As Facebook aims to go public on May 17 2012, the company is facing unprecedented scrutiny to prove its earning potential. To appeal to brands and open up ad dollars, marketing terms like reach, awareness and stories are now replacing the old “likes and comments” focus of the past in Facebook’s presentations to agencies.

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most credible forms of advertising but its reach and measurement potential are typically limited. An unpaid recommendation from a trusted friend trumps the power of a one-way message received over any medium. With 830 million Facebook users sharing billions of personal and brand-related stories with friends, the platform provides a remarkably powerful new advertising option: word of mouth “at scale”.

Many agencies miss out on this potential as they continue to farm fans through incentives and simply broadcast their messages to the masses. Brands in turn are questioning the value of their Facebook ad spend–a concern for any pre-IPO company. So what is Facebook telling agencies today?

Don’t Build Connections. Build For Connections

Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s Director of Program Management, gave this crowd-raising impassioned plea to all partners*: Let stories tell your story. While it’s true that everything begins with a connection and community size does matter, the race for fans using gimmicks and incentives is a misguided one. Use many different, highly targeted ads to get fans and make sure you’re attracting consumers. Then give them something worthwhile.

Grow Business Value Through User Value

“We are moving from ads to stories” said Chris Cox, VP Product at fMC earlier this year. “Lots of ads add up to noise. Lots of stories are how we build our relationships.” In Facebook’s early days we depended on ads because we couldn’t build enough connections to tell stories on the scale that large brands needed. With 830 million fans this has changed. Give fans something they want to share–something they find valuable–and they’ll build your brand for you.

Master Social Discovery

Engaging your connections depends on frequent, high-quality publishing. The Community Manager role has shifted dramatically toward a need for skilled copywriters who understand the brand voice. At Grip Limited our Community Managers now spend less than half their time responding to fan comments on behalf of brands like Stella Artois, KFC and Honda, down from close to 100% a year ago. The greater focus today–and real challenge for agencies–is in creative copywriting and image sourcing.

In summary, stories are the currency. Getting your content seen in newsfeeds, timelines and tickers is the most powerful aspect of Facebook and the most underutilized by marketers. Brands and agencies have a wealth of options at their disposal: Smart paid campaigns using Sponsored Stories and targeted ads; Well placed Like Buttons and Social Plugins; Compelling Page and Timeline Apps. But in the end it all comes down to meaningful, valuable content and it’s up to brands and agencies to let this one key question guide them:

How will people share your stories?

*Facebook gathered Preferred Marketing Developers from 35 countries at their new Palo Alto campus to provide best practices for building brands. The author attended representing Grip Limited.

In addition to his full time role as Group Director at Grip, Andrew is also a Huffington Post columnist providing digital-related advertising insights. This post and others can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-cherwenka.

The following article was originally drafted for Escape Magazine. A relink was kindly granted because it cites one of Grip’s great designers, Joel Derksen, who is also a friend and writerly compatriot to the Slide. The article’s author, Nadia, is a freelance games writer and About.com’s guide to the Nintendo DS at ds.about.com. Nadia can be found on Twitter at @nadiaoxford.

Reading text off a screen isn’t as glamorous as poring over a magazine page, but it has its advantages. With the touch of a button or the flick of a slider, we can adjust fonts at our whim. Want to fit ten sentences on a pinhead? Sure. Want to read web sites in Comic Sans, each letter the size of a Clydesdale’s hoof? Why not?

But while the people who build and engineer websites, tablets, and iOS devices understand the importance of making sure their audience can read what’s on the screen, modern day videogames typically don’t offer the myriad font options that are found elsewhere in the digital realm. In fact, poor design decisions sometimes render otherwise masterful games unreadable.

What keeps going wrong with in-game fonts, and what can developers do to fix the problem?

High Resolution Gaming for Some, Standard Definition for Others

Once upon a time, in-game text was pixel-based. Developers typically had to make their letters work within a limited pixel grid. There was little room for graphical negotiation, especially in an age where lower resolutions were the norm.

Of course, the 8- and-16-bit eras of gaming were also times of simpler engineering. Games didn’t require reams of text, aside from the occasional role-playing title, and in-game menus weren’t stuffed with skill options and item descriptions.

Moreover, aside from a few encoding differences between some countries and continents, developers could safely assume that their audience was playing on a standard color television set. Sure, some sets were small, others were large, and still others were decked out in fabulous wood paneling, but everybody across North America, Japan, and the UK was getting a consistent picture.

Nowadays, a person might play a Wii game on a standard definition television in his bedroom, while his sister plays an Xbox 360 game on the high definition set in the living room. There is no longer assured consistency between players’ experiences, and this, among other factors, has wreaked havoc on in-game typesetting.

Text, Menus, and Gaming’s Teenage Phase

When developers relied on rasterized text, the results weren’t always pretty, but readability was rarely an issue. Now that most videogame text is vector-based, developers can adjust text size to their liking — and most of them have apparently decided that they like said text to be as small and compact as possible.

Joel Derksen, a graphic designer and typographer based out of Toronto, Ontario, believes it’s likely that modern game designers have been caught up by the allure of the slim, sexy menus that are made possible with today’s high-res displays and vector text. “Thin, light, small type is like a designer’s dream,” he says.

Derksen, whose resume includes design and typography work for Blackberry/RIM and Labatt Breweries of Canada, also notes that videogames are still a relatively new means of expression that’s going through a bit of a “teenager” phase. In other words, designers can get caught up in a game’s looks to the point that functionality falls off to the side of the road.

“In every other digital and printed interface — books, pamphlets, mobile devices, computers, websites — if something is illegible, it gets thrown back in your face, and you’re told to clean up your act,” Derksen adds.

Your Fault, Not Theirs

Videogame technology is evolving at a stunning rate, and nobody expects developers to get everything right the first time. However, it’s been six years since gamers made their first loud cry over readability issues, and there’s still little effort being expended on making in-game text as easy to read as possible. Worse, when developers and publishers are confronted about poor font-related decisions, the response is typically a shrug coupled with, “It’s your problem, not ours.”

When Xbox 360 owners played Capcom’s Dead Rising in 2006, they discovered a gory but humorous take on the zombie-slaying genre. They also discovered that the game’s tiny text made it nearly impossible to read menus or follow the story if they were playing on a standard definition set.

It was a disappointing oversight to begin with, and it was made infuriating when Capcom said the problem was not going to be patched. EGM magazine confronted Dead Rising director Yoshinori Kawano about the matter in its September 2006 issue, and Kawano laughingly said, “People should definitely have an HDTV before buying an Xbox 360.” Few players were in the mood for laughing after paying money to squint at their television screens, however.

Derksen says, “Really, what it comes down to is eight engineers and developers around a 52-inch hi-def television screen with their perfect vision going, ‘Looks great to me, man, I can see it. I have the money for this big set. I am young and my eyesight is good.’”

And that’s why providing readable (and preferably adjustable) fonts in games should never be a joking matter. Not everyone can afford a high definition set. Even if everyone could afford one, there are still hundreds of thousands of game lovers who have poor eyesight, or who are hard of hearing and rely on clear subtitles to follow a story, or who simply don’t want to lean forward and strain every time they open a game menu.

To be fair, there have been instances wherein developers and publishers have acknowledged and fixed in-game font issues. When the demo for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts hit the Xbox 360 in 2008 and people complained that much of the text was unreadable on standard definition sets, Rare patched the issue.

Commendable, but it shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. What’s more, poor typesetting is still a major problem in games. Legibility should be a priority; it’s disappointing that developers are not taking simple steps to make their titles as accessible as possible to their increasingly diverse audience. Why spend all the time, money, imagination and effort necessary to make a tremendous world of dragons and sorcery if you’re just going to lock out audience members who don’t have 20/20 vision?

Skyrim’s Shame

Like the rest of planet Earth, Derksen fell in love with Bethesda’s massive RPG, Skyrim during the Holiday 2011 season. Though he thoroughly enjoyed playing the game, his experience was marred by Bethesda’s choice of font (Futura Condensed), which, Derksen recalls, made reading important information in the game difficult at times.

“The thing about Futura is that in its natural incarnation, it’s a very round font,” Derksen says. “It’s basically very stout and wide. So this idea of ‘Futura Condensed’ actually goes against the nature of what Futura was conceived to be.

“Futura Condensed is an OK font overall, but when it’s applied to Skyrim, you see its bad side.”

What’s the “bad side” of Futura Condensed, exactly? Derksen pinpoints how Skyrim highlighted the font’s troubles. “The letters are pretty tight together, which creates a lot of flickering around the letters, and they also tend to blur together. The definitions of the shapes become less clear, so what could be an ‘o’ may actually be an ‘e’ or ‘c’.”

“Also, Futura Condensed’s x-height [the height of the lowercase letters] is small so that the font ‘feels’ smaller. In this particular application, it means less pixels to express letters and their counters ['counters' being the spaces in letters, like a 'o' or 'e'].”

“It’s uncomfortable to read even on high definition settings, but on lower resolution settings, it’s nearly impossible.”

Granted, developers have enough on their minds when assembling a game of Skyrim’s magnitude. It’s hard enough making sure that dragons fly forward, so it’s understandable why Bethesda might have said, “Screw it, the text looks good, and that’s all that matters.”

However, that doesn’t make poor typesetting excusable. Given that game developers don’t have to face legal repercussions for engineering inaccessible text (unlike webpage developers), it’s up to game studios to start taking players’ complaints seriously. This isn’t a handful of fans swearing and squabbling on a message board because their favorite character didn’t make the cut into a fighting game. This is an accessibility issue that leaves players out in the cold for reasons that they have little control over.

It’s not as if decent typesetting requires a great investment of resources, either. Developers can avoid font-related problems if they make some common sense choices early in a game’s development- precisely when it should be done, not weeks after thousands of players have complained about not being able to read in-game text.

Fixes: Quick and Otherwise

What do some of those “common sense choices” entail? As far as Skyrim is concerned, Derksen believes improved performance is as easy as a font swap. One of his recommendations is to switch Futura Condensed with Interstate, which, true to its name, is used in North American highway signs specifically for its high legibility in sub-optimal conditions.

“Interstate’s e’s and a’s are much more open and distinct compared to Futura Condensed,” Derksen points out. “And you actually don’t want a big height difference between capital and lower-case letters.”

“The fix is low cost,” Derksen adds, “and the testing is negligible, compared to bug testing. The impact area, however, is huge.”

Making good font choices is a major and necessary step for resolving the typesetting problems that plague today’s games, but it’s only one step of several that need to be taken. Players need more control over in-game fonts, and developers need to realize that every single person who picks up their game deserves to be able to read menus and text. That includes the man who can’t afford a high definition television, and the woman whose eyesight is less than optimal.

Editor’s note:
Students from Centennial College’s Account Management post grad program were invited to take a stab at writing a blog post for the Big Orange Slide. Submissions had to fall under one of the Slide’s main pillars (strategy, design, digital, and culture), and be somewhere between 300-600 words. The winner would be published on the Slide, and receive a secondary prize that, frankly, we have yet to come up with.

Natalie Skaff’s submission was selected because of its unique and insightful way of psychologizing social media. So feast your eyes upon, and put your hands together for, her winning submission.
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“Pin” this, “Pin” that – people everywhere are #pinning (is that trending? It should be.)

I have been considering my own relationship to Pinterest, and am finding that it’s off to a slow start. The digital scrapbooking platform is undoubtedly becoming extremely popular, so maybe we just  have no natural chemistry. Immediately I noticed a trend in my terminology – “relationship,” “chemistry.” With an interest in psychology and advertising, I began to realize that the relationships we form with social media are a lot like ones we establish with other people. In each case, we each seek unique characteristics and rewards.

We commit time to nurturing our social networks
We tell our social networks about our day through updates to followers/friends/connections about how drunk we got last night, how this Android is better than that iPhone, or our “Roll Up The Rim” standings. To the point where we have established a dependent relationship with our smartphones, panicking when we see “battery drained, now shutting down handheld” or when we are stuck with a stale Twitter feed on the TTC. We respond to our social networks when they call; reaching for our devices when we hear a familiar notification tone (even if it’s not our device.) Social networks are our cherished companions, proving excellent company when your friends planned to meet at 11, but you swear they said 10:30.

Familiarity breeds attraction
The more you interact with a person, your expectation to see them strengthens pleasantly. Similarly, the amount of time we spend with our social networks only serves to bond us to them more closely. For example, consider how many of your friends declared their hatred for Twitter two years ago. Now consider how many of those same friends now seem to average 100 tweets/min. Or witness the chaos that ensues on Facebook the minute a new update or format is introduced, inducing status updates such as “Timeline is the worst, I’m going to get off this thing forever!” Upshot: they don’t. Whether it was curiosity, peer pressure or being forced-at-gunpoint that  made them start, it has become a familiar part of their life. And, like with human beings, certain foibles aren’t enough to shake the resolve of the relationship.

We are drawn to “types”
When looking to spark a relationship, we tend to talk about our “types” – certain characteristics that we find attractive. In a similar way, social media platforms have distinct qualities that are ultimately defined by their audience. Birds of a feather, in this case, flock together. Twitter seems like the Don Draper of social media: populated by those offering powerful ideas in only 140 characters. LinkedIn, while an aesthetically average platform, is nonetheless the type with the cool friends you want to get closer to.

The variety of types also means that social media also prompts a bit of “playing the field.” As with Pinterest, I felt compelled to flirt with Google+. It seemed like the new big man on campus. It had its share of interested parties. But many, like myself, created an account but never established a real relationship. For as much as it “looked good on paper,” Google+ tried too hard; typifying itself as that guy who comes to a house party with a playlist of songs from every genre, self-appoints as the official photographer, and still manages to pass out first. In my opinion, Google+ tried to be everything, and no one knew what to make of it. Not attractive.

We use social media for information, entertainment, and attention. Like any relationship, aesthetics attracts you from the beginning, but it’s the content that makes you stay. And even then, the more you invest, the more you get out. Given the number of people who are now in a committed relationship with Pinterest, it may be that my next date will lead to something long term.

Facebook has always been stalwart about presenting itself as ‘Social by Design.’ For the average Facebook user, each new innovation pointed to a greater degree of interconnectivity and self-expression. For brands, this idea was inherent in the fact that old fan pages were focused around conversations on the wall. Brands had the ability to connect with fans and play host to their genuine content.

However, this month marks a transition to the new Timeline layout for both users and brands. In our industry, this means a big shift from the strategies of the previous layout, leaving some brands and community managers wondering how they’re going to maintain such an open and easy level of communication with their fan base. Here’s why:

The “wall” as such is now a small box below the page fold with a notable real estate shift towards brand-controlled content (i.e. the massive cover photo). At first glance this shift seems to undermine the community element entirely, allowing only five post views at a time, with no comments on display.

Meanwhile, user ‘Stories’ (posts) are much more controlled by the brand page. Some brand managers may rejoice, because this means a heightened ability to feature great fan feedback. But is there something disingenuous about this move? Because as nice as it is to feature positive feedback, it also marks a certain capacity to sweep negative fan feedback under the rug and off the main page. Consumer dialogue is now weighted in the brand’s favour, but is that always a good thing? Negative feedback can often have positive outcomes, after all.

As a developer, I feel that the Timeline shift means that brand-controlled content comes first, while “social by design” now comes second. This begs the question: is putting Facebook at the centre of your digital brand experience the best approach? The reality is that many brands have taken to recreating the sociability of Facebook outside the restrictions of the medium itself. Strategically, this removes a barrier for many users who don’t want the hassle of connecting through Facebook directly and offers a couple of additional benefits. On one hand, it allays some privacy concerns that have grown considerably in the past couple of years by offering content that does not even require Facebook connect. On the other hand, it allows Facebook users to connect via the social networking website of their choice, making it easy to take advantage of growing social networks such as Google+, Pinterest, etc.

The Facebook announcement also included a line item that means that businesses can pay to greatly increase their chances of being displayed in their fans’ newsfeeds. Again, some marketers may delight in this opportunity. But consider it from a fan’s perspective. My hunch is that fans will not welcome this heightened sense of “being advertised to” and may even get annoyed and unsubscribe from fan page content in general. So is this the death rattle of brands on Facebook? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the more intensified the presence of promotions and advertising becomes, the less consumers will see content that is authentically targeted to them – and the less responsive they may become.

If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, as the Canadian science fiction author William Gibson suggests, then I’m pleased to report from the near future here in Austin, Texas at the fourth annual SXSW Accelerator.

The Accelerator Program is dedicated to the discovery and promotion of the newest and most innovative web-based products. The program is a great format to hear from many different start-ups in a short time. With two minutes for their elevator pitch and ten minutes to address questions by an expert panel of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, each start-up is competing with four others in a 3-day round-robin style competition that concludes on March 14.

Of the 56 competitors so far, the five that interest me the most, and whose success I will monitor in the future are:

Funf.org is an open source framework for mobile sensing and data processing developed at the MIT Media Lab. Already the recipient of two Google Grants, Funf helps collect and interpret the abundant rich data about individuals, their devices and their environment.

Swift.Ushahidi.com develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to share their stories. An example was residents in Japan sharing their individual home radiation levels and seeing them mapped in aggregate.

BuzzData.com from Toronto pitched their platform as the best way to share and collaborate on spreadsheets and other datasets publicly or, using their premium paid service, within a private organization.

Foreca.st is a simple way to share where you’re going instead of where you are now. Something that may be useful helping your friends find you when you’re out and about.

Brandyourself.com claims to be the first DIY platform that makes it easy for anyone to take control of their personal Google search results, optimizing positive information to the top results.

Which innovative new products do you have your eye on at this year’s SXSW Accelerator?

From Austin, Texas, see you in the future.

With 1 of every 5 online minutes being spent on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, ad agencies and marketers are scrambling to get their brands into the social party. While some of us are pushing our way in by employing the same 1-way mass tactics used in TV and print, others have swung too far the other way, blindly chasing likes and fan counts. Both approaches miss out on social media’s true potential and they most often point to 3 all-too-common mistakes in thinking.

Believing Content is Still King

Sure, great content delivered in the proper context still delivers reach and frequency in whatever mass channels we pursue, including digital. Smart online ad spends and compelling sites and videos can drive big metrics. But this carry-over mentality from the GRP days of TV falls short in social media. Generating engagement scores on content in our brands’ social pages and profiles isn’t a lofty enough goal.

Chasing Views, Likes, and Comments

A Facebook fan simply watching our video or reading a brand post is a lost opportunity. Even comments, likes, and app engagements aren’t enough since propagation from these actions is limited mostly to the ticker. They’re valuable metrics in an ongoing social strategy and a skilled Community Management team can do wonders building and growing a brand’s presence with these goals in mind, but our creative thinking shouldn’t stop there.

Most Facebook time is spent on personal profiles and news feeds—not on brand Pages as we’d like to believe. True social media success lies in an agency’s ability to get brand content into those news feeds, and this happens best when fans talk directly to their friends on our brands’ behalf. Facebook is actively educating agencies in how to think Social By Design, making a fan’s friend network an integral part of the experience. Put another way, if a fan has zero friends and the app or campaign still works then it doesn’t belong on Facebook. The real goal is to get people to include brand content in their own conversations with their friends, which leads us to mistake #3…

Thinking We’re Part of the Conversation

People chat socially with their friends. Not with brands. They may write the occasional response to a brand post or start a thread on their favorite brand’s wall but it’s still all about them. As agencies the best we can hope for is to inject ourselves at the right time to provide value and let people know we’re there. Like a parent in a big crowd of kids, we want them to know we support them but we know we’ll never really be a part of their conversation. Throw in a timely comment, add value with some relevant brand news, or respond when they ask something—be properly engaged—but understand it’s their time with their friends. It isn’t about us or our brands.

Look to campaigns like Huggies Hong Kong (sharing baby photos with friends) and 1-800-FLOWERS (telling your friends which flowers you like the best) for some recent effective examples. Getting our clients’ brands into news feeds doesn’t have to be a complex or expensive investment. But if done right it can lead to unprecedented reach and advertising success in an increasingly social online world.

In addition to his full time role as Group Director at Grip, Andrew is also a Huffington Post columnist providing digital-related advertising insights. A modified version of this post and others can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-cherwenka.

Here’s a nice little present from American Express in Australia. Every American Express cardholder was sent a “Talking Tag” which they could include with any of their gifts. Cleverly, the tag directs them to a site for an augmented reality experience customized (somewhat) just for them.

Using your webcam to scan the card, lips appear telling whether the gift’s recipient has been naughty or nice. Choosing from eight different voices ranging from a surly “scot” to “nanna,” they will get a gift message that’s sure to conjure a smile.

Interested in downloading your own set of tags? You can choose and print them out here.

Full disclosure, the interface is a little slow, the messages a little uninspired and the voice stereotypes a bit tired. But hey, it’s Christmas.

There seems to be a great divide between the real world of retail and the corresponding world of e-commerce. In the real world, developing relationships and return customers is a huge focus. Online, the focus is to get new visitors into contact with popular products, without consideration to who might be landing on the website, and where they’ve been before. Is it a lack of sociological awareness? Or a fear of new and enabling technologies and their cost? Either way, there’s a lot of room for small businesses to bring personal and relevant information to each of their visitors.

In retail, marketing for repeat business is more cost effective than generating first time buyers. Recognizing that word-of-mouth is always the most effective advertising, retailers work hard to develop customer loyalty through rewards programs, CRM, and creating positive shopping experience. So much so, that repeat customers can expect a degree of personalization at the shops they frequent. When I buy my morning coffee, I’m pleased when I’m presented with my regular order without having to ask. When I go to my favourite clothing store, It’s nice when the sales clerk greats me by name, and presents me with new stock I might be interested in.

I often note how customers are treated at the establishments I visit for the first time. Are the products merchandized in an intuitive, intriguing way? Is the staff approachable, friendly and respectful of the needs of those in their domain? In other words, is the retail environment conscious of individual needs? When I tell my friends where I shop, it’s usually more about the shopping experience, than it is about what I actually bought. Is it such a leap to imagine that the online experience of a retail business should mirror that same attention to detail?

Today’s technology for generating interactive online content has come a long way since the first business risked creating an online presence. While there are still hurdles getting the perfect creative ideas online, the prevailing question is no longer “is this possible?” but “how difficult and expensive will this be to implement?” Yet for all the technology available, there are still some e-commerce and retail sites that err more on the site of creative content than productive functionality – in some cases, leaving personalization entirely in the realm of email communication. Microsite development has become even less personalized because it often comes at the expense of the main site.

For some, the main concerns seem to focus on whether their site is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), and whether they have analytics tools to track the effectiveness of their sites. But what are they doing with all that information? How is that information being fed back into the website to develop a relationship and generate a more personal experience. Sites have the potential to be Consumer Optimized, but how many sites actually are?

Technology today allows marketers to not only collect data about their users, but to sort and filter this information to personalize what they offer back to their visitors. Developers have access to a suite of tools that can bring personalization (and relevant experience) to a new level. Though perhaps not the most efficient organic storage tool, XML has served a very important role in advancing website capabilities: most popular are the various RSS and news feeds that websites offer for sharing information with similar sites. Even newer are the organic storage dbs such as Mongo, Redis and Cassandra, these non-SQL storage solutions approach data storage far differently than a relational database, offering developers new and better tools to bring specific, high-quality content to users faster. Rather than forcing data into a system that is not optimized for it, developers have access to much more effective data storage and sharing tools than ever before.

Another major innovation is the ability to add natural language searching to websites. A number of projects, both enterprise and open source have sprung up to offer search engine indexing to everyone. While not technically databases, these tools offer the means to sort through and retrieve from huge amounts of relevant information very quickly, factoring in geographic location, incorrect spellings, multiple languages, gender biases, previous searches, content filters, etc.

Using these new technologies to specifically target consumer needs is necessary to take a website from being a high tech brochure to an engaging and satisfying experience.  Consider the power of intelligently altering content for consumers who tend to look for service and support information. Or offering user reviews and ratings to those who do their research. Consider your best, most recent experience with a retail marketer. Do any of those personalized details feel superfluous?

There is risk involved. New ideas often cost more than the stuff everyone else is doing already, and they don’t always visibly help the bottom line. It also takes time to create all that extra content. There is also consumer adjustment to factor in. But some industries have already bought into the powerful world of adaptive site development. Some online travel booking systems offer alternative itineraries that save their consumers money or factor in rewards points. Starbucks that allows me to pay for my coffee from my phone, and show me my rewards as soon as I earn them.  There are fewer and fewer reasons why online companies serve up the same thing to everyone.

When I visit your website, I would love to find that you took notice of what I looked at last time, and maybe serve up less content i’m not likely to be interested in, and more content that I am.

A few years ago, augmented reality (AR) experienced a brief but gimmicky insurgence. Every brand looking to innovate their communications wanted to integrate AR into everything from website features to direct mailing pieces. The trouble was, no one had a distinct vision for how they could evolve the magic of AR beyond the awkward task of printing out a code and manoevering it in front of a webcam.

Recently, the applications of AR have diversified and refined to the point where it has coupled charm and surprise with practical utility. Yelp and Google use it in the context of mobile wayfinding. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has been developing wearable augmented reality to help guide new workers through complex tasks.

To that end, I’d like to present a couple recent examples of ways some intriguing brands have been revisiting augmented reality as a means of capturing and elevating their consumer experience.

Tesco AR retail enhancement

Tesco, the U.K. supermarket megalith, has been experimenting with augmented reality both online and in-store. In-store, webcams will allow consumers to generate 3D images of products, and explore their specifications prior to purchase (with emphasis on bulky items, like Tesco’s line of consumer electronic products.) Online, Tesco shoppers will also be able to generate models of products, fostering a slightly more “tangible” interactive experience to abet purchase intent. This is not the first example of a British store using augmented reality, but it is a notable example of giving consumers a chance to thoroughly investigate what Tesco offers. Packaged good and retail brands, take note.

Starbucks augmented reality Xmas Cups
The promise of AR on your mobile device has yet to be fully realized for a number of reasons: (1) low consumer awareness; (2) the small learning curve to understand how it works; (3) the  cost to develop, and (4) requirement to have a mobile app installed on your smartphone device. And those reasons are just to name a few. However, leading edge mobile marketing adopter Starbucks will be releasing a new mobile app to activate unique AR experiences triggered by their famous red Xmas cups. The idea is to find, activate and share all 5 special Christmas characters that appear randomly on the red cups. The new app will also showcase special offers and provide the opportunity for eGifting. Starbucks already has a loyal following and entrenched user base with Starbucks apps on their mobile device which will hopefully bring the masses into the wonderful world of augmented reality.

National Geographic AR Installation
National Geographic created an augmented reality installation to tour shopping centres and promote their TV specialty channel. The AR installation enables passersby to engage and interact with the type of content they would find on the National Geographic channel, from dolphins and dinosaurs to leopards and astronauts. Unlike a personal AR experience that requires the user to download an app to their smartphone,  an AR installation works by placing a huge digital screen and high-powered camera in front of an augmented reality marker that is affixed to the ground. As people step onto the marker, the content is triggered to play on the big screen in front of them and enables them to virtually interact with the content they are seeing.

With so many new avenues of thinking about augmented reality, we are slowly learning to liberate this magic little technology from the bonds of its printed codes.

The question is whether advertisers and marketers will be willing to adopt and push the envelope even further.