If the service can leverage Facebook’s ubiquity to crowd out a smaller player like Foursquare, the shakedown will be devastating (if not entirely unexpected). Foursquare is one of the few apps that showed enough independent promise that it wasn’t immediately overshadowed by Facebook, and many thought that it might complete a social triumvirate (along with Twitter).

3. Facebook integration
As avid fans of seamless integration, we love to see how well Facebook has been able to integrate the various aspects of the social media experience under one roof – Twitter-like updates, shared photos, events, groups… remember when you went to a different site or app to do all of those things? It’s not a surprise that Facebook is adding location check-ins to its wheelhouse. The question is whether it can mobilize its hordes of users to get on the location bandwagon, or if other services Foursquare is already ahead enough in the game to survive.

4. Early adoption
This is the first “Big Brand,” highly publicized Facebook Places promo we’ve come across, so it will be interesting to see whether it has an effect on the its adoption rate, perhaps giving Places the jumpstart it needs. Again, it just seems like Facebook has a overwhelmingly unfair advantage when it comes to launching a service like this. But Google has also leveraged its size to launch new services (like Buzz) and failed… so it’s not just size that matters here.

5. Gap in the social space
Worth noting: while Gap has received a lot of negative commentary due to its logo fiasco, the company has trying out a variety of interesting national promotions in the social space. Groupon, Foursquare and now Facebook have all been at the heart of promotions run by the San Francisco based retailer.

6. Facebook Deals
The promo is also a launching point for Facebook Deals. Announced yesterday, Deals replicates the Foursquare Specials functionality. It allows merchants to post special offers for those who check in, and allows users to explore specials near their current location. Call it Facebook’s double-down on the Foursquare bet.

7. Striking a balance
In a tech-happy environment like Picture Marketing’s headquarters or Gap’s marketing department, it’s easy to imagine that everyone out there owns a smartphone. But a lot of Gap’s customers are leaving comments about feeling left out.

Brands need to strike a balance. Set trends with innovative promotions like this one… but don’t forget to show the love to your less “plugged in” fanbase. We don’t think Gap is overstepping anything here, but it’s a healthy mantra for any marketer to remember. When you add the Facebook element, you’re opening up the conversation to everybody. Negative reactions will come along with the good. A fascinating effect here: with an open Facebook Wall at the center of the conversation, brand fans are incredibly effective at helping each other find answers (and rebut the naysayers). Sure, Gap is adding posts and helpful responses… but they almost don’t have to!

Direct Marketing works because practitioners are constantly improving upon a baseline program and comparing newer efforts against it. Event Marketers can do the same by 1) measuring the appropriate metrics, such as Consumers Engaged Onsite and the Cost Per Engagement; and 2) measuring follow-up activity, such as Online Visits, SMS texts, etc. Sometimes event marketers are too willing to do something different simply for the sake of novelty, or abandon a program when only an adjustment is needed. Direct Marketers never abandon a program that works well in favor of a new, untested program – they simply test the new program against the proven program or test enhancements to a proven program.

2. Start with a good list.

Of course, you don’t have a list in Event Marketing, but the premise is the same – be sure you’re reaching a targeted audience. Event demographics should be readily available and your events should be a good match for your product. Great Western Bank (long gone) once sponsored a series of rodeo events, and while the events made sense from a creative and branding perspective, it made absolutely no sense from a demographic fit; the audience was not upscale enough for a bank targeting adults 55+ with incomes $75k and over. Conversely, the rodeo is a powerful tool for tire manufacturers, tool manufacturers, truck manufacturers, and farming and lawn equipment manufacturers. (On a side note, here’s a nod to the power of rodeo sponsorship: my uncle works his farm wearing Levi jeans, but when he goes to the rodeo, he wears a pair of Wranglers without fail.)

3. Refine the list based on responses to your program.

Direct Marketers flag anyone replying to a previous mailing and put them in a subset that receives additional attention or a different, creative approach, because that group is predisposed to respond to the next piece of communication. Similarly, event attendees represent the most predisposed target audience you could wish for; they have an obvious affinity that can be leveraged, and they’re interacting with your brand face-to-face. So don’t treat this group like someone who serendipitously found your content on the web.

4. Don’t give up after one interaction.

Why do you keep getting catalogs even though you’ve never responded to date? Because Direct Marketers know that the message needs to reach prospects when they’re ready to receive the information, so by remaining in touch with consumers, brands are sure to intersect with them at a time when the consumer is finally ready. Moreover, the cost to deliver an incremental communication is far less than that to create an original lead. Yet too many event marketers deem programs a failure if attendees don’t immediately race down to the store to buy their product. And so they race back out to events to generate new leads. If it costs you $3 to generate a lead and $0.05 per incremental communication (email), your conversion rate on new leads has to be 60x higher than on existing leads to yield the same Cost Per Conversion. In other words, you can leverage your marketing dollars 60x by focusing on lead conversion from your existing base rather than using up those dollars to buy brand new names. Don’t push a rock up a hill only to let it roll back down when you’re nearly to the top.

Direct Marketers build their whole business model around this ability to leverage their existing lists… ‬something antsy Event Marketers can learn from when they’re about to give up on a particular market because it hasn’t generated an immediate reaction or sales spike. A lead, even one generated a year ago, has a value. Therefore, find out what the brand does with the leads you generate, how long those leads remain in the system, and the conversion rate for leads based on the age of the lead.

Exhibit A: Gas station in Miami

What works: Our chief tech officer said, “What was cool about it was there was no text on it at all, so you got a little buzz knowing that most people wouldn’t even know what it was. Exclusivity based on cutting-edge technology.” If you surround the code with an air of mystery, you can get scans simply based on the mystery alone. This is a great example of a guerrilla approach to QR code usage.

What to watch out for: Well… the obvious. If there’s no other text or recognizable brand mark, your entire impression depends on people being willing (or having the ability) to scan. That’s the guerrilla gamble.

What it linked to: http://www.kneetoface.com/

Exhibit B: Times Square, NYC

What works: It’s big, it’s bad, and it’s begging to be scanned. The target audience is right: if you’ve got a fancy gaming console, chances are you (or your mommy and daddy) own a smartphone.

What to watch out for: Standing in front of the billboard, I couldn’t have scanned this thing even if I’d had a gun to my head (which, by appearances, was entirely the case). I tried three different smartcode readers, and wandered back and forth across 7th Ave trying to get it to work. Only when I uploaded the photo to my computer, then pulled out my phone, could I scan it from the comfort of my desk. Not exactly effortless… and if I hadn’t been planning this post, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. The A for effort doesn’t go to Medal of Honor – it goes to the few, the brave, the 17-year-olds who actually photographed the billboard to scan it later.

What it linked to: http://tier1-nyc.com

Exhibit C: Carrol Street Station stairwell, Brooklyn NY

What works: In a foodie-centric neighborhood in Brooklyn, this poster Seamless Web has the demographic right. New Yorkers heading for their subway ride home after work (if they haven’t already eaten on restaurant-heavy Smith street) catch a reminder of their favorite way to make dinner: outsourcing. In addition to the QR code, the surrounding messaging is clear and locally resonant.

What to watch out for: First, the code was small. Too small to scan. That’s always a risk with QR codes. And the billboard wasn’t well-lit at night, but Metropolitan Transport Agency deserves the bulk of that blame. Still, something to consider as you’re planning your next big QR campaign. The bigger error was something that every savvy New York advertiser should know: DON’T BLOCK THE STAIRS. Passing under this sign and imagining myself amid a crowd of rushed commuters, I saw only one thing: some poor slackjaw blocking traffic while trying to scan the code. So while the campaign itself was well-placed, it would have been much more effective inside the station on the subway platform. Stairs, especially NYC stairs, aren’t the place to ask people to scan a QR code.

What it linked to: Too small and dark to scan, and I wouldn’t dare transgress the “no stair blocking” rule in any case. Couldn’t scan from the photo, for obvious reasons.

Exhibit D: Subway underground

What worked: Commuters would have ample time to scan this code while waiting for their trains. For that reason, subway platform code sightings are great.

What to watch out for: On an underground platform, there’s no internet connectivity. So for all our joyful scanning, we couldn’t actually access any of the tag’s content in realtime. Furthermore, Lifetime chose to use a proprietary smartcode format – the JAGTAG. The JAGTAG format can’t be read by smartcode readers… which minimizes the already segmented (though growing) audience of individuals who know about QR codes and how to scan them. You’ve got to take a photo of the code and then email or MMS it via Verizon or AT&T. If you’re used to the instant gratification of a standard QR scan, that’s a whole lot of effort for a bit of extra content.

There’s more to discuss regarding JAGTAG and other proprietary smartcode formats (including Microsoft’s Tag codes), so we’ll save that for a future post. Common QR and proprietary smartcode formats each have their benefits and drawbacks, and they all address a sliiiightly different audience… worth knowing if you’re about to spend thousands on a campaign with smartcode integration.

What it linked to: On phone, opens a YouTube video with job tips. Via email, sends a link to the video (which starts to download itself when you click): http://bit.ly/aEYzxb

Exhibit E: Subway underground, part deux

What worked: Big, easy to read code in a high-traffic location with lots of people looking for something to do as they wait for the subway. Visual queues let users know to scan the code with their phones. This would have been much better on an elevated subway platform where people could actually respond to the call to action.

What to watch out for: Underground without internet connectivity, as above. The other leap in faith here had to do with the target audience. MCU (Municipal Credit Union) is targeting lower-income individuals and potential loan applicants. Probably not the most likely smartphone-toting crowd.

What it linked to: http://r.beetagg.com/?46oko1
(just the MCU website… not even a mobile version of the site)

Final Thoughts

It’s understandable that lots of brands want to get on the QR code bandwagon, but marketers need to pay close attention to detail. Location, target audience, brand recognition (or hiding the brand), visibility: all of these Marketing 101 factors become even more important when the call to action is as immediate, and attractive, as a QR code scan.

It’s worth a trip over to his site to have a read. In the meantime, here’s a quick download of some key points he made.

1. Facebook and Twitter demand unique, dedicated approaches

Facebook and Twitter are unique in their design and their culture and each offer distinguishing opportunities for businesses. As such, they demand a dedicated focus, strategy, and approach.

2. Twitter: your window to relevance

Twitter is important and essential to learning, engaging, and cultivating customer communities. Twitter is your window to relevance, both understanding how to identify and earn it.

3. Facebook: a social epicenter for business

Facebook, as both a network and a platform, is unlocking new and important connections between people, brands, content, and data. Once we explore the culture and technical advantages of Facebook Connect, Likes, and the scope and possibilities of the open graph, we get an idea of the deepening emphasis required to transform Facebook from a “Fan Page” to a bona fide brand page, creating nothing less than a social epicenter for business.

4. Integrate Facebook into all your online properties

More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries support Facebook as a “platform” with greater than one million websites integrating Facebook sharing, liking and visualized social graph features into content discovery and consumption. So, what does that mean? Integrate Facebook functionality into your online properties (in addition to other relevant social presences of course).

That’s why the photo activation microsites we create at Picture Marketing always have seamless Facebook integration. Sure, there was a time when that was cutting-edge. But as you can see, it’s becoming the de-facto state of the web. Don’t let your campaign miss the connection to that living infrastructure.

5. When “Fans” became “Likes,” everything changed

What started as “Fans” has evolved to “Likes” and in that simple shift in phraseology comes something quite profound. “Fans” implies a hierarchical relationships where brands publish at will to a community that feels a bit more like a traditional audience. “Likes” begets a linear form of relationships where we earn the endorsement of a social consumer, but in order to foster a community, we have to continue to do so. This introduces a peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamic where rather than program our Facebook activity from a top-down perspective, we now have to consider an active participatory role in earning Likes, attention, and hopefully advocacy much more frequently than we may have anticipated initially.

6. Social engagement leads to purchases (digital actions catalyze live behaviors)

In February 2010, market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey along with iModerate Research Technologies, surveyed over 1,500 individuals online as well as conducted one-on-one discussions to contextualize social media behavior. Their research shows us that social commerce and quite specifically, F-commerce (Facebook Commerce) is bursting at the seams.

Since actions speak louder than words, the study sought to answer the question of whether or not engagement actually leads to purchases. The answer is yes. An impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers indicated that they are more likely to buy since connecting online.

7. Facebook is a transformative social marketplace

Facebook is changing the way we think about business, customers and community and as such, there’s much to learn. Everything begins at the beginning and together, we will earn relevance and expand business opportunities in a new social marketplace one Like at a time.

So… are QR codes on the road to adoption, or will the trend fizzle? Here are our five talking points:

1. Consumer recognition

According to a recent survey by Siegel+Gale SimplicityLab, 15% of consumers recognize and would use a QR code printed on a new car label [download the survey results PDF here]. That’s about half of smartphone users (which make up 30% of the cell-phone owning population). Not exactly an overwhelming number, but that percentage has been steadily growing for the past several months.

2. Breadth and depth

As experiential marketers, we’re starting to see QR codes everywhere. The square “quick response” codes act as a shortcut to a piece of information, like a URL or a typed message. When scanned by any smartphone QR code reader, they link users directly to a website, play a YouTube video, dial a phone number, or launch a variety of other actions directly on the device.

3. Novelty factor

A healthy percentage of the new marketing campaigns we’re seeing feature some sort of QR integration. Because the codes can link to such a huge variety of data, they’re being printed and stickered everywhere. They offer a novel way for consumers to access additional information about a product, and there’s a certain “what’s this?” element to the scanning process that makes everyone curious to participate.

4. Consumer trust vs. the spammers

We’re guessing that it won’t be much longer before QR codes approach ubiquity. What remains to be seen, though, is whether their growth will result in a marketing channel that’s trusted by consumers. If not – if, for instance, some marketers take advantage of the fact that individuals are essentially opting in to an unknown and use QR codes as a tool to deliver spam or other, more malicious, packages – the trend could fizzle under too much suspicion.

5. Marketers can shepherd this technology toward success

At the moment, widespread popularity for the technology seems to rest in two places: first, it’s a matter of educating consumers and pushing toward that tipping point. Second, the industry needs to foster responsible execution so that nascent consumer trust will bloom into widespread adoption. Of course, there will always be those marketers who exploit the tech. But bigger brands have a major advantage in their corner: they’ve already got masses of trusting fans ready to respond to their calls to action. If they can “own” this new technology as it matures, they’ll engender the kind of acceptance and trust needed to bring QR codes to their potential as powerful, engaging tools for the marketing landscape.

What’s new from PM

We’re integrating QR code technology into our Photo Access Cards so that visitors can simply scan a printed QR code to access their event photo or view a campaign-branded website or message. Hungry for more? Click here to download the info sheet.

Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, is heading up a search for innovative means to reach audiences. They’ve signed up for an experimental effort with a company called netBAT, a system that turns photos within editorial into sources of additional content on the subject pictured. When you mouse over one of the sponsored photos, contextual buttons appear with all sorts of options for digging deeper. Users can access quotes, recent stats, YouTube videos, and the like. All this is pulled from a database that netBAT created, which maps to 40,000 celebrities and athletes about whom they can display information.

So… cool. netBAT is building apps directly on top of photos. Photos of celebrities, within editorial. But won’t that just make the photos look like another ad? Sure, it’s an interesting photo. But it’s also possible that the experience of mousing over one of these photos to get to the “advertorial goodies” underneath might have a distinctly ad-like feeling.

The solution to Pepsi’s search has at least two prongs. Bough is looking for communication channels that “bridge the paid and earned media with one editorial unit.” He adds,”It has to happen in a way that brings content and conversation.” We’re not arguing that netBAT fails to answer that call. In fact, it looks pretty cool, with the “ad-like” caveat considered. And the online ad publishing industry is in need of a fresh angle. (Endlessly scalable online ad space does, after all, come with a major Econ 101 downside: scarcity and demand equals price. There’s no scarcity online, is there?) From an ideological standpoint, we’re all for it. Enrich existing content by making it a conduit for more information. Do that in a totally integrated fashion, so that the user experience is seamless. But how could we make netBAT an even more relevant tool? (Hint: newspapers aren’t involved)

We have an idea for these guys: why not break out of the pure editorial space and offer this app for all sorts of photos? Not just celebrities, and not just on news pages. Imagine what Facebook could do with an app like this. They’ve got the data. With everyone’s faces tagged. Then the individual becomes the celebrity. And the mouseover gets you to your friend’s recent quotes or news or favorites or whatever. It’s far more personal than the celebrity angle ever could be. And that means it’s meaningful to individuals. The issues of curation, placement, etc. are present, but in our minds totally easy subordinate to the idea that you’re providing a way to enhance users’ own content… which is patently more important to them than anything else (well, their friends’ content is probably pretty high up there too).

On the Pepsi side of the story, we think it’s a great effort. They’ve created a program called the PepsiCo 10 to work with innovative new tech and media firms, and according to Bough the program with BAT (along with their recent deals with Foursquare and Twitter ad network Ad.ly) is meant to serve as a model for how that can work.

We think about seamless integration a lot, and recently it’s been getting more… personal. What if technologies were integrated into us? Digital experiences wouldn’t just intersect with live ones: they would be live.

For an exhibit at DDW 2010, Dutch culture thinktank Next Nature designed a conceptual supermarket filled with nanotech products that might hit the shelves sometime before 2020. The exhibit is designed to provoke discussion about our potential “nano” futures, and to help us decide what kind of nanotechnology-enabled future we actually might want.

Check out some of their inventions:

NanoLift – Physical Photoshop

What would your life look like if you had the ability to change the shape of your face on a daily basis? Not just retouch parts through make-up but actually alter the physical form of your face. The Nano Lift is a product that could make this a reality. All it takes is one trip to the cosmetic surgery clinic, where they will inject a grid of tiny magnetic nano particles into your skin. From then on you can adjust these particles at home with the accompanied magnetic stick. The particles are connected with your skin, so adjusting the grid means physically changing your face.

Enabling Technology: Magnetic Nanoparticles

Programmable Wine

Each course of a fancy diner should be accompanied with a soothing wine. But why buy each different type separately when you can get them all out of one bottle? Nano Wine is a basic grape product that is mixed with nano sized flavour capsules. When exposed to microwaves these capsules release their flavour. Different wattage and duration of exposure means you create a different type of wine. Just open the vanilla capsules when you are in an Australian mood. Truffle puts you in an Italian atmosphere and for a smooth Merlot won’t have to do anything.

Enabling Technology: Nano encapsulation

Wallsmart – Interactive wallpaint

This paint gives you the freedom to change the colour of your walls with the push of a button. Just paint any surface once with the product and nano particles in the paint will give you the option to change colour just by choosing on from the accompanied computer program. If you get fed up with your choice just pick a different colour and the walls will change instantly into the desired hue.

Enabling technology: Magneto chromatic nanorods

Nano Supermarket TV Commercial

NANO Supermarket commercial from nextnature on Vimeo.

The Conversation Prism is a visual encyclopedia of the social media universe, encompassing 28 different “conversations species” that exist online… from wiki sites and blog platforms to custom social networks and social commerce. The 2010 update to the original 2008 Conversation Prism, which contained 22 much simpler species, is most interesting when one considers its nuances. Sure, there are 28 different conversation types now, and boy does that seem like a lot. But the micro-variation of platforms within each species are what’s really getting us going.

Consider location-based networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Brightkite. They’re all cut of the same cloth, but surely they’re not carbon copies of each other. So if we group these – and the rest of their kind, or any kind – we can consider their features as a collective set… and then set our entrepreneurial minds to work creating a category killer app to rule them all, or an aggregator, or an app that fulfills something missing from the group.

All of these online networks have a live component because, of course, humans are populating them. But it’s interesting to see how the categories that always intersect the offline world – Location, Events, Livecasting, Pictures – have matured. And all of a sudden, Groupon is the elephant-sized 800lb gorilla in the room. We have a complete newcomer in Social Commerce, which didn’t even exist in 2008 and feels like it’s already reached puberty two years later. The offline to online information flow is being complemented by an online to offline activity flow. Online social networks now loop to offline social experiences.

The lesson here is this: social networks aren’t just online phenomena created to enable and introduce variety to electronic communication. They’re becoming amphibious… to stretch a metaphor, they’re going to live, we think, at the tideline of digital+live experience.

We recently read an interesting article about study habits in the New York Times. Turns out that much of the conventional wisdom we’ve come to rely on to guide students through the learning process isn’t all that wise. According to cognitive scientists, traditional study suggestions like “always study in the same, quiet place” or “focus on one subject at a time” really have no basis. In fact, research has led the scientists to the opposite conclusion. Students actually retained – learned – more of what they were studying by alternating their study environments instead of sticking to a single location.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Same goes for studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

But… what does all that have to do with marketing? If you’re looking at the landscape with digital+live point of view, a lot. Marketing using a digital+live strategy, where consumers get to experience your brand in multiple environments, and perhaps through a few “distinct but related” campaign strategies, could mean better message retention. They come into contact with the same brand concept at your experiential event, on your signage, your microsite, your followup emails, and the like. And all that leads to better brand learning, so to speak. Not that we needed scientists to convince us that digital+live… works.

(You can find the full text of the NYT article here).

We also gave readers a sneak peek at the new Ricoh FotoZap® Camera inside. More on that soon – the new camera has been completely redesigned from the inside out, and we’re really proud of it. We think it’ll transform the way brands use photo activation at events, since it offers some great seamless features like instant wireless upload, onsite printing, and QR code recognition.

Picture Marketing Partners with Oddcast to Delight Event Attendees with Photo-to-Speech™ Avatar

Novato, CA, October 4, 2010 - Picture Marketing, Inc., a developer of experiential marketing applications and tools, has chosen Oddcast as a technology partner to help deliver Photo-to-Speech™ animation, effectively allowing people attending events to easily create an avatar of themselves. Event marketers and sponsorships now have a cost-effective tool to enable event marketing to become viral, vastly extending its reach and lowering per unit cost.

Brands participating in a photo activation – any event at which a sponsor invites individuals to have their photos taken, and allows the individuals to retrieve their photos online at a Microsite – can integrate the Photo-to-Speech™ application into the Microsite activities. The technology animates a still image into a moving, speaking character. The photo can be morphed to include a wide range of emotions, expressions, or caricature features. Users add speech by entering text, speaking into their computer’s microphone, calling in by phone, or selecting from a bucket of pre-recorded phrases a brand has included.

Photo-to-Speech™ animation has been the lynchpin of some astounding social media efforts over the past year. The 2009 “Trek Yourself” widget, for example, which allowed fans to turn themselves into a character from the new Star Trek film in theaters that summer, received over 650,000 interactions during the first five weeks it was live. Of those who used the application, 51% (333,000) came to it through a viral source, whether it was an email, a posted creation, or a grabbed and shared message URL. And more than 98,000 users shared their creations with friends by posting to their blog or social profile, emailing, or passing along a unique URL linking to their creation.

Oddcast’s Adi Sideman said: “Our products represent an incredible new theater for social engagement. We’re built to go viral. Partnering with a platform like Picture Marketing allows us to match the creative scope of Oddcast with the lead generation potential of a photo activation powerhouse.”

Picture Marketing, Inc. is proud to offer an application with such social media firepower. The company’s Director of Inbound Marketing, Samantha Rose, added, “It’s more important than ever for brands to find creative ways to make their social media campaigns pop. Bringing a highly personal photo to the next level by allowing it to move and speak… that’s the type of amplification agencies are looking for when they’re imagining a strong solution.”

Beyond the high level of engagement offered by a photo activation effort, incorporating fun activities like Photo-to-Speech™ into the photo pickup page keeps viewers interested and elevates viral sharing. “It significantly moves the dial for social metrics, lead generation, and word of mouth,” said Rose.

With advanced tools like the Ricoh FotoZap® Camera at the forefront of Picture Marketing’s arsenal, its popular creative technologies – Photo-to-Speech™ animation among them – can integrate with any experiential marketing program to bring the consumer experience to a high point.

Novato, CA, Sept. 28, 2010 – When Picture Marketing, Inc. employees recognized that few of the charity fundraisers they attended were incorporating social networking efforts into the onsite event itself, they set out to create a tool that would allow charities to unite their live and online efforts. The result? Picture-a-Cause.org, a charity donation vehicle that uses the company’s FotoZap® technology as a bridge between the onsite and online worlds. The program embodies Picture Marketing’s pledge to help non-profits integrate their resources and create one-to-one connections with their fans.

“We are very pleased to collaborate with Ricoh to bring a donations-centric, cost-effective approach to the use of Picture Marketing in charity programs,” said Ron Tonini, CEO. “Our employees have always been very generous donating their time and energies to good causes, but with the establishment of Picture-a-Cause.org, we’ve raised the bar to a new level. We’ve set a goal of $100,000 in donations for 2011. The approach that we’ve taken makes it easier both for charities to request our services, and also for other participants to join us in supporting worthy causes.”

Social networking and charity events are a match made in heaven. Non-profits have long relied on events to increase visibility and support, gather contributions, and foster community among their supporters. Social networking has fundamentally changed the non-profit fundraising landscape, allowing charities to reach a broader, more engaged audience than ever before. By combining these two powerful tools – social networking and event fundraising – charities have the opportunity to amplify their impact… and fully integrate their efforts in new and creative ways. Picture Marketing, Inc., a developer of experiential marketing applications and technology, has found a way to do just that.

With the Picture-a-Cause.org program, Picture Marketing provides a full photo activation system to each participating non-profit organization, allowing them to take photos at any event with the Ricoh FotoZap® Camera and invite the attendees to view their photos at an online Microsite. The Microsite, which Picture-a-Cause.org also donates, allows the charity to connect participants with their social networking efforts, share or collect valuable information, and even invite additional donations.

The first partner to join Picture Marketing is Ricoh Corporation of America. Ricoh has agreed to supply the cameras needed for the program. Yuki Uchida, VP, Solutions Strategy, said, “We know that charities are faced with a tougher economic climate, which means reduced donations. The Picture-a-Cause.org program will bring a fun element to the event, and, more importantly, establish a strong online presence that encourages further donations and social networking about the cause. Picture Marketing is at the cutting edge of this movement and we are proud to be their technology partner and especially to provide the Ricoh FotoZap® Camera at no charge to program participants.”

For more information on new ways to enhance charity fundraising, or to request a Picture-a-Cause system for your non-profit or charity event, contact events@picture-a-cause.org.

Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

A vehicle manufacturer saw the opportunity to sponsor the Muddy Buddy team obstacle race as a great reflection of its offroad, experiential personality. Picture Marketing engaged both race participants and crowd observers, and used collected survey data to drive a powerful (and award-winning) direct mail follow up campaign. The result: dealerships got more than just a drive-by; sales zoomed out of the lot.

Offroad to online… and back again
Covered in mud and riding on a post-race high, teams were excited to pose for their victory shots. Photo pickup rates for individual events one summer ranged between 65-85% and resulted in tens of thousands of page views. The survey page asked just a few simple questions. For the respondents who showed interest in purchasing a certified pre-owned SUV, postcards were generated using Variable Data Printing technology so that each individual received a highly unique mailer. Based on their survey responses, recipients got a postcard featuring their photo from the race; the car they expressed interest in (down to the exact model and color); and a map to the dealer nearest their zip code… along with a test drive invitation. And test drive they did!

Goals and metrics
The main goal for the campaign was to gain brand exposure and drive certified pre-owned vehicle sales, best measured by number of user interactions, test drives, and vehicles sold.

•    More than 16,866 users participated in the campaign during a single summer season.
•    76,877 unique photo views were generated; photos were viewed an average of 4.67 times each.
•    Increased foot traffic at local vehicle dealerships, with direct impact on sales.
•    Award-winning direct mail program drove substantial SUV sales & leasing.

Results
Picture Marketing’s pilot program captured 917 photos over eight evenings during August 2010. Over 47% of those photos were viewed online by a guest, resulting in the collection of 486 email addresses that represented opt-in contacts for the restaurant to use in future marketing communications.

The program also generated healthy viral activity as guests shared their photos online: a total of 2,496 unique page views were recorded, resulting in an average of 5.71 views for each image. The 486 initial guests invited 253 friends to view their photos through the Picture Marketing system. In addition, a number of participants posted their photos on Facebook pages, generating 895 views from Facebook viral activity. As is typical with Facebook postings, the viral activity continued long after the pilot program ended. A week after the program wrapped, viral activity increased photo visits by about 15%.

In an online survey, guests were asked about their dining preferences, “favorite things” about the restaurant, and how often they ate at the chain. The restaurant collected this information to inform and personalize follow-up communications, and to deliver custom offers based on the diners’ feedback. The campaign website featured prominent co-branding for the restaurant’s partners, and allowed visitors to click through to find more information about how to participate in the partners’ efforts to build community and stay in touch with the neighborhood.

Campaign Summary
• Over 100 photos per evening were captured, using just a single Ricoh FotoZap® Camera.
• Of the individuals invited to see a friend’s photo, 53% viewed the image at least once.
• Viral activity created 5.71 unique views for each individual image.
• Total unique photo views: 2,496, rising weekly with viral shares and Facebook posts

Novato, CA, August 26, 2010 – Marketing technology company Picture Marketing, Inc. just received recognition for its impressive growth over the past year. The company earned a position on the 2010 Inc. 5000 list, Inc. magazine’s annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America. There are over 6 million private businesses in the United States. Each year, only a tiny fraction can claim the distinction of being on the Inc.500|5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies.

In a letter announcing the award, Inc. Editor Jane Berentson wrote: “More than ever, this year’s list is a testament to the creativity, resilience, and tenacity of America’s top entrepreneurs. As an Inc. 5000 honoree, Picture Marketing shares a prestigious pedigree with such notable alumni as Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Visa, Clif Bar, Patagonia, Oracle, and scores of other powerhouses.”

Picture Marketing, Inc. creates some of the most innovative interactive marketing technology in the event market today. Experiential marketing is becoming an increasingly effective tool for brands seeking more cost-effective marketing campaigns with ever increasing returns on investment, by utilizing new media and new technology to drive down customer acquisition costs. Picture Marketing’s photo-based lead generation system creates a digital+live experience for fans, integrating them directly into brand campaigns and bringing them online to a sponsor-branded photo retrieval website after the event. In effect, the system builds a miniature advertising campaign around each consumer’s image. The process creates a proprietary database for the client, and gathers valuable marketing data for use in follow up sales and future campaigns.

Many of the company’s event marketing innovations emanate from the multiple patents the company holds. These patents involve the process of collecting data with photography equipment that can be used to help create marketing messages for consumers. In addition to the patents, Picture Marketing has teamed with Ricoh to produce the Ricoh FotoZap® Camera, which features a built-in barcode scanner, wireless photo uploading capability, and a rugged design built to withstand the rigors of any event. Because of the need for scalability and smooth deployment in experiential campaigns, the device is unexpectedly simple to use; so simple, in fact, that brand ambassadors can master it within a few minutes.

The combination of the patents and camera allows for a very simple process to convert face-to-face interactions with consumers into online branded communications. Picture Marketing has integrated the process of sharing the resulting pictures on a number of popular social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and even location-based applications like Foursquare, to encourage viral activity around each captured photo.

Ron Tonini, Picture Marketing’s CEO, explains, “We created a classic win-win business model. Our clients get an elegant yet simple, highly effective marketing system that yields valuable customer information at attractive values to them. Their customers win by having a unique, very positive experience with the brand.”

“We’re honored to be included among such a fantastic group of companies, past and present. Our goal has always been to develop unique ways for brands to connect with consumers at a personal level. For us, that happens through technological innovation and design, coupled with a creative instinct that integrates with the mindset of the brands and partners who use us every day. The Inc. 5000 list is an acknowledgement of that drive and entrepreneurship,” Tonini added.

The Photo-to-Speech application puts fans at the very center of the action and brings the image to life, using facial recognition technology to animate the lips, eyes, and expression of a participant’s photo. Fans add speech by entering text, speaking into their computer’s microphone, or recording a telephone message. Their words are spoken through the moving lips of the animated photo.

The app is impressive to see, and very fun to play with. It’s also a handy way to generate lots of buzz around a photo activation campaign. As with all Picture Marketing photos, participants can save the image and use the site’s click-and-share social networking capabilities to post their animation online.

Want to give it a try? We’ve got a basic version that will run you through the ropes:
1. Visit http://www.geicotalkingphotos.com/#mId=36315285.3
2. Turn up the volume to listen to Kristen as she searches for her GEICO Caveman
3. Click the “Make Yours!” button to upload a new photo and add your own speech
4. Share your creation: you can email to a friend, grab the URL, or post the entire widget to a blog or social network

From there, you can get more creative and complex – the Trek Yourself app was wildly popular during the launch of 2009’s Star Trek movie. You can still view the app online, at http://www.facebook.com/TrekYourself. Hop right through the intro to get the full experience and get Trekked using your own photo.

The viral power of an application like Photo-to-Speech can’t be underestimated. Check out these metrics from a 2009 campaign:

• More than 650,000 users loaded and interacted with the application during the first five weeks it was live
• 51% of all application users (333,000) came to the application from a viral source, whether it was an email, a posted creation, or a grabbed and shared message URL
• Approximately 240,000 users – 37% of the total – uploaded a photo to create their own personalized character
• Of these users more than 98,000 shared their creations with friends, whether by posting to their blog or social profile, emailing, or grabbing and passing along a unique URL linking to their creation

We’ve been working with recruiting forces for a US military service group to boost their efforts for the past couple of years now, and this summer it’s shaping up to be a fantastic program. We put Ricoh FotoZap® Cameras into the hands of dozens of guardsmen across the nation, and created an online platform that integrated into the service’s website to create a bridge to their “Talk to a Soldier” program.

Using Picture Marketing has amplified the US recruiting effort in a couple of key ways. The photo opp acts as an icebreaker, giving recruiters a smooth point of entry for a conversation with passers-by. When campaigns include an experiential element like a physical fitness challenge, the photos commemorate the accomplishment.

As with most Picture Marketing integrations, users pass through a brief survey before viewing their photos. The campaign survey allows recruiters to collect contact information from each participant, much like they would do with paper and a clipboard on most occasions. But by moving that process to an online platform (and incentivizing it with the gift of a free photo), the campaign streamlines the data collection process and eliminates manual sign-ups and data entry. We think it’s pretty clever.

Notably, this recruiting campaign features our Insert-a-Face™ application. Insert-a-Face allows individuals to add their photo to a branded scene. It lets us bring the action online, and adds another experiential element that helps the campaign live beyond the event itself. In the recruiting service’s case, there are dozens of scenes to choose from. Participants can be a sports hero, an action hero, or a national hero… and invite their friends to do the same.

Insert-a-Face is one of our Virtual Greenscreen™ apps, which means that it can be combined with other VG options so that users can add text to the scene, drag and drop photo elements or props, and play around with fancy recoloring and resizing options to make their faces fit right in to the scene (dare we say… camouflage?).

We’ve also incorporated a slew of social networking options into the recruiting service’s Microsite, so that creative Insert-a-Face app users can share their masterpieces with friends. Which, incidentally, is helping to drive the service’s Facebook fans likers through the roof. Last month, the site had over 48% of its 19,000 unique visitors go through Facebook to see the photos.

American Eagle Outfitters sponsored Spring Break promotions at beachside and mountaintop destinations, where they knew thousands of vacationing college students would flock to spend the week in the warm sand or fresh powder. The goal: to connect consumers to the retailer’s online platform, promote the musical performers and livebloggers featured at the Spring Break events, increase brand awareness and seasonal sales, and drive traffic to its social networking sites.

Beyond Spring Break
Picture Marketing created an integrated program that featured significant social networking placement on Photo Access Cards and Microsite pages. Participants had their photos taken in Cancun and Squaw Valley; in the Cancun market, 3,836 photos were captured over one week with a single camera. Over 70% of the photos were visited at least once, generating nearly 14 unique views per photo as participants shared the images online. The result: 37,555 photo views, all from a single camera for a single week at one destination. Over 20,000 Facebook hits originated from the photo views, helping to grow the company’s impressive online fanbase. Remarkably, even one year after the original promotion the photos were still generating hundreds of hits and Facebook visits per month.

Goals and metrics
•    Over 5,300 photos were captured over one week with just two cameras.
•    Of the individuals invited to see a friend’s Squaw Valley photo, 77% viewed the image at least once.
•    Viral activity for the Cancun photos created nearly 13.83 unique views for each individual image.
•    Total unique photo views: 43,400
•    Facebook hits originated from the photo views: 22,642

Picture Marketing Launches Insert-a-Face™
Experiential Marketing Program for the Harley-Davidson Museum

Novato, CA, June 9, 2010 – Picture Marketing, Inc. today announced an innovative new program for the Harley-Davidson Museum, enabling visitors to insert their face into Evel Knievel’s classic action photos.

Picture Marketing is a developer of experiential marketing applications and technology. It teamed up with the Harley-Davidson Museum to bring their Summer 2010 Evel Knievel special exhibit to life. The retrospective tells the story of the folk hero and daredevil superstar, going way beyond artifacts and photographs to make the exhibit an audience-engaging interactive experience.

Picture Marketing’s patented photo activation platform is integrated into the show to allow visitors to record their “Evel Experience” with a photo memory. After their visit, participants retrieve the picture online and are treated to a free Insert-a-Face™ application that lets them relive Evel’s classic action stunts by putting their own images into the photo. Stepping into the famous daredevil’s action shots is sure to make a museum visit a far more memorable experience…and it can be shared with friends and family at no cost.

The museum expects fans to have a strong positive reaction to the visit and the online activities offered through the Insert-a-Face™ application. They are excited to make this innovative way of engaging their audience a fun, user friendly, yet memorable extension of the event, while establishing a proprietary database and gathering valuable marketing intelligence on which future marketing programs can be based.

“Harley-Davidson wanted to deliver an authentic exhibit that offered visitors a glimpse of the uniquely American history and culture embodied by Evel Knievel,” said Joe Frisch, Picture Marketing VP. “The Insert-a-Face™ program allows the museum to send a sharable memory home with each visitor, and brings it to a deeper level of engagement by inviting fans to ‘Be Evel’ when they add their faces to some of his most famous photographs.”

Picture Marketing’s groundbreaking Ricoh FotoZap® Camera is at the heart of the system, allowing the company’s popular creative technologies, Virtual Greenscreen™, Photo-to-Video™ Animation, and Insert-a-Face™to seamlessly integrate into virtually any experiential marketing program.

About Picture Marketing, Inc.

Picture Marketing, Inc. is dedicated to measurably boosting the return-on-investment its clients make in marketing programs by creating photo activation technologies and services for the marketing industry. Their patented experiential marketing platform is designed to amplify a consumer’s connection with a brand, enable a rich online experience, and build a proprietary database for the client while capturing valuable data around each interaction.

• Memorable photos provide an opportunity for social networking and viral activity, and elevate mobile marketing campaigns to penetration levels previously unheard of, dramatically reducing costs.

• The Picture Marketing system helps brands increase sales and move the sales needle through lead generation. Successive programs cumulatively establish a valuable, proprietary database.

• Picture Marketing’s system effectively ushers consumers into any number of fully branded activities, each of which is specifically designed to fulfill a marketing goal.

Picture Marketing, Inc. is located at 1202 Grant Avenue, Suite D, Novato, California 94945, with offices in Miami and New York. Please visit www.picturemarketing.com or call (949) 623-9889 for more information about the company and to arrange a demonstration of the Picture Marketing System. For media inquiries and to arrange for an interview with the chief executive officer, please contact Gary Douglas at (949) 464-9301, email: gary@DouglasStrategic.com.