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."

Comments

Re:I don't get it.

[panaceaa]

The business model for this product would likely parallel the business models for online spyware companies, such as Gator/Claria. That is: Give people something they want for free, and then bundle some things they may be okay with having too. For example, maybe this device could be embedded into free iPods? And since many people go everywhere with their iPods, the ad measurement device is always there to do it's thing. Personally I would just buy an iPod on my own, but there are many teenagers who don't have that liberty.

But, really ....

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:I don't get it.

[Otter]

I think it's more like Nielsen boxes -- a demographically meaningful sample of people is paid to carry these things around with them.

If the hashing scheme people are speculating about is how this works, I'd say that's pretty damn clever, whatever the ethical merits. And honestly, the ethical issues don't strike me as a huge deal. On my list of privacy concerns, knowing whether I'm forced to listen to Holly Jolly Christmas more or less than Here Comes Santa Claus in the supermarket in December doesn't rate extremely high.

Heh, I bet they can tell when you're in a strip club, though...

Cell Phone Paranoia

[Bob3141592]

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!