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You Look Like You Need a Guinness
prestidigital writes "This is a great fictional advertisement (high bandwidth) for Guinness. I say "fictional" because it is from the movie Minority Report. You may recall that Steven Spielberg is known for heavy branding in movies ala the opening scenes from Back to the Future (Burger King and Pepsi plastered all over). Well, apparently he has taken it a step further by weaving it into the very fabric of the plot in Minority Report. Cool ads if you can afford to wait for them. Lexus is good."
You can already see that this kind of advertising is soon to come. Ya get hundreds of email spam with your name on it and you get tons of phone calls a day congradulating YOU for being accepted for a new low rate card. How many of you agree that if not the eyes being scanned, there is at least this huge war for the eye balls at every website you go to. Remember those obnoxious flash adds, flashing adds, adds that run all over the page you are trying to read, and not to mention the ones with audio. I think there is a line that consumers are going to put up with. We have been pounded and proded by product placement in every single medium we use, and there is a point where you start to loose customers who get pissed off with this invasion of sanity. Hopefully people will speak up before the ads in this movie become a reality otherwise I am going to start wearing mirror sunglasses.
Going into the store with you significant other...
"Ah! Joe Johansen! Good to see you again! We just received a new batch of KY in butterscotch, your favorite flavor, according the Basking Robbins!
We know you normally buy KY down at Big Al's Porn Shoppe on 32nd, but this store is 4 blocks closer to your home, and we know how awkward it is to get those 50 gallon drums home on the public slideway! Why not have one of our friendly clerks help you out to your car with one of the store's hand-trucks? Remember, we provide free curb service, where Big Al's doesn't!
How is Millie, your Yak, by the way? Has the infection she had responded to the Penicillin you purchased two weeks ago from Bob's Veterinary Supply? Is she still down in U-Store-It Storage Unit #15? We have a co-marketing agreement with U-Store-It, where if you buy from us today, you will get 5% off your next month's rent!
..."
[and on and on...]
Uh, no thank you!
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If PKD were still alive he would be laughing his ass off at the product placements in this movie; not only are the ads portrayed as he envisioned, the moviemakers actually used the techniques being portrayed to help pay for the movie portraying them.
On second viewing I also have to say that the "not too futuristic future" is more different from ours than it first appears. Every flat surface in the movie's public space is a monitor showing ads. Even the cereal box! (That was soooo Philip K. Dick.) While The Gap might not be around in 2050, you can rest assured some other business serving the same niche will be; and it and the fashions within will be as unremarkable to the people of 2050 as the Gap and its product are to us in 2002.
And you have to really wonder whether the rest of the movie after Anderton is haloed is just a fantasy (a la Total Recall) or if it really happened...
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
There is a reputed Blade Runner Curse, referring to a number of brands given prominent display in Blade Runner which fell victim to hard financial times during the 80's, with the exception of Coca-Cola. Brands such as Atari and Pan Am, which were featured quite prominently in ads on the sides of buildings lost a tremendous amount business, to the point of collapse (although I was shocked last week to see the Atari brand on my NWN box). It wouldn't surprise me, then, to see a number of companies shown in Minority Report to collapse before 2054, even currently viable corporate behemoths. I would like to think that their inclusion in a speculative illustration of dystopian coporate intrusion would be the "real reason" they collapsed, and that PKD somehow had a part in it, laughing at the irony of it all.
Free Mac Mini
Walking into a bookstore:
But, it might be neat to have tailored banner ads online. I mean, I never want to go hunting or fishing, so don't show me anything outdoorsy, but would like to see something regarding computer programming, but not games.
Click here or here.
"We need personalized ads, like Minority Report. And we need them now. I want ads like that in our malls by next year!"