Technology

Photo marketing is a valuable tool for a variety of reasons. It’s an incentive to get consumers to interact with your brand, it captures data, it serves as a long-lasting memento and generally drives eyeballs to your website during the photo retrieval process. But what’s next on the horizon for photo marketing? Once that photo lands in the inbox or on the Facebook page, how can event marketers get the photo activation past the point of distribution? EM checked in with the experts to find out how they’re using photo marketing to inspire consumers to take action.

You might say it takes a village to pull off an event as big as the reveal of the newest Boeing airplane, the 747-8 Intercontinental, which also happens to be the largest commercial aircraft built in the U.S. and the longest passenger aircraft in the world. At least that’s how David Okrent, brand manager for the new plane, puts it.

The April 18 press reveal in New York City for the 2012 Beetle captured the essence of the newly redesigned car via dramatic video projections that brought to life the vehicle’s Super Bowl ad and created an immersive experience for the 260 industry writers and lifestyle media in attendance.

To connect with tech-savvy trendsetters at the South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music Festival in Austin, Texas, March 11-20, job board Monster.com created on- and off-line experiences promoting its latest job searching capabilities. In addition to a presence on sxsw.com, the brand interacted with attendees at its Hiring Hub, a booth on the event’s trade-show floor. It also sponsored networking events and teamed up with social sites like Gowalla, the location-based check-in provider for the show this year.

Image enhancement technologies like holograms and 3D have been building in popularity over the past few years, and though neither is new, event marketers have been finding clever new ways to leverage them. More interestingly, marketers have been discovering that each special effect has a strategic strength that makes it more effective in moving the needle depending on the objective of the event. Here, a closer look at each technology and how brands like Honda and Ralph Lauren leveraged them for distinctly different purposes.

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