Personal touch

We’ve spent a lot of ink in our recent print editions and a fair number of bytes for our electronic coverage on the latest technological innovations being used by marketers to reach their audiences. And why not? The campaigns coming off the Internet are lots of fun and increasingly creative — plus you can’t beat the sheer weight of data each digital effort generates for the metrics lovers on the account.

Add to those promotions the ones that go straight to the computer in everyone’s pocket, their mobile phones, which are now platforms for text and multimedia brand messaging. Then we’ve got the latest innovations: podcasting and blogging…it seems as fast as electronics engineers (or teenagers) create a new technology, brands find ways to leverage it.

We celebrate the best in interactive technologies in this issue as we recognize 10 campaigns that have shown us how to create brand awareness while driving breathtaking sales numbers — digitally. If you weren’t able to join me a few weeks ago in Las Vegas when we presented these awards to the agencies and clients behind them, please turn to our coverage beginning on page 16. These were, in fact, the tip of a very large response to our first Interactive Marketing Awards. Each of the nearly 100 entries we received was successful on its own terms, and you can view our first-, second- and third-place winners online at www.promomagazine.com.

For all their electronic savvy, something else put these winning campaigns at the top of our list: an appreciation of the people that they were trying to reach. That after all, tends to be the key strength of the best promotional marketing, the human touch that extends the brand relationship. And for all the bells and whistles, the digital marketing profiled in the cover story and discussed in our benchmark research study is simply another set of tools that marketers are deploying to communicate — in these examples, better than most!