Everything in its place
Exploring the innovative world of digital placemaking — and its implications for marketing and advertising.
From innovative museum exhibitions to Pokemon Go, digital placemaking has come to the forefront of technology — even if many people aren’t aware that this is what they’re looking at. According to Calvium, leading company in digital placemaking, the concept can be defined as such:
Digital Placemaking (Noun);
The augmentation of physical places with location-specific digital services, products or experiences to create more meaningful destinations for all.
Calvium describes the technology, and the campaigns that arise from it, as a sort of ‘art of reality’, blending the physical space and digital world together. Often these projects are art installations, or tourism tools — such as Naho Matsuda’s Every Thing Every Time. This installation consists of a custom-built split flap display board bearing poetry. The words displayed are not ‘written’ by a person, generated at random from data gathered from Newcastle’s inhabitants. ‘As the installation interacts with data collated from sensors at the city’s Urban Observatory and other buildings in the city centre, the data is transformed into words, creating ‘impractical poetry’’
These kinds of projects have some interesting applications in the advertising and marketing industries — we have already seen through the last few years attempts to make OOH advertising more digital compatible, as explored in our previous articles.
We have seen some brands embrace this sort of technology in recent years — the most obvious being augmented reality games like Pokemon GO, which took the world by storm with its ability to place beloved Pokemon characters in the physical world. It quickly became the most popular game of the year on its release, served to rejuvenate interest in the Pokemon brand as a whole, and prompted a series of similar AR games, such as Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
While these games had the consequence of advertising their wider brands, utilising this kind of technology for pure advertising has largely been confined to tourism boards and events, such as the National Museum of Singapore’s experimental new museum guide, that offers location-specific historical knowledge to visitors.
A little closer to home, however, is the Cardiff Bay ‘Digital Town Crier’. This project was a prototype, that saw visitors to Cardiff Bay interact with a that senses their presence and quietly announces special offers nearby — advertising everything from local companies to huge brand offers, and simple directions around town. Similar projects have already been put in place for companies such as Transport for London, which operates a mobile wayfinding application to enable people with less visible impairments to navigate railway stations independently and with confidence.
These sorts of projects combine the convenience and intelligence of digital advertising, with the physical practicalities of OOH advertising, and therefore it seems only a matter of time before they are utilised by larger brands on a much wider scale. Many are already tapping in to the advertising potential of advergames, so why not an AR advergame that not only lets you collect fun creatures around town, but alerts you when one of these creatures has an exclusive offer code, and can point you in the direction of the nearest store?
While Calvium and many companies like them have their sights set largely on art and public access projects, and on ‘how tech can be harnessed to deepen people’s connection with the public realm and, in turn, with each other’, as Calvium Digital Innovation Programme Director, Jo Morrison puts it, it seems the next logical step for them to be used to deepen people’s connection to brands too.
