Smile: It's a Gift Card

A recent Consumer Reports Holiday Poll found that despite the recent economic woes, 66% of Americans still plan on giving at least one gift card this year, up from 62% last year. It appears that retailers south of the border are paying attention to this.

Gone are the days when the most interesting aspect of a giftcard design was the graphics that adorned it. New gift cards from Target and BestBuy are using innovative technology to vie for those hard-earned consumer dollars.


Target, who is well known for their dedication to good design, is releasing a Camera Gift Card. The camera itself is 1.2-megapixels with 8MB of memory on-board, and will reportedly come with a voucher for 40 free prints from Target.


BestBuy’s gift card will be ready to make some noise as it doubles as a speaker that can be user with a wide variety of MP3 Players, iPods or any other audio player with a mini headphone jack.

As women are the primary consumers of wireless gadgets and gizmos, and outspend men on electronics purchases, it will be interesting to see how well these new ‘enhanced’ gift cards will be received (and redeemed) by women this holiday season.