Unexpected Technology Brands Are Using for Marketing

When people think about marketing technology, their minds usually go to familiar tools: CRM platforms, email automation, digital advertising, analytics dashboards, and social media software.

But marketing technology increasingly extends far beyond what happens on a laptop screen.

Brands are using technology inside stores, at events, within physical products, and throughout real-world environments to understand customers, personalize experiences, and create new opportunities for engagement.

Some of these technologies are probably more familiar than you think. You just may not have realized they were being used for marketing.

Here are five examples.

That wristband, badge, card, or product tag you tapped may have been doing much more than simply granting access.

Radio-frequency identification, or RFID, and near-field communication, better known as NFC, allow physical objects to communicate with digital systems.

For marketers, that creates some interesting possibilities.

At conferences and experiential events, attendees can use RFID-enabled badges or wristbands to check into different areas, participate in activities, collect points, unlock content, or save information about products they are interested in.

Instead of repeatedly asking someone to enter their information, their physical credential can become the connection between different parts of the experience.

The technology can also help brands understand how attendees interact with an activation.

• Which stations attracted the most participation?
• What products did someone show interest in?
• How many experiences did they complete?

Those interactions can potentially create a much clearer picture of engagement than simply counting how many people walked past a booth.

NFC provides a similar bridge between the physical and digital worlds.

A customer can tap a phone against a product, display, package, or sign and instantly access a landing page, product information, loyalty experience, or other digital content.

The physical environment essentially becomes clickable.

Cameras are not always used to take pictures. Computer vision allows software to interpret what a camera sees, opening up entirely different applications for marketers.

In retail environments, computer vision technology can be used to analyze traffic patterns and understand how people move through a space.

Brands can learn which displays attract attention, where customers spend time, and how different areas of a store are being used, providing valuable insights for digital marketing strategies. At interactive installations, computer vision can allow an experience to respond to the person standing in front of it.

• A screen might react when someone moves.
• Digital content could change based on the number of people participating.
• A game could track body movement without requiring someone to hold a controller.
• The technology can effectively turn the human body into an input device.

That creates marketing experiences that feel much more natural because participants do not necessarily need to understand the technology before using it.

They simply move, interact, and watch the environment respond.

Augmented reality has quietly become one of the more practical technologies available to marketers.

Instead of transporting someone into a completely digital world, AR places digital elements into the environment they are already viewing. One of its most useful applications is helping customers visualize products.

• A furniture company can allow someone to see how a couch might look inside their living room.
• A beauty brand can let customers virtually try different products.
• Fashion brands can create digital try-on experiences.
• Automotive brands can allow users to explore vehicle features without requiring the physical vehicle to be present.
• For marketers, AR can remove some of the imagination required between discovering a product and understanding what owning it might actually feel like.

There is also an experiential side.

Brands can create AR scavenger hunts, interactive packaging, location-based content, virtual characters, and digital extensions of physical events. The customer’s phone effectively becomes another layer of the campaign.

Photo booths. Yes, photo booths. But not necessarily the rinky-dink machines you remember sitting inside a mall or the booth breaking down in the corner of a wedding reception.

Brands are increasingly using sophisticated photo and video experiences as another technology-driven marketing touchpoint at conferences, trade shows, product launches, sporting events, and brand activations.

A modern activation can combine cameras, automated image processing, generative AI, interactive surveys, digital backgrounds, customized software, printing technology, and instant content delivery into a single guest experience.

The photograph itself may only be one small part of the system.

Orlando photo booth rental company Focus Experiential, for example, specializes in building branded photo and video experiences around objectives such as audience participation, data collection, personalized content, physical takeaways, social sharing, and extending the reach of an activation online.

A guest might answer several questions before their session and have those answers influence the content they receive.

Another experience might transform the participant into an AI-generated character.

At a sports activation, the technology could turn someone into a personalized trading card complete with their photo, name, and custom attributes.

At a professional conference, the value exchange might be completely different: attendees provide information through a survey and receive a professionally captured and retouched headshot in return.

Slow-motion cameras, automated video effects, green screen environments, and other technologies can create yet another category of output.

This is what makes modern photo activations particularly interesting from a marketing technology perspective.

• The camera gets someone’s attention, but the infrastructure behind it can connect several marketing objectives.
• The brand receives an interactive touchpoint.
• Attendees receive personalized content or a physical takeaway.
• Data can be collected with consent during the experience.
• And when attendees share the resulting content themselves, the activation can potentially reach people who never attended the event.

What looks from the outside like someone simply taking a picture can actually be a small marketing technology ecosystem operating in real time.

Marketing technology does not have to involve a screen. Scent is increasingly being approached as another controllable element of the customer experience.

Hotels, retailers, entertainment environments, and other physical spaces can use scent-delivery systems to distribute carefully selected fragrances throughout a location.

Some brands develop signature scents designed to become part of their identity in much the same way they use recognizable colors, sounds, or visual design.

Technology makes that process more sophisticated.

Modern scent systems can control when fragrance is released, how strongly it is distributed, and which areas receive it. For experiential campaigns, scent can also become part of a themed environment.

Imagine walking into a brand installation designed around a tropical destination and smelling something associated with the location before seeing the primary display.

Or entering an automotive experience where the environment has been intentionally designed to create the sensory impression associated with a particular product.

Most attendees probably would not describe what they experienced as marketing technology. But that is part of what makes these systems interesting. The technology operates in the background while influencing the experience itself.

Marketing technology used to be discussed primarily in terms of software. That definition is becoming increasingly incomplete.

• RFID can connect physical interactions to customer profiles.
• Computer vision can make environments respond to people.
• Augmented reality can place products inside someone’s world before they purchase them.
• Photo and video activation technology can turn participation into personalized content, data, and social reach.
• Even scent can be digitally controlled as part of a brand experience.

What connects all five technologies is the same idea: the gap between physical experiences and digital marketing is getting smaller. For consumers, many of these interactions may simply feel interesting, useful, or entertaining.

Behind the scenes, however, technology is giving marketers entirely new ways to understand how people interact with brands — and new ways to turn those interactions into experiences people actually remember.