The digital world is an intriguing place filled with information and entertainment that can keep a person busy for hours and hours on end, but it certainly does not carry the circumstance that a physical task brings. Likewise, the world contains an endless supply of solid entertainment and educational opportunities, but it has not the productivity and boundless nature of the digital realm.
When planning a marketting push, it is not easy to decide whether a physical or digital push is the most compimentary to your brand’s message, unless you marry the two together. With the many tactile options available for digital interaction, the real world can quite easily control the digital. Likewise, one can gather the information necessary from the internet or social media outlets and use that information in effecting their digital message. Finally, the walls between these two worlds are thinning by the day with such technology as augmented reality or user dependant interaction. Following the take off of social media and mobile devices, almost every aspect of our lives are now, in some small way, related to what is happening up in the cloud.
The first of the marriages between digital and physical designs would have to be the physical leading to the digital. Though apps and programs are fantastic, as well as useful most of the time, they are nothing without a system to run them. The iPad, Android tablets, and the newly immerging Windows Surface are all great systems of delivery, but can also be augmented to serve specific purposes. For example, an iPad set into a tabletop display with a forward facing camera can serve as an attractive and easy-to-use guestbook. A few of any type of tablets setting around a trade show booth, geared with branded programs and games, can be a delightful use of time while waiting for a company representative. Likewise, a game focusing on motion control (such as the Kinect or Wii) with a personally branded game can provide a great distraction from the intensive education most participants are subject too.
