Ambient communication, in its many shapes and forms, employs the urban environment in a way that is generally less

expensive and more cost-efficient than traditional advertising media Among the key trends driving the rapid expansion of alternative out-of home media are: the perception among advertisers that these media provide high engagement ,targeting options, proximity to point-of-sale, measurable impact, and cost effectiveness; exposure to and recall of these media is growing as individuals spend more time commuting to work, walking in urban areas, waiting in transit hubs, and shopping at retail outlets; the vast majority of consumers view alternative out-of-home media as favorable and educational; new technology enables companies to launch digital advertising platforms that generate higher revenues than the conventional formats they replace. The ability of ambient communication to help brands reach target audiences will likely make it a critical part of the future marketing landscape .This is owing to the emergence of venue-based media solutions combining multiple ambient initiatives and tools with other marketing strategies (such as event marketing and sampling, branded entertainment, demographics, and psychographics)4 aimed at building brand affinity. Ambient communication is of special interest to marketers who need to make decisions about the most effective communication mix .It is necessary to approach ambient communication with a holistic perspective in order to recognize and emphasize common elements (e.g., experiential nature, engagement capacity, and emotional appeal). This helps marketers to better integrate and coordinate their branding efforts by: increasing effective and efficient allocation of the advertising budget, recognizing the potential of the environmental urban context as a powerful advertising medium beyond traditional (and expensive) mass media; enhancing brand identity and widening the brand scope using all possible environmental touch-points with consumers; exploiting all possible synergies among the different forms of ambient communication, while avoiding the trap of using trendy terms (e.g., street marketing, guerrilla marketing, and proximity marketing).

Ambient Communication Categories

2-D Traditional and Innovative Print and Pictorial Media 3-D Artifact-Based Media 4-D Motion-Based/Interactive Media

Conceptual Evolution
The outdoor and out-of-home concepts imply that customer are merely passers-by, essentially passive creatures whose curiosity has to be aroused by spectacular messages that must be eye-catching. As the concept of spectacle itself suggests, consumers relate to brands in a detached and fundamentally non-participatory waythe roles of spectator and performer are rigidly adhered to. The brand plans and manages the advertising spectacle while the audience looks passively on, curious and amused. ambient communication stresses the experiential component of advertising in order to relate to consumers One especially popular form is guerrilla advertising, whose appeal lies in its ability to intrigue, amuse, and activate consumers by artistically decontextualizing space. Techniques include putting any chosen feature of the urban environmentto original and creative use, positioning out-of-place artifacts in carefully chosen sites, and promoting products using promoters who behave in out-of-the-ordinary ways. It targets not a general and passive mass audience as does traditional media (such as television and print), but groups of more active individuals that can be more easily engaged, individuals who aggregate spontaneously in specific places according to their interests and needs

Static content and one-way messages have given way to dynamic, interactive, and consumerinvolving content. This new audience consists not of passive spectators but of co-creators of a brand experience based on consumer activation.The specific aim of a brand strategy based on ambient communication is to build an experiential and relational environment around the consumer Ambient initiatives encourage consumers to interact with the product and spread the brand-message on their online and offline social networks, triggering a word-of-mouth process based on shared narrative and video images.16 Ambient communication invokes the principles of experiential marketing elaborated by Schmitt17 that are based on two major concepts: strategic experiential modules and experience providers Strategic experiential modules involve five complementary components of consumer experience: Sensory experiences (sense), Affective experiences (feel) Creative Cognitive experiences (think), Physical experiences (act), Social-Identity experiences (relate)