Over the past two years, retailers have morphed their infamous shopping day into a new tradition: Cyber Monday. According to Fast Company, “Cyber Monday sales totaled $687 million” in 2006. Since the majority of consumers’ online purchases are made during business hours anyways, retailers learned to apply this trend to revitalize our holiday shopping experience.

We now have the best of both the materialistic and affectionate worlds during the holiday season: we can enjoy quality time with our family and friends and still purchase our “must have” items. The only fall back is that consumer’s now spend Monday scanning the Internet at work looking for great gift ideas instead of focusing on their normal everyday responsibilities and tasks. Crossing our fingers that our boss won’t catch us! But this change in pace has also caused a seismic shift in the advertising world. Budgets for print and broadband ads are being redistributed into interactive/digital campaigns. The alteration in distribution channels has clients fighting for their banners and skyscrapers to run during this crucial timeline. But marketers have embraced this change. The interactive switch gives them the in the opportunity to create promotional campaigns that will generate a larger database of qualified sales leads and a more accurate account and understanding of their target market.

Consumers shopping habits are evolving and simultaneously, the advertising world must follow suit. Seasons greetings from new media!

By integrating this new capability into its Acrobat software, Adobe has taken the static PDF format and reinvented a program capable of creating dynamic and eye catching electronic marketing collateral.

Imagine a real estate agency that would normally email static spec sheets on properties to prospective buyers. How much more interesting would it be for these potential buyers to receive a PDF with a video tour of the property, right there embedded within the PDF? This also opens up a whole new world of possibilities for product support documents. Have you ever downloaded or received a user manual for something you purchased? Wouldn’t it be much more helpful if that manual was embedded with instructional videos of how to operate or put something together? As a new father, I know I would have a lot more hair if I had had instructional videos to go along with the user guides when attempting to put together the stroller, bouncy seat, pack ‘n play, crib, changing table, and Diaper Genie!

With the full Flash integration in this latest release, the previously limited ability to convert web pages into PDFs is significantly enhanced. Until now, it was impossible to capture complete web pages and place them in a PDF document, due to the inclusion of rich and interactive media in most websites. Now the entire page can be captured, which is beneficial in website review as PDF versions of web pages, can be printed, marked up, and shared.

It’s just another cool product released by Adobe that will help marketers get a leg up on their competition by taking advantage of this technology and thinking creatively!