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New Ad Technology Tracks Consumer Movement
mingrassia writes "Over at CNN: New technology tracks consumer movement, flashes messages and calls out to passersby. Meet the Human Locator. It's a new technology developed by Canadian ad agency Freeset Interactive that purports to detect when humans are near, track their movement, and then broadcast messages directed at them on a nearby screen. Conspiracy theorists can relax, however. The Human Locator can't yet identify, say, obese pedestrians and then bombard them with images of a cheeseburger and fries."
It's probably illegal, but does anyone know a way to (permanantly) disable a digital camera? Would a laser pointer do it? Not that I would do anything of the sort, of course.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
At first glance at "consumer movement" I thought
about a revolutionary toilet device that examined
what consumers were, well, consuming. And then
an advertisement would flash in front of the captive
audience. I guess that would be too revolutionary.
It's called directed sound. There was also a big deal made about it for the Republican convention (e.g., here and here). as a crowd control measure.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
So it's basically just a motion detector with some fancy bells and whistles (ie, can tell if you're walking away)? What's the big deal? It's not like it's gonna give try and market special ads to individual people, or that when you leave the vicinity of the ad fixture it even remembers you.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Negative or not, they did get brand recognition. You may think that company X are rear orifices for advertising laundry detergent Y in this way, but at least you remember detergent Y.
Three weeks later, as you are standing in the aisle, choosing a detergent from the fivehundredmillion varieties dumped upon us, you will react emotionally to the sight of detergent Y. You do not have an emotional reaction (positive or negative) to the others. Of course, it been three weeks, so you don't actually remember why you have a reaction. The negativity was most likely attached to the company, not the brand, and since you don't really recall the connection to the company, the negative attributions are mostly gone. All you remember is that you have emotions for detergent Y and not for the others.
Guess what? You are more likely to buy it.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This could eventually be expanded to resemble Amazon's product reccomendations based upon what you're wearing, what sort of items are in your bag (RFID), etc. I just can't wait until it gets as bad as Snow Crash where they can hack into the LCDs implanted into your eyes and display commercials constantly until you commit suicide.
Imagine when the human-targeting billboard people get together with the RFID people before descending on your nearest Wal~Mart. Can't tell skinny people from fat, male from female, you say? Once most products have RFID tags, it'll be a simple matter to differently target the person whose cart just rolled up with FUBU t-shirts and 13 bottles of Jheri Curl vs. the one with a stack of flannels and a gross of shotgun shells. (And telling the Size 8 purchases from the Size 18 purchases is more trivial still.) The beauty is these guys don't even have to correlate anything with actual purchases nor tie into a specific customer's Preferred Card database profile for this targeting method to be effective (although that might not stop 'em from trying anyway).
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.