Technology

When it comes to generating social media activity through events, the sweet spot lies in convincing attendees that your brand’s content and assets are witty, informative or just plain weird enough to merit a comment, tweet or wall post. That’s why smart marketers are integrating social media kiosks and “post it” incentives right into their activations and events as a matter of course. Yahoo! did it with its partner Flickr at the Olympics in January. ESPN made it extra-fun with the Snowcam promo for the Winter X Games.

Hybrid events may be a new concept but they are already getting an upgrade as marketers mix the timeliness of one-off microsites with the stickiness of social media to form a one-stop branded engagement “platform” that’s always on, always evolving and never out of touch.

In our new Then and Now series, EM revisits old event marketing trends to find out where they’ve gone since we first reported on them. Are they old hats and has-beens? Or is that past up-and-comer a future best practice that’s now an industry standard? In this installment, we re-examine hologram technology, which we last reported on in October 2006.

Everybody’s talking 3D these days, and no image is more three dimensional than a hologram, right? Maybe not.

Remember the extreme Diet Coke and Mentos experiments from 2007 in which two lab-coated science guys drop Mentos mints into two-liter bottles of Diet Coke? The video depicting the resulting geysers spewing across their backyard has been viewed no less than 10 million times on YouTube and became a cultural phenomenon as it spread digitally around the globe.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you haven’t. This is especially true in the world of mobile apps—those downloads you can drop on your Smartphone that do just about everything from turn off the lights in your kitchen from halfway around the world to track down the name of a favorite song just by holding the phone to the music. Just as limitless are the ways event marketers can use live experiences to drive downloads, boost engagement and leverage the service-based nature of apps to keep your brand top of mind and consumers engaged long after the event is over.