When Print Becomes Video

Remember a few years ago when business card CD-ROMs were all the rage? Then folks starting handing out flash drives with video presentations embedded on them. Today companies upload their videos to YouTube and send you a link.

But as Bob Dylan sang, ‘The times they are a changin...’ and today we want to share one of those changes with you.

In our last post, Rob Hudak shared his early Augmented Realty (AR) experiments with you. If you missed that, you can see the video here.

Currently, most folks are playing around with that kind of 3-D augmented reality. That’s fine if you have a product to sell or you just want to do something cool that may ‘go viral’ in the blogosphere or on Twitter. But what if you’re in the service business or a tourism destination or maybe an ad agency looking to use AR as a true marketing tool? Is there a relevant application of the technology that you can use? Actually there is.

Not a lot of companies are focusing on this, but we think they should – using AR technology to turn 2-D printed pieces into full motion video streams. Think business card 2.0.

Think about the possibilities. No more shipping boxes of DVDs to your next trade show, just hand folks your business card and presto, they have your product demo video in the palm of their hands.

Never again be forgotten by folks you’ve met at a networking event. Now your business card can contain a personal video from you.

And no more is direct mail limited to static words and images. Hold the piece up to a webcam and presto, you have delivered a 2-minute infomercial complete with a one-click response mechanism.

These are but a few examples. We don’t think it will be long before newspaper and magazine publishers exploit the technology to give their mediums a new advertising dynamic. We can see email campaigns, mobile campaigns and who knows what else campaigns that will leverage this technology to bring new information, formats and applications to consumers everywhere.

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