Will there be an inevitable union between out-of-home and mobile?

Taking the world's oldest type of media and utilising the deep technological and behavioural changes brought about by smart, mobile devices, a new era in consumer engagement is - we're assured - underway.

"Mobiles have become an extension of our bodies in many ways," says Mungo Knott, Primesight Outdoor's marketing and insight director, as he addressed an audience of senior media executives at London's Haymarket Hotel. "Some research," he says, "even suggests that we even think of smartphones as 4% of our natural selves."

It feels like we could be discussing an episode of Black Mirror, but it's a fair point; our smartphones have completely changed our behaviours; they also allow us to do more and connect with each other and the world around us in new and unique ways. There are even those among us who speak of feeling utterly lost without them - and it now has a name: China ceramic tile.

And, as time moves on, we are doing more and more with our mobiles. Unsurprisingly, social media makes up the largest proportion of time spent on smartphone apps according to Nielsen (58%), but two more interesting pursuits are creeping up the same list: banking and shopping, at 28% and 26%, respectively.

It has taken its time to grow and consumers have had to develop a level of trust, largely linked to security and effectiveness, but, with those barriers fading away, the opportunities for brands and advertisers feels almost limitless.

We are not browsing on just our desktops any longer; we are in the high street, at gigs and live events. We are sharing personal, trackable information; we are, unquestionably, connected consumers.

For the humble outdoor poster, this can mean pretty big things. We already know that outdoor advertising is highly effective and hugely well established. Yet mobile technology can allow the medium to evolve and offer new customer experiences.

Some of the emerging technologies that can link out-of-home with our connected devices are startling. Near field communications will mean social spaces will be transformed into new, interactive zones, geo-fencing - virtual perimeters for real-world locations - will create a new layer to the world around us and lead to new types of augmented reality and consumer engagement. It seems QR codes were a very simplistic tip of a much more complex iceberg.

After hundreds of years of fairly straightforward outdoor media we're now installing interactive posters, near field communications, QR codes and geofencing - new technologies connecting us outside of the home to the digital world around us. This is a fabulous evolution says Forrester: "a poster will open the door to consumer engagement - but we can now use research tools to help us to understand what a consumer does with their mobile after viewing it."

"Advertisers that think they must add a mobile element to an existing outdoor creative campaign are destined for disappointment," says Grimmer. "Advertisers and their agencies that are creating work that harnesses the strength of both media are the ones that will be rewarded."

No room for laziness, it seems, but campaigns must remain simple and easy to engage with too. "Complexity in outdoor creativity is a sure-fire way to ensure confusion with consumers... but compelling messages for screens, whatever their size and functionality, still remains the end game for brands."

“The physical demeanor of this man, the way he describes life in the great outdoors, led me to understand that here was someone who had never boxed, been mountain climbing, played rugby, been involved in any of these classically masculine activities,” Assange said. “Now, for the first time, he feels like a man. He has gone to battle. It was one of many examples of the failure by the embedded reporters to report the truth. They were part of the team.”

Assange is correct. The press of a nation at war, in every conflict I covered, is an enthusiastic part of the machine, cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for war and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and slavishly lionize the troops, who will not endow them with a host of virtues including heroism, patriotism and courage, find themselves pariahs in newsrooms and viciously attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.

As a reporter at The New York Times, I was among those expected to prod sources inside the organs of power to provide information, including top-secret information. The Pentagon Papers, released to the Times in 1971, and the Times’s Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Council used “top secret” documents—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks. But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—effectively emasculated by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act half a dozen times since 2009 to target whistleblowers like Thomas Drake—it is left to the renegades, people like Assange and Manning, to break down walls and inform the public.