Generation gaps are getting shorter and shorter. Add gestural navigation to the list of generation partitions. Soon, your 25-year-old co-worker will be grousing about teenagers making fun of people who insist on using a mouse and keyboard.

Don’t laugh. The moment may not be all that far off.

Where we are.
It’s difficult for many people to get their brain around life without a keyboard and mouse, but for a burgeoning number of people who text and navigate the Web on their touchscreen smartphone, it’s not such a stretch. Using gestures to navigate is easy, natural and practical.

Gestural navigation—the simple, intuitive process of using gestures to scroll up or down, flip through photos, shrink and enlarge content and navigate the Web—will one day have us shaking our head, wondering what took us so long to get rid of the keyboard and mouse. Cloud computing promises to take us even further away from the desktop paradigm, but that’s a whole other discussion.

Where we’re headed.
As mobile computing and smartphone usage grows, navigational technology is likely to replace the standard mouse/keyboard setup. Kids who grow up with on-the-go information access will have little trouble moving away from desktop productivity toward hand-held productivity and all it implies with regard to navigation. 

The mouse-less, keyboard-less Apple iPad aims to push traditional navigation one step closer to obscurity. Even if the iPad doesn’t catch on as Apple envisions, the direction in how we navigate is unmistakable.

What’s changing most rapidly is the idea that you don’t have to be tethered to information. Touchscreens allow the keyboard to come to you with a simple click. Using your Webcam to scan a code and access product information that gives you instant access to ecommerce mode is more de rigueur than futuresque. For marketers, this means digital marketers must routinely add executions that work well on hand-held devices. It means that highly targeted and personalized marketing becomes the expectation, not the exception. On a device that conforms to you, marketing must also conform.  

Looking forward.
It’s clear that smartphones and touchscreens are transforming on-the-go consumption and moving productivity from the desktop to hand-held devices. 

So what’s a keyboard-free world going to look like? We enjoy hints of it already. Augmented reality lets you simply point your phone’s camera to add graphics, sounds and other sensory enhancements over a real-world environment.

If you’ve seen Jeff Han’s amazing TED Conference presentation on multi-touch sensing, you have a firm grasp of where the touchscreen/gestural navigation movement is headed. 

This generation gap that’s growing around how people navigate and access information is not to be ignored from a marketing perspective. We’ve been down this road before, when online marketing was in its infancy not so long ago and marketers were widely split on whether to adjust budgets accordingly. Although the budget battles continue, it’s clear that online marketing is solidly legit. Now, mobile is the rising tide and with it, we’re seeing a new navigational model forming that is practical, natural, and unmistakably promising for users and marketers. So promising, it may lead to your keyboard being added to the museum collection of outdated technologies, right next to typewriters, 8-track tape players, mimeograph machines and the like.

There’s been quite a bit of industry chatter lately surrounding augmented reality, the blending of the real world with the virtual world. Computer-generated information and real-time environments are now being seen together, and it presents big opportunities for marketers. But the question of practicality still remains.

I’ve been watching and waiting to experience augmented reality from a true consumer perspective. My moment finally came this past weekend when I picked up InStyle and Esquire magazines, both of which debuted augmented reality content in their December issues.

Among endless pages of new fashions and beauty guides, InStyle featured a six-page section, “Gifting in 3D”, that promised a 3D holiday shopping experience that was “as easy as 1-2-3”. It proved more complicated than advertised, however, as you had to first download a plug-in that would allow you to view the galleries. And the only reward I received for the effort put forth was simple video advertisements (25 of them no less) that popped out of gift boxes. The gallery of items presented for each brand with click-to-buy capacity, which wasn’t even part of the actual augmented reality experience, was the only interesting aspect.

Esquire, a publication that has been known to experiment with off-the-wall features, at least offered more interesting content with more of a wow factor. It featured numerous AR elements, including an introduction by Robert Downey Jr., a photo shoot with changing clothes and weather conditions, and a joke-telling model that gets more risqué after midnight. At least that’s what I’ve read, as I was never even able to get the required software to download in order to view the augmented reality content.

My first true experience with augmented reality left me disappointed, with all of the effort and time I put into trying to view this cool new content far outweighing any sort of payoff that was promised. Too many variables, from searching for the magazines among newsstands to trying (unsuccessfully) to get the downloads to work, tainted the much-hyped technology.
 
I was beginning to have my doubts about augmented reality until a co-worker showed me Burger King’s AR banners advertising its dollar value menu. No magazine purchase or print out was required to trigger the experience. All I needed was a Web cam and a one dollar bill (or something that was of a similar size and shape). Three dollar-menu options rotated across the screen as I flipped my dollar bill over a few times, and then, perhaps most entertaining, the iconic King’s head was superimposed onto my body to wrap it all up.

It was simple, it was contextually relevant, it was awesome. The Burger King ad works because the payoff received is greater than the little effort that they ask on the part of the user. Unlike InStyle and Esquire, Burger King kept it simple and wasn’t too ambitious on its first foray with a new, complicated technology.

By minimizing the variables, they maximized the experience.

I have seen the future, and it includes print. The evidence is a video-in-print ad scheduled to run in the September 18 issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The Pepsi Max/CBS ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to New York and Los Angeles subscribers. It’s the first video ad to be embedded in a print publication, not unlike a talking birthday card, only with video. And to think I was about to give up on print. 

The sad truth is ad pages and attendant revenue are down and heading south. Venerable titles have disappeared. Still, I think print has a role to play, and this video-in-print ad should act as a heads up to publishers. Only rarely have magazines earnestly attempted to bridge the digital and print worlds, but that’s exactly where they need to head. We’re past “out of the box” now. Print’s survival hinges on blowing the doors off the entire model.

The plan.
How does the print world bridge the digital/physical gap? In addition to the promise of video-in-print, there are a number of smart ways: 

Slug everything with 2D barcodes. Every article, every ad. Publishers can build mobile microsites to capture traffic and tell an even deeper story behind each article or ad. And they can report on this: visit volume, traffic source, time spent, actions taken. Sure, only 1% of phones have barcode readers right now, but I guarantee you there’s an “app” for that. If every page of every magazine has codes, adoption of the code reader will follow. The magazine has to become the preview of a much deeper, richer world. How many times have you been waiting for your haircut and have to abandon an interesting article? With barcoded articles, I could simply snap a quick picture and I’d have the link. Epicurean titles would almost certainly benefit from this, but I could also see sports, celebrities, business and news benefiting from barcodes. To me, this is a potential keystone in the digital/physical bridge.

Spread augmented reality. This is still very nascent technology. Mini Cooper used it very effectively last year to render a Mini in 3-D from webcams to an otherwise blank ad. Someone needs to blow this technology out, and not just advertisers. Publishers have to start believing this is part of a magazine’s content. This is crucial – publishers, not advertisers, need to drive behavioral change and take responsibility for changing the way readers interact with their product. But they’ll need to make the jump way beyond the Mini ad by figuring out a way to stream video, create pushable buttons and provide 3-D graphs. Better yet, give me 3-D video of the catwalk to go along with that fashion show article. And let’s not forget to add a little billboard that says “Sponsored by…”.

Light up the Kindle. I don’t understand why there aren’t more magazine titles on the Kindle yet. When the color Kindle comes out, there will be no excuse. The infrastructure is there: great resolution, complete connectivity and portability. I can’t decide if the Kindle will kill print or save it. But an ad that links directly to purchase on Amazon.com is a no-brainer. And again, publishers, not advertisers, need to drive this. This needs to be packaged up and ready to go.

Prove it works. Here’s the sad truth: most clients still probably optimize to click on their digital campaigns. Just proving that print drove traffic might be enough for a lot of advertisers, but let’s do our best to shed the mistakes of the past, because on a cost-per basis, print might not hold up well against typical CPC deals. This means print has to prove more, to quantify interaction. We have to pull out all of the stops. We need a plan for how we’ll hook this up with Omniture, Webtrends and Hitbox. I want to know how many times the ad was shared and how long people spent with it. I want to know if this generated buzz in the blogosphere. I want to know about the kinds of people who interacted with my ad. I want to know how many people clicked straight to Amazon from their Kindles and how much revenue that represents.

I want print to live, but print has to want to live. It has to leapfrog ahead and re-take the reins of its own destiny. And it needs to start today.