When marketing and technology meet

My company Bright Angles Consulting publishes a newsletter every Friday. In this newsletter, we encapsulate curated news clips from the world of tech. Our readers, most of whom are from the marketing fraternity, tell us that they find our newsletter very useful as they can just scan through our newsletter every week to keep themselves abreast of tech news. While curating content for our newsletter today, I came across two very interesting pieces of news:

News #1 : American media Behemoth, Tribune has recently launched a smartphone app that reads aloud personalized playlist of news articles. The app called Newsbeat uses text to speech technology and human voiceover to produce a catalogue of  7000 news articles about everything newsworthy. While the app is free, the content is not advertisement free.

News #2 : A Miami based company, Admobilze has created a technology that finally makes outdoor advertising measurable. The technology called AdBeacon can count the number of people who were exposed to a particular billboard by taking photos of the surrounding every 2 seconds. The photos are fed back into the server where a software tracks the gazes of the passersby. Billboard suppliers can now charge the advertisers on a 'pay per face' basis.

I think here are two great examples which demonstrate the growing symbiotic relationship between marketing and technology. The line between the two functions are fading fast. Companies which are adept at both, marketing and technology, will be the ones most equipped to take on the brave new world. From consumer research to media, the magic today lies in the zone where marketing meets technology.