If you live in a major metro market, then you know what it’s like to walk down the street and see 90% of the people with their heads down buried in their phone. I was one of those people, until I found myself standing in the middle of the street in Manhattan writing a text and nearly getting hit by a taxi. From that point on, I made sure that I was always looking up. But I am definitely in the minority. And this post is not about the safety, or lack thereof, when it comes to texting. It’s about how marketers can capitalize on this Head Down Revolution.

According to Statista, the U.S. mobile phone penetration has reached 81%, representing 223 million consumers. And those consumers spend an average of 4.7 hours per day glued to their smartphones. More importantly, is the role that texting now plays in our everyday lives, especially when it comes to marketing. For an eye-opening example, texts have a 99% open rate compared to 20% for email*. Pretty amazing, huh? Now I imagine that smartphones are currently in the midst of fine tuning their hardware to introduce features that can block such correspondence. But who knows when that will come?

So until that day, marketers have a humongous opportunity to take advantage and focus their outbound efforts on the behaviors of the smartphone user. A behavior that is now second nature, and while receiving a text from a brand may seem like a nuisance at first, it is certainly less of one than an email. Also, if you’re sending info or content that isn’t selling, but more serving them something of value, then you’re more likely to be able to maintain that dialogue.

And isn’t a dialogue what we want? It opens the door, and leads to traffic. And when you have enough traffic, ultimately it will lead to transactions. It’s this approach to marketing, partnered with the aforementioned tactics, that can build the awareness and engagement you’re looking for.

Now how about a little “social experiment”: The next time you’re walking down the street, take note of how many people’s’ heads are down. It truly is a sight to see. Just think, those eyes could be engaged in your brands message. And if the message is “timed” to when your customer is in the market for a new product, it becomes relevant and timely — a very powerful combination.

*Credits: Jack Loechner — Editor of The Center for Media Research; SinglePoint; Statista

To do this, we must think about our engagement strategy, and look for ways to immerse our audience in the brand, rather than simply sell it. We must tap into the emotional sensibilities, and bring their normal, everyday experience to life in a way that serves a bigger purpose — to create an unbreakable bond, that ultimately results in sales.

Here are some ways this is being done…

• Virtual Reality: Create a new world to experience your brand (Check out what Tom’s did)
• Augmented Reality: Bring the retail experience to life wherever you are (See how the IKEA Catalog enables you to place furniture in your space before you buy it)
• Bots: Brands becoming personal assistants (Casper gives you someone to talk to on those sleepless nights)

There are many partners out there specializing in these methods (Blippar, LSTNR, Moth+Flame). And if you want to proactively bring new, impactful ideas to your clients and consumers, we suggest you tap into them.

So don’t get stuck in the world of selling. It’s a one-dimensional way to drive engagement and conversions. Change your approach. Be multidimensional, it will serve you well.

What Sparks Our Fire: Taking the initiative to find new ways to turn simple ideas into ones that serve a bigger purpose.

Forsman & Bodenfors wants to make sure drivers “drive 25 to keep kids alive,” and they’ve found an ingenious way to do it. Talking GPS are standard features in modern vehicles, but the agency has conceptualized an app that will switch the voice on the GPS to a child’s when within range of a school, daycare, or other area populated by children.

It’s currently available in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and comes pre-loaded with all schools and daycare centers in the Nordic region.

The agency hopes that this will serve as an audio reminder to drive carefully and watch for children, reducing the number of accidents in school zones and other kid-friendly areas.

What Sparks Our Fire: Using innovation and unconventional problem-solving to draw attention to an often-ignored safety hazard

Sustainability has been a growing trend in business for years now as climate change becomes a more prevalent threat, however, now technology companies especially have realized that sustainability is a good investment.

Sustainability “ensures business continuity by conserving resources,” and now more than ever, economic and environmental sustainability are vital to businesses’ longevity and productivity.

In 2014, Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that climate change-related natural disasters are costing Unilever at least $300 million a year. To combat this, several companies have come up with ways to conserve energy and other natural resources.

Creating environmental products is one such step. Samsung, for example, has taken the lead and released a solar-powered laptop, as well as three “green” mobile phones made of corn starch bioplastic and have energy-efficient chargers and recyclable packaging.

In order to ensure the future of the planet–and technology–it’s up to other companies to follow in Samsung’s small carbon footprints.

What Sparks Our Fire: Companies taking on a greater accountability for their sustainability and making moves to make sustainability a universal practice.

The next step for global connectivity? A smartphone for the developing world. And it’s designed by none other than John Sculley, former Apple executive and Robert Brunner, the designer behind Beats by Dre headphones.

The Obi Worldphone marks a greater push toward accessible technology–Sculley aims to provide developing countries in places like Africa and Southeast Asia with high-powered, affordable smartphones, which he predicts will replace their needs for personal computers.

In addition to its sleek design, the phone is tailored to its target consumers’ preferences. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, texting, taking photos, and banking are popular uses for smartphones, so the Obi Worldphone has features like a 13-megapixel camera and a diverse marketplace of applications.

The phone will retail for $200, a reasonable price to most first-world Americans, but still may be a problem for the standard income in a developing country.

What Sparks Our Fire: A quest for a high-powered but inexpensive smartphone that makes technology more available on a global scale.

Minimum wage in the United States is recognized as a sign of financial instability, but it is rarely understood exactly how incredibly draining minimum wage labor actually is.

Blake Fall-Conroy, an artist who strives to create “socially-conscious” pieces, has conceptualized an ingenious way to demonstrate the frustrating, monotonous, and often demeaning plight of minimum-wage worker.

Fall-Conroy invented the “minimum wage machine,” a device with a hand-crank that the user turns continuously, and dispenses a penny every 4.5 seconds. An hour will earn you $8 in pennies, which until eight months ago was the minimum wage in the state of New York.

The artist hopes that the machine will help people understand the amount of work that goes into making just $8/hour, and perhaps inspire sympathy for those who work minimum-wage jobs or provoke change in legislation that will raise the minimum wage (the minimum wage in New York is now $8.75).

What Sparks Our Fire: Art that serves a purpose and sparks social awareness.

It’s no secret that Google has a broad spectrum of interests, and they’ve even got a new parent company to prove it. Recently, the Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities, which strives to spur innovation that helps “create more access and opportunity for the one billion people living with disabilities,” granted $600,000 to e-NABLE, a nonprofit organization that uses tools like 3D printing and bionics to create solutions for the disabled.

Examples are the hot pink bionic hand that e-NABLE created for a little girl, Ari Solorio, who was born without a hand. e-NABLE, the Google-funded nonprofit organization of volunteers in charge of creating Ari’s bionic hand, takes advantage of the growing 3D printing trend and the do-it-yourself movement. AIO Robotics supplied all the 3D software responsible for creating the device, and so far about 40 have been made.

These prosthetics, rather than awkwardly attempting to imitate human flesh, are brightly colored and look like something out of an Iron Man comic, some with claws and flashing lights. They are designed with the intention of helping kids take pride in their artificial limbs, rather than be embarrassed by them.

e-NABLE has made it clear that subtle is not their style–and kids are loving it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Technology designs that are not only functional, but fun for kids and help

Everbright is a wall-sized mood board composed of 464 dials, and is reminiscent of the popular Light-Brite toy. The dials act as the pegs you’d plug into the Light-Brite, and by turning the dials, participants can pick any color in the rainbow to make pictures, patterns, or any other visual their heart desires. The Everbright board acts as a creative game for the office– Hero Design even points out it’s benefits over a typical ping pong table found in break rooms. One person or an entire team can work together to create the designs.

Office “toys,” such as the Everbright board, emphasize the importance of breaking up the work day with creative activities that inspire outstanding work, especially in creative fields like Marketing. Learn more on Hero Design’s website, and take a look at the video below.

Everbright from Romy Randev on Vimeo.

What Sparks Our Fire: Flexing our creative muscles in the office

The creators of the Blitab, a new “haptic tablet,” are bringing new meaning to the word “touchscreen.” Designed to be a Kindle for the visually impaired, their device allows users to actually feel their electronic devices.

The device works like an e-reader with a few major changes. Instead of using an LCD display that users can read off of, the “haptic tablet” uses “smart liquid” that forms bubbles on the surface. Blind and visually impaired users can than read the bubbles as Braille letters. “We call the materials ‘tixels’ from ‘tactile pixels’ because we do not use any mechanical elements to trigger the dots,” says Bitlab’s founder, Kristina Tsvetanova. The software converts text from webpages and USB drives.

Tsvetanova has a working prototype and is still looking to get seed-funding to bring her product to market. And while similar products already exist with astronomical price tags of over $15,000, Tsvetanova’s goal is to make the “haptic tablet” more affordable, so that more people can use it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative design improving internet accessibility for the blind and visually impaired in the tablet-era.

With a majority of Americans and people worldwide that consider solar power to be their number one choice of energy, SunPort is introducing a new way to use solar energy, with their new innovative and affordable outlet adapter. This portable outlet adapter allows users to power all of their gadgets on clean solar energy. Once plugging in a device into the SunPort, the application will automatically calculate how much power you’re using and quickly give you the option to upgrade to solar energy. Once upgrading, it will automatically purchase solar micro-credits that are provided through a non-profit organization called ReChoice. It’s a more affordable and less cumbersome option than those industrial-sized solar panels.

Due to cost being an issue when purchasing solar panels, the inventor of SunPort, Paul Droege, believes they will eventually offer their customers a chance to upgrade their entire home at an affordable and reasonable cost. This will allow those with high interest to use clean solar energy and help create a demand for more solar production.

The use of solar energy has increased tremendously throughout the years and will continue to grow. Nivea Sun ads, which generated a great deal of praise and attention worldwide, used a similar approach.

What Sparks Our Fire: Making solar power more affordable, more portable, and more accessible to change the way we use energy.