2012 AdWeek Digital Winners

Adweek has released their list of the Digital Winners for 2012 and the results prove that emerging technologies had quite the year.

While Twitter clearly was a dominate force during the election, boasting 327,452 tweets per minute and Instagram cashed in with Facebook at $1 billion, there were other best-in-show digital opportunities that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Here were my favorite three emerging technology examples from the AdWeek Digital Winners 2012 list:

The Xbox was voted the ‘Best Reason to Cut the Cord’. With more and more people moving towards a connected television viewing style, I think the Xbox has every right to be king of this category. It brings together Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and social gaming. It’s one box for everything. More people are watching video on the Xbox Live Gold service than are playing games, and they are using what was designed as a game console to do so. Media consumption is changing.

For whatever reason I missed out on Flipboard until now. But after an app download and some research I am sold. Flipboard was selected as ‘Hottest Tablet Publisher/Aggregator’. You can use Flipboard like your own personalized magazine. You can subscribe to the news content, social sites and entertainment you are interested in and it all gets pulled into one location. Good news, it’s ad enabled. It’s a great opportunity to target users. The registration data from all the sites they are pulling into Flipboard is available.

I’ve talked about ad enabled maps before, but I think Foursquare, who was voted ‘Favorite App Right Now’ will have a much more solid run with their ad integration than Waze. The ad opportunity is just being tested this year, but the value seems to be there with their geo-social ads. It seems to be a new trend that is emerging in the mobile space.

Working on a team titled Emerging Technologies, it’s so refreshing to see appropriate emerging tech pieces being executed. Check out the rest of the Hotlist 2012 Digital Winners here and then come back and share your favorite with us. Most importantly, tell us: Are you utilizing any of these digital hotties –or other emerging tech strategies – in your media planning?