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Japanese Video Chain Cashes in on Mobile Internet
Matthew Rothenberg writes: "CIO Insight has a case study that describes how Tokyo's Tsutaya video stores are tracking their users' shopping habits in real time via NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode wireless services and devices. 'We're not interested in merely renting videos to people,' Tsutaya founder Muneaki Masuda says. 'We're collecting lifestyle information, and the possibilities of that are, over time, enormous.'"
Unfortunately, were applying western thought to a very eatern culture. Japanese do not have the same feeling of privacy. Loudspeakers in public places "encourage" people to go to bed in some areas of Japan. The "annihilation of self" or the sacrifice of self for the good of the group is a prevalent ideology in Japan and other eastern cultures and I'm assuming that they would not be too put out by having their information transmitted to a potential supplier of wares, goods, or serivces.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Either Japan has a wildly different culture that has no expectation to legal, personal or consumer privacy, or this company is going to be eviscerated for tracking its customers' behavioral habits (not just purchasing habits).
Then again, I wonder what the safeguards are. If people are opting in to receive this wireless info, no big deal - they chose to receive it. Tracking's a different story, but still, what web site owner doesn't track how much demand they get from an ad or a news story? If they're not opting in, hmmm - sounds spammish.
Last, I wonder if Tsutaya is tracking consumer response to their e-notifications en masse, like matching up web site visitors to their country of origin, or if they're doing microtracking - matching up responses to each individual, each indiv with their own corporate-database-tracked profile? One's OK, the other's nuts. Both are easily and totally possible.
Can't wait til Blockbuster or BestBuy starts doing this! Not...
actually, what if you "borrowed" a friends (or foes) phone and then made a lot of VIctoria's secret orders and bought some NSYNC cd's?!
Could you then "RUIN" someone's demographic fit?
Thats actually real scary.
Imagine getting bombarded with goatse.cx pictures while trying to read about the latest linux distro?
Oh, wait, this is slashdot...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What if I liked the idea of only having to see or sit through ads for things I would actually be interested in? I don't want to be tracked either, but is anyone aware of a company working on tracking where I submit what I want tracked (I don't give a damn if everybody know how many times I've seen Star Wars) and can keep the rest of my privacy? Would such submission be more hassle than it was worth, or would the advantages (to me) outweigh the effort?
That said, I also have no problem with word of mouth ads that are one-off. I'm interested when someone tells me something they like even I it's new to me. Otherwise, how would I be made aware of new things to try or look into (like how I found out about Slashdot)?
At what point will people realize that lifestyles are not globalized by any means yet, and that part of the difference is the level of willingness to share that kind of information.
I'm not surprised this would work in Japan. Japan is "consumerism 'done right'", where 'done right' means there are no compromises. We're talking about a culture that has underwear vending machines, corporations live in a comfortable mercantilist marriage with the government, and the idea of opposing a keiretsu makes as much sense as voluntary amputation.
This doesn't mean it can work in the US, or many other places.
The fact that it may not work here doesn't mean it won't work there, either. Not every culture puts that much value in "privacy", not even the US's, and you require a very significant demographic actively opposing this, or your privacy advocates will end up being tomorrows "sovereign citizen"'s movement.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Corporations always think they can track what I buy and then use something like the "recommendation engine" they talk about in the article to tell me what else I would like. Sure that seems like a helpful service but it really is a very selfish service, because it does nothing to expose me to new and interesting stuff, it simply herds me along with what 9 out of 10 other people watched after they watched what I just watched. The whole purpose is to get the most of my money the fastest way possible.
OK, so you might say, "you dont have to use the recommendation service". But you see that is not the problem. The problem is that they will eventually produce a much less diverse range of films, music, etc and focus in only on what the majority wants to see. They are already doing that today, but it will get worse with systems like these. Soon your local Blockbuster will not bother stocking your favorite cult film, if they haven't already. My problem with this is that it really homogenizes the population into a bunch of boring drones who are told what to like and what to think.
I Heart Sorting Networks
We do similar things here, cable companies selling logs to the same people that administer the systems of grocery cards to know if someone was watching a commercial for a product bought by you.
I wonder what sort of psycological impact this has on a person.
Really, people talk about the internet polarization of ideologies, what is this doing to say someone that may have a passing interest in say quiltmaking they rent a video, the japaneese system shove quiltmaking products of all sorts down the customers throat at every juncture, and eventually through the aid of all including the ISP, Cable Companies, etc, all the person see is quiltmaking shit, do they , A) go insane B) Join the Rosie Grier(for you who dont know look it up its worth the laugh) needlepint society. c)Gain a hatred for quilts, buy ginsu knives and start chopping up quilts, which then leads to a proliferation of cutlery advertising targeted at this same customer, who in turn becomes a serial killer due to all the cutlery advertising now.
Leave your TV on some stupid ass channel when not at home, trade grocery cards(please make sure you cant cash a check with it) and lend you cell phone to your aged aunt selma who couldnt figure out how to use it if her life depended on it.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
and everything to do with DoCoMo. They made i-Mode just for this stuff. That is why I cringe when people (if I remember Taco's quote correctly) describe the Japanese as "light-years ahead of us in cell phones."
I did some work on this stuff a while back, and the outline of their system is here.
The really fun part is that what I was involved with was making the information about how this worked clear to American executives at telcoms. I doubt we have long to wait till this great tech comes to a continent near us.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
This is exactly why I hope the US NEVER gets 3G! I want my phone to do one thing: make and receive phone calls. If I can hook a modem or such to it and transfer data, thats great ... but through another device! I don't want everything in my phone; not my PDA, not my web browser, just a phone.
*sigh*
Realistically, I know that we will be getting something (probably not true 3G by the time its all done, but something similar) and I will have to switch phones if I want one at all.
Damn.
My mother always used to tell me: If you can't find anything nice to say, say something bad about Windows.
This is yet another point where your initial viewpoint influences the conclusion you arrive at.
:)
Instead of "this will drive products to centrist crap" you can have a different perspective on this. One thing this will allow, is to provide a "guaranteed audience" for just about any genre you care to name. And provide a way to get access ot that audience.
You like movies about obscure topic X. Most movie companies don't bother making such movies, because the marketting costs involved in informing you that the movie exists are too high for the small size of the market. If, instead, you can simply send an email out to everyone that likes these movies, your marketting costs just dropped like a rock. Your audience is suddenly aware of your movie, and, one can hope, if it doesn't suck too much people will actually see/rent/buy it. But no one will see/rent/buy it if they don't know about it.
This *can* make it more economical to target smaller audiences by decreasing the costs of communicating with that audience.
Will it acutally be done that way? Well, that's where your initial preconceptions come into play.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?