Asics wins big at the New York City Marathon with RFID tags and social media

You may remember a few months ago when the Coca Cola Village in Israel decided to run an event through Facebook, which brought social networking in to the real world thanks to RFID technology. Now I’ve found a second campaign that does this in an even more innovative way based around the New York Marathon. I love campaigns that blend social media with the real world and this exciting innovation from Asics certainly does that. As you’ll see from the video runners attached RFID tags to their shoes and when they passed readers at specific points of the New York Marathon track they were played messages from loved ones on giant screens to encourage them along the 26 mile course. This is the sort of marketing campaign that really can only be attempted by huge brands on a large scale but I think RFID is an interesting technology that we could be seeing even more of in the future. Anything that pushes your real world experiences in to the online social world is always something that is going to get my vote.