Imagine all the hype, excitement, and anticipation associated with the Superbowl, World Series, and NBA National Championship combined and make it into a month-long soccer tournament every 4 years. That is pedestal that the World Cup rests on in Europe, which nearly reaches national holiday status in most European countries. Now add a 3D broadcast, and you have a phenomenon.
Sony just announced its “fake 3D” ad campaign for the 2010 World Cup to truly show the audience what they are missing without upgrading to Sony’s new 3D TV, conveniently on sale in the U.K. the day before the first match.
The campaign will show the ads as they appear using 3D broadcasting without the needed technology, creating a grainy, blurry image that can only be corrected if the viewer purchases the TV.
This is, in my opinion, a stroke of marketing genius. Sony has made a name for itself with its 3D movies, such as Alice in Wonderland; however, because 3D DVDs are still a bit of a nuance, Sony could not solely rely on these to create a need for their new 3D TVs.
Instead, Sony has created a market for its product, not unlike Edison did for his radical invention of the light bulb. Ideally, Sony hopes this campaign/product duo will solidify them as the forerunner in 3D technology and TV sets.
Although this campaign will not run in the United States, the mainstream use of 3D technology in advertising no longer seems to be looming in the distant future.
Up until this point, watches have served a few key purposes. Of course, the importance of telling the wearer of one what time it is has been key to their success over the years, however, we can’t forget innovations that helped pushed them into new and better applications, extending their reach and value beyond the mere aspect of showing you the hour/minutes of the day.
First came the watch that integrated the calculator on keypad, arming the watch with the power of a Texas Instruments super-calculator. At 12:45pm someone asked you to find out the square root of the number 765 you say? Before this innovation hit, you just weren’t in a position to do that. Then came the ever-successful remote control watch. This came in especially handy in high school when TVs were installed in the classroom and students were able to surreptitiously turn on and off the TV during class, much to the surprise and bewilderment of many teachers and substitutes. Lastly on the innovation front for watches was the indiglo light which took a mere backlit display to a whole new level, allowing the wearer to not only see the time at night, but also utilize the watch as a flashlight in a number of instances.
Well, it appears the watch has done it again and with a level of design-style.
Enter, the Happy Hour Watch.
If you like to know the time, but also regularly find yourself in situation where beverages are served that require a bottle opener, well borrowing and modifying a line from an unnamed beer manufacturer, “This watch is for you!” With digital and analog read outs, a solid/large face design and a sharp looking layout, as a watch guy myself, I’m pretty impressed. When you think about what the watches above looked like back in the day, the Happy Hour Watch is on its way to revolutionizing the industry. Well perhaps not revolutionizing, but having fun and delivering with some style, the makers are on the right path with that.
As emerging markets work to attain the middle class standard of living, it would take 5-6 planet Earths to support them (if they do it the way developed countries have done it).
…scary, huh? Even with recent reports that question the authenticity of global warming data from the mainstream scientific community, we know that the resources we depend on to do business and maintain our standard of living are becoming more scarce, and therefore, more expensive.
“An impeded stream is the one that sings” – Wendell Berry
Gil Friend’s webinar on innovation, the first session in the Sustainability Boot Camp series, was exciting and inspiring as he described the robust opportunities for product and process innovation by adding the constraint of “sustainability” to design. Design, he defined, is the process of innovating in the face of constraints, and adding sustainability as a constraint isn’t about being altruistic, it’s about accounting for the real costs of doing business (accounting for the cost of transportation, waste, supplier resources, etc.).
Traditionally, innovation has been about optimizing either one or two of the attributes of (1) speed, (2) cost and (3) quality of products, services and processes. Conventional thinking has always claimed that we make trade-offs among these three attributes and that it’s impossible to optimize all three at the same time; however, sustainability challenges us to do just that.
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