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Advertising Screen Tailors Ads to Audience
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist are running an article about a system which tailors the ads displayed on a screen according to what BlueTooth gadgets people are carrying. A bit like the billboards in Minority Report ." Awkward situations created by devices like this will be scenes in the sit-coms of tomorrow.
... on the nuances of bluetooth. First off, it's likely that it will only work on discoverable devices. These are getting increasingly small in number, as cellphone companies and others learn to disable that by default.
:)
Secondly, I'd be interested to see what information they plan on using. For instance, I have a Motorola V551.. so I have a cell phone. Now, my cellphone happens to have a name of Diwani (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwani), so will I get Arab language stuff? I know another person who's cell phone is named Turd Ferguson...
It may be good for a laugh
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Actually, if I understand it right, all this would do is make sure you get to see more ads (by reducing the probability to see the same one again), not actually target them to you. The system won't even know you're a guy, in fact, but just whether it detected your bluetooth device before, and during which ads.
So it won't necessarily mean you get " Lean Mean Fat-grilling Machine" infomercials. It might as well mean that instead of seeing a Tampax ad 10 times, you'll see ads for Tampax, OB, SlimFast, WonderBra and some epilation machine, 2 times each.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's nothing. Just wait until I finish perfecting my device that will target advertising based on what RFID tags you are foolishly carrying around on you. Bwaahahahah!
Oh, right, that's how the advertising bubble (driving the dot-com bubble) worked. Let's subject the user to hundreds of thousands of different, but still untargetted, ads, and surely he'll end up buying everything. Right? Heck, instead of having just 1 ad on the main page, let's have a dozen different ads on each page. It's good if the user gets a lot of product information, right?
Needless to say, it didn't work that way. Being bombarded by a lot of untargetted stuff just got people to mentally filter those out. Whereas in the days of 1 (and always the same) banner on the main page, people actually clicked on them, nowadays most of us don't even notice them any more.
Plus, you know what kind of a downward slope that started, as each generation of untargetted ads had to be more obtrussive and in-your-face to be noticed at all. Pop-ups, full-page ads, layers on top of the actual page, became actually necessary because that bombardment actually desensitized people to the point where a normal banner isn't even noticed any more.
So, I dunno, it may be that the privacy advocates _are_ right there. Whether you're worried about the privacy or not, the problem still is that it's for naught. It's a rehash of an idiotic idea we've already seen before, and which _didn't_ actually provide any actual benefit. Not for the ad providers, not for the web masters, not for the users. I can even understand risking your privacy and a slippery slope in return for some actual benefit, but it seems stupid to me to just give it up when there are no benefits whatsoever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bald and fat people usually care that they are bald or fat or both. So they might be interested in doing something about it. As someone without fashion sense I can tell you that clothing ads do nothing for me. Clothing in ads looks no better to me than what I'm already wearing.
Maybe