Day 1 of 21

I am now 21 years old, as of yesterday night. When did that happen?

Last week, I took a trip to Chicago with UF's AD Society. We went to Leo Burnett's Mosaic Career Fair, got inspired by Leo's EVP of Human Resources and Global Innovation Manager (a woman of maybe 30 years who went to both Harvard undergrad and Harvard Business School for her MBA, worked in Italy for four years just because she felt like it, and became Leo Burnett's regional manager for all countries in the general vicinity of Italy. After coming back to the United States, she got her MBA, worked in investment banking for a while, and then became Leo's manager of Global Innovation for the entire world, making us all feel completely underaccomplished), met lots of employers for internships, and learned about the future of advertising.

It's so fascinating. Companies now are not only doing traditional media forms of advertising- television, radio, magazine/print, etc- but are expanding into a whole new realm of interactivity. On the website for the Sony Bravia (yes, I know I'm obsessed), there's a section of the website where you can click to literally change the color of a building in Tokyo for a certain amount of time. The site attracts lots of consumers because of its novelty. Leo Burnett did an ad campagin for McDonald's breakfasts in which instead of having the golden arches on a pole for everyone to see, they put an egg that opened and closed depending on the time of day. An open egg signified breakfast time, whereas a closed egg signified that it was past breakfast.

Digitas did a digital campaign (who knew, with a name like that) for KitchenAid where they redesigned the website from a vertical, static format to a horizontal, flash one. The products flashed across the screen, and upon clicking on one of them, the consumer was directed to a page where hotspots for the products had special links that one could click on to learn more about that aspect of the product.

The future of advertising is completely nontraditional. Now, it takes more than creativity to reach consumers because of their insensitivity to traditional forms due to all the clutter. It takes adaptability. It takes knowing that new form of technology that may not even be available to the general public yet. It takes a completely out-of-the-box theory of perception.

I won't let you go so long without hearing from me again.