Among the various of sites, consultants, and publications that address new media from a marketing perspective, IPG’s Emerging Media Lab’s “show and tell” approach stood out to me as as an effective and results-driven balance between breadth and depth of information. As Josh Lovinson addresses in a recent Future of Media blog post, “emerging media” is a troublesome term whose definition is largely in the eye of the beholder. The prominence of dualities like new/old, mainstream/niche, and technology/behavior further muddy the water, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field make forming an objective definition a goose chase. Luckily, I don’t think a concrete definition is what marketers want or need: a subjective yet sound distillation of pertinent information is much more valuable. Though I was initially uncertain of the filters that IPG uses in this distillation process, the tour, review of their publications, and a discussion of their philosophy has convinced me that IPG’s “brick and mortar” and online content effectively serve marketers with a streamlined summary of what’s happening, what’s possible, and best practices in regard to emerging media.
I was particularly intrigued by the lab’s usage of immersion as an educational tool. Given “what I want where I want it” media consumption trends, tethering specific technologies or media to physical spaces seemed counterintuitive. However, by addressing this issue early on and explaining that some features are meant to show things that won’t catch on (eg. digital refrigerator) or aren’t mainstream yet (eg. location-based mobile video streaming), the floor plan instead serves as an important reminder to consider the way behavior, technologies, and surroundings interact and impact our media usage patterns. Immersion, then, is not about being in a dorm room or kitchen, but about understanding the lifestyles of its inhabitants and how that relates to their media, and therefor marketing, consumption.
The Social Media portion of IPG’s presentation was an interesting and crucial complement to the hands-on lab experience. I want to thank Raquel for taking the time and energy to speak with us: the task of addressing such a vast topic without knowledge of our backgrounds or goals is doubtlessly daunting. Different industries, clients, and individual project managers should approach the social media space differently, making a general overview all the more challenging. Facilitating immersion in an online environment is also a very different proposition than doing so in a dorm room or kitchen, but if we consider it using my definition of immersion as an understanding of a lifestyle, social media immersion is simply an extension of the empowerment that “what I want where I want it” consumers are experiencing. Our discussion of prosumers is at the core of this additional user empowerment that stems from the ability to produce and distribute content, but it seemed slightly isolated. Of course, as a social media student and geek, I am partial, but I thought that this segment could be strengthened by demonstrations at other stations. Showing how a user can create and publish content using the surrounding technologies takes the audience through the evolution of marketing practices we’re seeing today: advertisers used to “push” content on people, now people choose to “pull” desired content in, and when it comes to the pushers and pullers we just jumbled everything all up.
