The Cannes Lions International Advertising festival is upon us. Once again, agencies, advertisers and tech companies are vying to out-geek each other, to prove they’re on top of the latest digital trends.
Delegates are welcomed to the Palais des Festivals by a giant “touchwall” – a 12-foot by five-foot screen by WPP unit Schematic, showing seminars, 3D maps and other interactive goodies.
SapientNitro – the digital agency which caused a stir last year by buying a traditional agency and scooping several awards for its “best job in the world” campaign for Tourism Queensland – has unveiled what it claims (and who could say otherwise) is the world’s first smile-activated ice-cream van. The van dishes out Unilever treats from Ben & Jerry’s and Wall’s to passers-by in return for a photo of a big grin, which is (inevitably) uploaded to Facebook.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is crowing about its first advertiser to use Kinect, the motion-sensing camera for Xbox 360 that was unveiled at E3 last week.
The Chevrolet Volt, an electric car to be released by GM in the US later this year, is the first branded vehicle to be included in Kinect Joyride, one of the launch games for Kinect.
Microsoft is touting this as a “four-screen” advertising experience – that’s TV, online, mobile and Surface, its touchscreen computing platform.
Chevrolet says it’s a virtual test drive that “allows us to bring the excitement of the showroom to the living rooms of our customers”. Equally breathless, Mark Kroese, general manager for advertising at Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, says it’s a “a lean-forward, fully immersive experience”. “We have found through research when you put the user in control, it has an amazing effect on brand engagement, memorability and favourability,” he says.
Put another way, it’s in-game product placement, backed with a 30-second TV ad and microsite added into the Xbox Live dashboard (the console’s “home screen”).
But press-release hyberbole aside, it’s an interesting indication of where Microsoft could take Kinect and the Xbox, with photography, facial recognition and cross-platform targeting (thanks to the pervasive Windows Live ID) all useful tricks up Microsoft’s sleeve. Joyride will already take pictures of players as they wave manically in front of the screen, then offer to share them on Twitter or Facebook, including the Volt branding.
With 25m users of the Xbox Live online services – only 60 per cent of whom are the classic gamer demographic of 18-34-year-old men – Kinect could help Microsoft give Google TV or Apple TV a run for their money in connected-TV advertising platforms.
