While global information technology spending will have its worst year on record in 2009, research behemoth Gartner is predicting a return to growth for the industry in 2010. For what it’s worth, so am I.

“While the growth rate has slowed over last year, it’s remarkable amid this uncertain economic environment that it is up at all. Core technology spending intent supports our conviction that the bottom has been reached. Everyone is looking for visibility, especially into technology spending. The fog is starting to lift.”

Actually, that quote is from a Gartner press release issued in November of 2001. Just a little reminder that cycles do happen.

Gartner is predicting 2010 IT spending to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.

Among the topics Gartner predicts will drive recovery in tech are business intelligence, virtualization and social media. Duh. Also cited is what Gartner calls Operational Technology (OT) — devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The result of OT will be an increasingly unified view of all the information covering business process and control systems.

It’s all good news and a good direction for the industry, of course. We’ve seen growth all throughout 2009 which continues to convince me that the innovation economy is plugging along with a quietly confident knowledge that only those who continue to invest in R&D and marketing will reap the benefits when the market as a whole returns.

Uncategorized business intelligence, economy, gartner, innovation, social media, technology, Technology Public Relations, virtualization

Advertising giant George Lois (inventor of “The Big Idea”) always spoke about the power of images in ads. For what it’s worth, I certainly agree – image stop us in our tracks, imprint idelibly on our minds (concious and subconcious?), and leave us with lasting impressions that may even transcend the brand itself. Advertisers hate that last part, of course.

During the process of creating a new print ad for Rainier, I began to ask myself: What image best conveys our brand promise of merging technology expertise and PR excellence? The image we eventually chose for our final ad looks like a brain slice from a CT scan, where the brain topology looks like circuit traces overlayed with a few integrated circuit chips.

Cool image, in my opinion, and pretty evocative of our brand statement.

BUT, is it too limited in scope? Does it fail to convey our expertise across a wide variety of technologies and markets? Or does it pigeonhole our image in the electronics/semiconductor space?

Then last night, I was reading Sports Illustrated (whose baseball postseason coverage sadly did not include the Red Sox…), and came across a two-page spread ad from Toyota. The message the ad was trying to convey was that Toyota is an innovator, and the main image was the word INNOVATION spelled out in circuit board font.

I wondered how much money Toyota had spent developing and focus grouping the ad. At any rate, Toyota chose to represent “innovation” with circuits, despite the fact that Toyota is certainly not in the electronics business.

So what, if anything, is the best image strategy for evoking a brand association with broadbased innovation and technology? Is it the circuit board? Highly overused images like astronauts? A lightbulb? Albert Einstein? A Van de Graf generator? Puzzle pieces? Fiber optic lightpipes?

I welcome your comments and ideas around this topic.

Uncategorized advertising, innovation, public relations, technology, Technology Public Relations

In his op-ed column, The Young and the Neuro, David Brooks writes that the attendees at last week’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Society conference were “young, hip and attractive.” These 30-something scholars from fields of psychology, economics, political science and beyond all have in common the hope that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These folks are essentially trying to understand how social behavior changes biology as a complementary process to the way biology (genetics) directly influences behavior.

Brooks shares some great examples of research going on in this burgeoning field. These include perceptual studies of Arabs and Jews (how each perceive images of pain), Yankee and Red Sox fans watching baseball highlights (a look at how we process tribal dominance), and Americans and Japanese (reward structures of dominant versus subordinate behavior).

He concludes that “hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences.” This, he says, shines a bright light on “the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments.”

Uncategorized innovation, medicine, neuroscience, Technology Public Relations