Body Language

I knew gestures were important in talking face-to-face, and even that smiling was important on the phone, because people can always tell. What I didn't know, however, was that gestures might be just as important in the world of digital marketing as they are in actual person-to-person conversation.

I just read an article on AdAge that described this new phenomenon. In the world of digital marketing on everything that is now acquiring an "i(insert word here)," human gestures and the symbolic conversation between a product and its user is now becoming just as important as the product itself. Since everything is becoming touch-- Nintendo Wii, touch-screen phones, even the apps available on the iPhone and iPod Touch-- the typical mouse-click won't work for your product anymore. Instead you need to be real, you need to be connected, and most of all, you need to be up on the times in every sense.

This new trend in digital marketing is not only yet another progression that society has made in the world of advertising (as a small digression, it astounds me how far advertising has come in the last century), but it also opens up an amazing opportunity for creativity and inventiveness. I know I've said this before, but the creation of innovative advertising that will go through traditional mediums is much harder now than is breaking into the new sphere of the "i____" and the Internet. It's a new time and a new world, with something new every day that will allow you to connect to your friend who lives in Hong Kong, or will allow you to play a game with people you don't know and probably will never meet outside of it. Though there is a flip side to all this (see my previous blog entry on the digitalization of life), we're lucky to be living in a time in which so much is new, so much that we have not yet even scratched the surface of in terms of branding, creativity, and invention, and so much that it is now possible to do.

Advertising is no longer shout-in-your-face. Instead, it has become subtle, with a focus more on branding than on selling, because branding is what's going to get people to become loyal to your product. It's about relationship building on an individual level, talking to the users of your products and finding out what they like, what they don't like, why they use you, and even why they don't use you. Social media has become more social than ever, and a person's phone is now the embodiment of his or her life (especially in my generation). Now, it seems, is the time to break out of the box if you've been in it before, to try something totally outrageous for your product and just see what happens, because no one has done it before.

I mean, if I'm seeing twelve-year-old girls with Blackberrys walking on the street in South Florida, that's definitely saying something, right?