1. Clouds and Crowds (2009 Trends)

OK, I know this has been a favourite subject of mine for a while but…

• The cloud is…distributing, accessing and publishing everywhere and sharing with everyone – including and especially yourself on all your devices

• Your machine does very little, it contacts the net and displays information/applications in the most appropriate fashion to the device at hand.

• It is WiFi enabled interactivity broken out into the real world

• Mobile to be dominant platform for connecting to net worldwide (already is in Japan)

• Even voice calls powered by internet & SMS/Texts become IM clients

• More access means more people sharing information, entertainment and functionality

• Stronger connections between people than with brands. Brands must try to facilitate these connections. Show don’t tell.

• Bluring between the product, social element, interactive film, site, app etc.

• The Crowd is…people shaping products/services and trialing them digitally – active engagement & opensource. People using technology to share and take control.

Next…2 Further Convergence

Back to…2009 Interactive Trends

Clouds, Crowds and Brand Reality Creative – distributed creativity and information, collaborative tools and ideas.

This is a whitepaper on near, medium and long term interactive creative and strategy that I wrote at the end of the summer in response to a “what should we be doing/thinking next?” question from several clients. It covers my belief that the semantic web leads to the need for a new way of approaching creative and content challenges – that the old “objective correlative” way of advertising and marketing has to evolve to a “Brand Reality Creative” approach which will hopefully be a step beyond “Brand Utility”. The paper can be downloaded here or found on my website  (http://www.davidjcarr.com/clouds_crowds_whitepaper.pdf) and I will post a blog-friendly version shortly.

In fact it starts here…