Top 10 Tech Trends for 2010

Here's the top 10 tech trends coming from South by Southwest's conference taken from Time.com. 2010 is well underway and tech trends are still coming up. Below is the list:

1. Location based social networking sites
2. Building platforms not websites
3. Social gaming
4. Augmented reality
5. Living in the cloud
6. Birth of the backchannel
7. Frictionless payments
8. Social objects
9. Ipad
10. A richer web

Here's a link to the full article.

Most of these would probably not a make it to the local market here in the Philippines but a few of these are slowly being used.

- A lot of people with smart phone's are using FourSquare already. I've personally registered for the service but I guess you need to have a smart phone like an Iphone or Blackberry to fully utilize this network I don't have one and . As such, unless you are a high end brand, this social network may not be a good platform for online marketing just yet.

- Facebook has successfully built itself as a web platform where you have the ability to connect to other sites and even to other gadgets such as your mobile phone. Being the first mover other IPs have tried to follow them (Google Wave/Buzz and Yahoo) but with limited success. Facebook is still the site of choice and this would be key to their longevity. Friendster and MySpace has since been losing a lot of ground to Facebook and FB just seems to be covering all the bases as they grow. Some web personalities locally have predicted that FB will probably just stay for 2 -3 years but as they become a platform of choice I doubt this will prove true.

- As social gaming continues to grow it simply means that that more and more people will be spending time on the social networking sites. This will just strengthen the position of social networks.

- Augmented reality technology is something local developers are probably rushing to master since this will give them more flexibility and creativity for web executions. I'm personally excited to see the first use of this technology for marketing programs here in the Philippines. Hopefully our developers can be the first to master this.

- The backchannel is now being used extensively by ABS-CBN especially during their coverage on the elections. This has proven to be very successful since during the VP debates their hashtag #harapan became one of the trending topics worldwide. This actually makes me think that we Pinoy's are one of the biggest users of Twitter.

As for the others on the list I am not quite sure if they will make an impact here. For those linked with e-commerce, I think due to the number of fraud coming from the Philippines we will probably be blocked. Infrastructure would also be an issue.

Death of the Advertising Agency?

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

I've been working in the digital marketing field for just over a year now and I've seen how the situation has changed in this short span of time. It has become very obvious that agencies who do not transform themselves to have digital capabilities will probably be left behind. Above the line is still the best way to generate a lot of buzz but as the strength and the reach of internet grows, agencies who haven't adopted would find themselves out of business. The digital realm especially with the growth of the social networks is becoming the best medium to communicate with their target audience. Agencies who do not have the ability to do digital marketing would be at a loss when their clients start asking for digital campaigns and as such will give opportunities for agencies like mine (Rogue Digital) to get a piece of their client's marketing budget.

We have pitched with a traditional agency and it was the digital marketing which hooked the client. In some cases client ignored the whole agency presentation and just talked about the digital executions offered. In the past 2 months we have been doing a pitch at least twice a month compared to just about 3 last year. The shift is now more apparent and the time to seize these opportunities has arrived.

Case Study Video: Viral Campaign from Heineken

Intro to the book "Different" by Youngme Moon (by Xplane)

I haven't read the book but I love videos made by Xplane. I now plan to read the book because of this video. I do hope that this is already available here in the Philippines.

Meet the Agency of the Future

Article by Jodi Harris

 ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:
- The current agency structure hasn't evolved at pace with media innovations
- The interactive agency model disincentivizes greatness and fails to penalize mediocrity
- Think about how your property can serve as a conduit for deeper interactions between brands and consumers
- If marketers want to radically impact change in the marketing ecosystem, it starts with how you allocate dollars

View the full article here.

The Social Media Revolution