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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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In the season finale of the Fox TV series Touch, savant Jake grabs a smartphone (which product placement clearly shows us is an AT&T Windows phone) and launches Air Graffiti, an AT&T service which, according to the website, “allows users to place videos, photos and songs “in the air” at a physical location.” He shoots an image that his father will recognize. After he vanishes,…

It had only been a few weeks since my last visit to Sun Valley Mall in Concord, California, but during our trek this weekend, we found that the mall had added two interactive installations that foretell part of the future of advertising.

On entering the mall, we saw a Fox-sponsored “Stop. Scan. Shop.” display driven by both QR codes and proprietary Fox images.…

The QR ProjectI had the privilege last week of attending the biennial of the Union for Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C.. While there, I met David Gerber, a rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. For his graduate project, Gerber has launched The QR Project, an effort to bring meaningful content to smartphones.

We chatted outside the plenary hall…

A Business Insider post last week took QR codes to task, arguing they “can be confusing and can waste time. And as mobile technology progresses, they probably aren’t even necessary.”

The post, by former Forbes writer Dan Frommer, listed a variety of issues with QR codes to support the argument that communicators and marketers shouldn’t waste their time with them. Not a single one of those…

Adding the ability to act to a billboardA billboard is a poor channel for inspiring action. When you’re walking down the street and see a billboard, even if the message creates desire to buy the product it’s advertising, actually making the purchase has to wait until later when you may well have forgotten ever seeing the billboard in the first place.

What’s missing from a billboard—and a lot of other…

imageI get pushback every time I blog or talk about QR codes. SMS—text messaging—makes far more sense, I’m told. Everyone has the ability to send and get a text but getting a QR scanner is a hassle. Until smartphones come equipped with them, QR codes will remain a curiosity and won’t gain anywhere near the traction of texting.

Nonsense, says I.

It’s true that you have to find,…

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