Friday, November 14, 2008

Adtech panel discussion proposal - World 2.0

Well happy as I am about changing times in the US, the massive mainstream usage of social media/networking platforms (and i’m citing the US election as just the latest, biggest example here) has hammered something home to me: web 2.0, social media, etc are so clearly out of the underground that it’s just not that exciting to talk about it all anymore. And before i get a thousand social media guru’s blogging me to death about how brands don’t get the space, how vital our insights all are etc, i do realise there’s still a lot of good business to be had helping brands get involved (… which is what it’s all about isn’t it?) All i’m saying is that for me at least it feels like a ‘cost of entry/ignore it at your peril’ discussion these days, rather than the ‘brave new word talk’ of a while back.

So, with that in mind, i’d like to propose a panel/session be set up at Adtech talk about something that is very real and very exciting - making the real world interactive. Augmented mobile reality, hyper-reality, interactive real world… whatever you call it, to my mind the most exciting developments in digital marketing and communications are not happening on the web, but at the points where the web and real world meet. Advances in RFID, mobile, GPS, interactive projections, face/image recognition, motion sensing, etc etc etc are turning the world around us, and all the objects in it, into a massive, deep, digitally interactive experience that I think holds a lot more exciting possibilities than rehashing web 2.0 yet again.

So, before google announces that android will become an operating system for everything, how about starting our own discussions and momentum for World 2.0? I’d be happy to get involved, talk through some examples/ideas, bring some big name clients along… anyone else?

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