(Note: This post originally appeared on the PNConnect Blog.)
Every week here in the Porter Novelli New York office, where our PNConnect digital team creates and executes content strategy for healthcare clients including Cardinal Health and Johnson & Johnson, financial institutions like Sammons, and consumer goods like Bel Brands and HP Inc, our team gets together to share research, product and platform developments and content marketing best practices. It’s kind of a digital show and tell, and it allows us to step outside of our inboxes and apply some critical thinking to what’s happening in the content marketplace. And in turn, we’d like to share them with our digital colleagues across the PNConnect global network and our clients.
ROB WOODS
Rob is in Porter Novelli’s brand marketing practice, where he works on tech and telecom brands – and beer. Based in New York, Rob’s focus is as a media specialist helping clients build and execute creative campaigns focused on impacting how consumers think and push the boundaries of digital’s role in both health care and consumer PR.
Magic Leap Just Landed An Astounding Amount of VC Money
Take notice: Beyond the giant round of investment Magic Leap recently received – which, if you were curious, amounted to just under $800 million – the Florida-based startup is slated to bring ‘mixed realty’ to the forefront of digitally-created immersive technology. What exactly is mixed reality? It’s pretty much as awesome as it sounds – a hybrid of virtual reality (which brings users into a virtual, immersive environment) and augmented reality (which overlays/augments the real world with computer-generated images, sounds, etc.).
According to Wired, Magic Leap will have its share of competition with established tech companies like Facebook, Samsung and Microsoft all developing and engineering innovative platforms that play host to virtual environments. However, according to the article, Magic Leap claims to be, “using a different technology to achieve its effect, and it’s keeping its efforts mostly secret.”
Even while the technology continues to develop, brands, publishers and entertainment companies have already started to cut their teeth with these types of mediums – and with success. And with VR becoming more accessible to mainstream consumers, what is the outlook for mixed reality? Well, if this startup has anything to do with it, it’s going to be pretty darn cool.
JULIE EUBANK
Julie works as a project manager in tech development on Porter Novelli’s analytics team, helping clients and internal teams use data to uncover audience insights, shape communications plans and evaluate the effectiveness of public relations across multiple sectors, including consumer brands, food and nutrition, government, healthcare and technology.
Access Denied is another installment in the “Content Wars” series, an excellent portfolio of articles by John Herman at The Awl that explores the impact of the changes in our content consumption patterns. With more readers consuming news from or, increasingly, within their Facebook feed or Twitter stream, publishers and content creators have seen a decrease in page-views, advertising dollars and political capital. For example, celebrities no longer sell their baby photos to magazines and presidential candidates no longer put out press releases; this news is instead delivered directly via social media.
This shift from publishers to platforms raises a slew of questions and concerns, many of which will impact the PR and advertising industries. When we consider how to most effectively reach our audiences, we must take into account these changes in media consumption. Herman argues that consumers should also be wary. He writes: “This ‘conceptual space for neutrality’ follows from the idea that publications and reporters have a responsibility not just to discover and contextualize new information but to distribute it in a transparent or somehow balanced way. Their audiences afforded them powers: to talk to the powerful, to dedicate resources to investigations, to collect and summarize the news.” What will the shift from publication to platform mean for balanced reporting and deep, investigative journalism?
Find out more here