Last week Old Navy launched an exciting interactive ad campaign with Shazam. Old Navy is running 30 and 60 second spots with brand new music showcasing their newest clothing line. 

Users can launch Shazam whenever they hear the music to recognize the song. Once Shazam recognizes the song, users will receive coupons, discounts and product information. Occasionally, Old Navy will even reward customers with huge discounts for using Shazam while in their stores. 

These are entirely original songs, but the bands are not real. (The band in the latest spot is Audio Threadz) Old Navy will use different “bands” and original music throughout the year to showcase their latest clothing lines. Get ready for more of Old Navy’s catchy jingles to get stuck in your head!   

Speaking of synchronized television, Digimarc has a joint venture with Nielsen that enables viewers of Grey's Anatomy to have an enhanced experience while watching.

The Nielsen Company (Nielsen) embeds audio digital watermarks into the US TV broadcast workflow. These watermarks are detected by Nielsen households and aggregated into a rating for a particular program and market.

Advertisers have been seeking a similar system, a system that would provide a rating by commerical, for quite some time. At a recent conference Nielsen endorsed the Ad-ID standard, and announced plans to incorporate Ad-ID within its watermarking system to provide commercial ratings.

Read more at the NY Times blog

Ad-ID enables individual commercials to be tracked from the beginning to the end of their life. The Ad-ID standard, created in 2003, is managed by the ANA and the 4A's (formerly the American Association of Advertising Agencies).

Disney/ABC Television Group today announced the new "Grey's Anatomy" Sync App for iPad App, now available on the App store.

Powered by the Media-Sync Platform, the app provides fans of the show the ability to interact with exclusive content in real time using iPad.  The Media-Sync platform relies on audio watermarks already inserted into nearly every TV program in the U.S. as part of Nielsen's industry standard TV audience ratings service. 

View a video demonstration of the technlogy at work.

Media-Sync is a joint venture between The Nielsen Company and Digimarc Corporation.

I first want to apologize for the recent lack of activity here on the blog. There's good reason though as we here at Digimarc have been very busy and are extremely excited about things to come.

You may have noticed that we've made a few minor changes to the blog site and have welcomed a few more authors (see to the right). Yes, Don and I are going to continue to share with you lots of valuable information about Digimarc for Images, but also wanted to expand the the focus of the blog to better showcase Digimarc's vision for a world where intuitive computing is part of our everyday lives. I touched on this briefly already in my previous post "Digimarc Discover: The Future" but now we'll have more experts who will be able to help keep us better informed.

Watch this amazing video here.