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Ad Measurement Is Going High-Tech
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "A media-measurement company called IMMI is giving panel participants special cellphones that can take reliable sound samples to track consumer behavior. 'Those snippets -- taken every 30 seconds and altered mathematically so any conversation is made unintelligible -- are transmitted continuously to IMMI,' the Wall Street Journal reports. 'Sounds from headphone devices such as iPods can be transmitted to the cellphones with a wireless accessory. IMMI has been building a database of sound signatures, with help from customers testing the company's services as well as with CD content it has licensed.' The idea is to use the sound signatures to test what media consumers are exposed to -- everything from radio music to movie trailers."
'Those snippets -- taken every 30 seconds and altered mathematically so any conversation is made unintelligible
And of course the folks whose servers this stuff ends up on also have a way to unencode the original soundbite. Even if they say they can't, don't or "would never do such a thing," given the current poor behavior of media / marketing corporations, why trust them?
" panel participants special cellphones that can take reliable sound samples to track consumer behavior..."
How many bytes does a customer statement of "Oh damn, it's that @#@!@#@ toenail fungus ad again!" take up?
Doesn't there get a point when marketing departments consume too much information in the quest to find out the spending habbits of every sentient creature in the universe?
I mean... Can't you just make things people need and find useful and if they need it they'll come to you?
Or am I mistaken... Are they just trying to convince all sentient beings they must buy things they never knew they needed to buy?
Either way... I hope they pay the panel participants good money for tracking them around town.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
altered mathematically to make unintellilligible? How exactly, then, do they tell what advertising, programs, and other media you are exposed to? Something here doesn't add up. Mainly, why in the hell would people agree to be carrying around an overt bugging device with the sole stated intent of monitoring thier actions?
It's bad enough that the government is monitoring all our conversations, but having corporations monitor our behavior for "marketing purposes" seems even worse. At least the government won't sell the data it finds to anyone willing to pay for it...
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Sounds kinda like Relatable's TRM fingerprints, which are used by MusicBrainz and in the Neuros audio player.
IIRC, the fingerprints don't have any actual content in them, but instead describe the characteristics of the audio. So it's plausible, at least, that they can't listen in on your conversations, but could still uniquely identify what you're listening to.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
So if I have lunch at Taco Bell, and go to the restroom when I get back to work, from the sound signature they can figure out how "explosive" the newest menu item is?
***Slowly tapes microphone on cell phone***
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I'm just curious what Fart sound signatures might mean to advertisers and marketing agencies.
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
What, you don't think the company asked the "participants" for a "deposit" on that specially-constructed cell phone?
The irony of asking for that as a deposit is that everyone is better off that they gave it up for any amount of time...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
The cell phone industry is a nice counter-example for anyone who insists that a free market is always good for the consumer, unless you redefine "consumer" as "wireless provider". NOBODY wants to carry around a phone that does what this article describes. Even those who aren't concerned about the privacy implications are going to be nonplussed by the fact that their batteries suddenly only last half as long because their phones are so busy processing and transmitting this marketing trash.
And to broaden my rant: Who are these people who think that playing TV programs and games on a phone is a great idea? Where are these people? I would love to see all of the marketing and R&D dollars poured into these stupid, stupid features go instead into producing smaller phones that have increased range, longer battery life and a user interface not designed by a team of raccoons. Is that so ridiculous?
My friend is participating in this "study" he constantly leaves his phone near his computer playing the same mp3's over and over. Not that he is intentionally skewing the results, he just leaves his mp3s running all the time anyway. The reason he does it is for free cell service, but I could see this easily turning into something similar to the Ad click programs that everyone signed up for in the good ol days. Load up a program to click on ad's constantly and watch the checks roll in!
Wikipedia has an article on sound signatures here
Who wants to be tagged like some wild animal so the media companies can tell you've been successfuly marketed to??
Anybody who would be persuaded to wear one of these things is probably ready to buy anything you tell them about. Everyone else is going to be looking at it like "why on Earth would I do that?".
Gah, how utterly creepy sounding. Then again, I'm pretty hostile to being marketed to, so I probably don't reflect a 'typical' view.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Next year's phones will all do this and send the results to the NSA. Gotta get those terrorists!
I'm sure they can figure out a one way algorithm that the phone can implement that would make human voice unrecognizable but in such a way that you could run the doritos commerical through the same algorithm and look for the signature.
You could probably just notch filter the typical range of the human voice and still have enough data left over to recognize just about any music or commerciall.
OTOH why not just have a device that records throuhgout the day and that the participants upload via their broadband connection at night.
I'd never go to chain restaurants, never buy mainstream media, actively avoid anything I've noticed an ad campaign for. What little TV I watch doesn't have ads, the music I listen to is not mainstream, and if they can make anything of the fact that I watched 4 episodes of Farscape last weekend and listened to Big City Orchestra, they're my kind of marketers.
If I could trust that the info was not being shared with law enforcement (big if) and didn't result in me having to see any ads, I seriously wouldn't care. My data is worse than worthless.
I used to be a mystery diner for chains, it was fun to get paid to eat at horrible chains and make fun of them in a report.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Almost anybody who is given a free portable player with access to free content.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Cheap freezers ruin your food. You'll get sick and throw up. You'll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you've got and see how rotten and mouldy it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle
Feckle Freezers!
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Today it's Madison Avenue, tomorrow it's DHS.
I presume most people here have read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, right? He pointed out decades ago that a phone can still operate even if the user isn't on it -- the phone is a ubiquitous bug, if anybody in control of the technology wants it to be used that way. We already know that cell phones have been used as medium resolution GPS trackers of people. Now we know that they are capable of listening in to our private moments as well.
It wouldn't take much for the manufacturers to put in enough memory to store random or prescheduled episodes of speech from our environment, even if we thought our phones were off. These could later be transmitted in a burst to some gov't agency and we wouldn't even notice the power drain. And cell phones always remain somewhat enabled, even when the main power is off. It's possible the time could come when the gov't requires manufacturers to build in some kind of continuous monitoring capability in order to be given their licenses to use the airwaves. If they suspect you, or if they suspect they might suspect you, they can remotely enable this mode.
This all sounds insanely paranoid to me, and now we have to to line our tin-foil hat with acoustic foam? There was a time not long ago when I'd dismiss anyone thinking about such things as a lunatic. But we have enough documented cases of policy corruption to go with the amazing advances in technology capabilities to make this all practical, if not practiced.
Well, I'm not about to go live as a trapper in the woods, and the technological genie can't be forced back into the bottle. Hopefully we can return to a benign government of the people and avoid the headlong rush into a police state. Now there's a crazy idea!
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
If the service were free I'd be happy to take this phone.
I am right there with you on also wanting more research into light, smaller, more pure phones which is sort of what I have (pay as you go phone from Virgin Mobile that is mostly just a phone) but I can see a place for something like this device where you give them data in exchange for service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you know what MADE the hash, and thus you know what they were listening to. You may as well just send the damn song title in the clear and save everyone the hassle. Also, with hashes, who knows what other sounds and words they may have hash values for?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
But if we don't let the government monitor our actions and tell us what to do, the terrorists will destroy democracy!
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
So your phone or whatever records some audio clip, sends it to this server where for the sake of argument it is one-way hashed. So that leaves them with...what? A hash of a sound recorded by you at time X? How exactly is that worth ANYTHING?
I also don't see how hashing would allow you to find similar sound clips, it seems to me most of them would be unique and even similar "adjacent" sounds would have a unique hash.
How much do you wanna bet this mathematical alteration is just a FFT?
Does that mean Google has been using ticker tape all this time?
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Did you miss the previous posting about AT&T delivering network traffic to the NSA, which unsurprisingly comes 2-3 years after all the hubbub about carnivore?
And long before that even there was Echelon, and also the Clipper Chip which was a simialr attempt that did not go through.
Honestly though I find it odd that people care so much about this, it seems pretty obvious to me that any transmissions sent over public networks are subject to being interecepted and listened to. If not the government, then someone in the phone company or just some guy with a little knowledge of the phone system.
The Bill of Rights guarantees us free speech, not that no-one will listen to it.
Now the clipper chip was bad news because that really was the government pushing into truly private communications.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's the apocalypse all right. I always assumed marketing would have a hand in it.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
They should not have started the idea with marketing in mind. Instead they should have suggested that every cell phone be turned into monitors for the audio signature for gunfire similar to that used in high-crime cities and anti-sniper targeting systems in Iraq. Combined with the GPS in the same phone crime locations can be identified. If the shot is considered very proximal to the phone owner's location, it could call 911 for you, similar to the OnStar automatic emergency call triggered when air bags are deployed.
Start with the public safety and anti-gun crime angle, then slowly work in the commercial angle under the reasoning that monitoring these systems is expensive and to maintain the public good it needs private funding.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The puns in the title really, you didn't need to click this far...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
is at http://immi.com/, btw.
"Doesn't there get a point when marketing departments consume too much information in the quest to find out the spending habbits of every sentient creature in the universe?"
The problem isn't "too much" information. It's finding the "correct" information.
"I mean... Can't you just make things people need and find useful and if they need it they'll come to you?"
Flip answer: and they're going to determine this through what? Mindreading? Also things cost. Success costs. Failures cost even more. Are you willing to pay more for their failures?
"Or am I mistaken... Are they just trying to convince all sentient beings they must buy things they never knew they needed to buy?"
Be nice of you to save them the trouble and tell them what to make, then promise to purchase.
"Either way... I hope they pay the panel participants good money for tracking them around town."
Focus group I'm going to be a part of pays over $200.
... I keep my cell phone securely under my tin foil hat when I'm not making calls.
The Financial Times (requires subscription) ran an article on this subject on 2nd of August 2005 here
A reference to this FT article can be found here.
I vote for all that data to immediately be sent to the NSA.
"The money is in making the consumer dissatisfied and convincing them that your product will satisfy them, then not satisfying them so they'll buy again."
Brilliant! I'll start a porn company. I'll be rich!
Oh please,I seen that cheap trick already.Its encrypted and mixed with random noise. I don't believe it.
If it was really scrambled it will be useless. Database of sound signatures?
Doesn't it make really suspicious?
Imagine a database of scrambled,one-second snippets of conversations(which have no content).How is that useful?
"The company has developed software that helps the phones take samples of nearby sounds, which are identified by comparing them against a database."
" says the technology can track exposure to CDs, DVDs, videogames, sporting events, audio and video on portable gadgets and movies in theaters."
Sounds its pretty accurate? How they "altered mathematically so any conversation is made unintelligible " and make sense?