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Advertising of the Future, Already Here
prostoalex writes "Did Stephen Spielberg predict the future of advertising, when in Minority Report the relevant ads were delivered by retina scanner, which could then personalize any message? August issue of Inc. magazine takes a look at future of advertising and who's offering advanced technologies today. Internet search engines and helpful utilities from companies like Claria already know a lot about your shopping and browsing habits. Combine that with advanced tech from TV viewership tracker Nielsen and large nationwide databases like Experian, and the advertising messages of the future could get extremely personal."
Gah, it'll be a grim future when you can't avoid ads by closing your eyes (because they'll be projected inside your eye).
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So does anyone have one or more good reasons why this kind of intrusive abuse of advertising should not be banned right now?
I can only hope that advertisers start to realize what they're doing by making their ads increasingly intrusive. I've done a fair amount of work studying advertising, and it's shown that by creating louder, personalized, in-your-face ads is more effective to about 90% of the market, and it turns off about an additional 10% (these numbers incredibly generalized for your reading enjoyment). However, as great as that sounds to marketers, advertising has increased so dramatically on such a huge scale, that these stunts are yielding diminishing marginal returns, because they now do it continuously. It's nearly impossible for today's generation to escape advertisement and endorsements. Increasing the volume has reached the point of turning off just about as many people as it gains - and this will become a huge factor as the baby boomer population reaches Senior Citizen status. The elderly respond far better to conservative advertising than to brash advertising - they also become less likely to switch brands, having built up brand associations over several decades. As they're going to be a dominant economic force, not earning wages but spending money nonetheless, advertisers need to back off of the intrusive advertising if they want to continue making sales.