Having caught you up on all things foursquare, you’ve now got a pretty good handle on how marketers are handling the rise of this location-based social network. Of course, foursquare’s not the only game in town. While the world figures out what to make of Facebook Places, Gowalla continues to be the best LBS alternative [...]

With Facebook recently unveiling their own location-based service, the press has itself in a tizzy trying to wrap its head around the impending arrival of the year of location. Y’know, the one we called out back in March. But no worries, we’re glad you’re all coming around. In fact, we’re going to spend the next [...]

Delighting consumers. Hidden surprises. We’ve mentioned them once or twenty times here on the Awesome Blog. But, underlying this trend was the idea that brands touting “big happiness” would struggle to deliver upon that promise in a period of great uncertainty and skepticism. When we introduced the trend, we felt that brands would best succeed [...]

We hate to say we told you so, but… wait a minute, we LOVE telling you we told you so! In our Smartshot webinar on Radical Demography, we told you about four dramatic demographic shifts that need to be in marketers’ peripheral vision, including “DINK” (dual income, no kids) households and multigenerational households. Well, guess [...]

Just as we were making the argument that live streaming video offers compelling opportunities for brands (but remains largely overlooked), the company behind Mafia Wars went ahead and notched 2 million live views for a recent live campaign (setting a Ustream record in the process). And what was this cinematic masterpiece that riveted an audience [...]

Many of our conversations about Immersive Sensory Experiences have focused on physical experiences: 3D projections, gesture-response technologies, and other interactive tactics that completely indulge the senses. But, there’s no reason to think these principles are restricted to the offline world. While touch, smell, and taste are (hopefully) inaccessible online, clever digital marketers can still take [...]

You can’t just go around throwing plasma bolts in the middle of a busy Hollywood intersection – you’ll poke somebody’s eye out! Unless it’s just an interactive window display from InWindow Outdoor. In yet another example of the movie industry’s willingness to embrace Immersive Sensory Experiences, the above display is part of an OOH campaign [...]

Well lookee here. Fresh off our conversations about innovative display ads and great World Cup activations, we’ve got an example that brings the two together (and spikes ‘em with a bit of augmented reality and casual gaming to boot!). The video above shows a display ad from AT&T, in which users try to head a [...]

We admit it, Samsung. We’re impressed. A couple of weeks ago, we sang your praises for your excellent use of projection, and gave you props for supplementing your event marketing with foursquare. But you couldn’t stop there, could you? You knew we were a sucker for those Youtube takeovers, which always end up being immersive [...]

Most adults like to think that they’ve outgrown the petty motivators from their childhoods: the gold star, the cub scout/girl scout badge, the varsity jacket. But, judging by the way most adults have responded to services like foursquare and Farmville, it’s clear that things haven’t really changed all that much. And, as marketers watch these [...]