'peeps creative

A brand doesn't exist on shelves—it exists in the hearts and minds of people. Your brand is the sum total of perceptions about your product in the heads of your relevant audience.

Apple has generated strong buzz for its coming iPad without advertising.

Just as Web 2.0 is a way to describe the proliferation of user-interactive applications and motion, Web 3.0 is all about community, recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that's no longer random data, but tailored, peer-reviewed, highly intuitive, totally integrated and delivered in real-time.

We've identified some broad trends along with some applications, devices and websites that are representative of the new crop of tools that are powering Web 3.0

TREND TRANSLATION: Geolocation will catch on by this time next year with early adopters. At that point it will be a fertile ground for marketers to early-adopt geolocation strategies in their marketing plans - mobile or otherwise.

The internet is the ultimate trendspotting tool. It allows marketers to take the pulse of the globe on a minute-by-minute basis. Feel the pulse by taking your pick from the following random list of real-time search engines, content aggregators, alerting services, friend finders and so on:

Web design has certainly come a long way since the first HTML files were published, and Cascading Style Sheets have given designers lots of freedom to specify typefaces, sizes, and styles for text. But most type on the Web is still limited to the 10 common "Web fonts" commissioned and distributed by Microsoft in the late 90s. Web designers and developers have done their best to work within these constraints, and even developed clever workarounds using images, Flash, and/or JavaScript.

Over the past 18 months, a great debate has consumed our industry: Are digital agencies poised to sit at the head of the advertising table? Depending on whom you ask and what you read, the answer seems to flip flop -- with a majority of people still having reservations and making claims that digital agencies aren't ready to lead.

Show us one experienced, switched-on consumer in a mature consumer society who does NOT google once a day. Or even once an hour. One consumer who has NOT researched the cheapest available fare, price, charge before buying a big ticket item. Who has NOT invested some time reading reviews, recommendations and suggestions from experts and fellow consumers on anything from hotels in Paris and designer vacuum cleaners to which specific seat to request on flight SQ220 from Sydney to Singapore.