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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.
How many times do you need to hear/see an advert for it to sink in?
This system is geared for that once only viewing:
As each passing device has a unique Bluetooth signal, this enables the screen to identify different individuals passing by. It builds a record of the adverts those people have been previously been shown to make sure messages are not repeated.
Surely advertisers want you to be paying enough attention to get the product information but to not drill it in 500 times a day.
Seems like a good idea, but the privacy advocates will go bananas (and demand it dismantled when all thats needed is to take out your bluteeth)
liqbase
The problem with advertisements now is that the vast majority of them don't appeal to me. I am a white male age 18-35. That doesn't mean that I fall into any particular demographic, it just means that I may be vaguely interested in some things that others are perhaps also interested. Bzzt. I am an individual!
So what this purports to do is give me information that I am interested in. Not information that "my generation" needs. Information underload is done away with and I now have interesting data customized for me. This is great because I no longer have to endure GLH infomercials and can get back to enjoying Lean Mean Fat-grilling Machine infomercials.
Imagine a video camera on the advertisement that spots you're bald and loads an ad for Rogaine or one that determines you're fat and loads an ad for NutriSystem, or that you have no fashion sense and loads clothing ads!
Lol no doubt, I can see it now:
Some hot chick appears on the billboard and says in a sultry voice: "Hello John Smith, did you need a refill on your last order of Teeny-Weeny condoms?"
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Good thing I'm not currently carrying any Bluetooth devices. No ads for me? Sweeet.
What's that, you say? It can detect the court ordered electronic monitoring device attached to my ankle? Shit!
hang brain.
... 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? --
All you need to do is take out your blueteeth, eh? What if that means getting rid of everything?
Sorry to "go bananas" on you but it's a possibility that's highly probable and I don't like. What, are you now going to tell me I'm a schizo for complaining about the NSA wiretapping? Does that make me a 'privacy advocate'? Because in my eyes, I'm just an American citizen who's sick of technology raping my goddamn privacy.
FTFA: "It can uniquely identify devices but keeps the person anonymous."
Sorry, but with all the identity theft, credit card skimming, government intrusion into privacy, etc. I find it hard to believe that such a system will provide "assured" anonymity for very long.
I wonder if there will be an increase in muggings/robberies because of this. All a thief has to do is stand near a sign, look for a laptop-related, phone-related or ipod-related advert to appear as someone walks past and then they have their target for the day.
Warhammer forums
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!
*massive blue face appears on the silver screen*
Attention theater attendants: The occupant in seat 4a, row 5 has a bluetooth enabled video camera.
SEIZE HIM!
Now please turn off all electronic devices, or else, and enjoy our feature presentation!
Demented But Determined.
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.
Homeland Security called, they want you to send them a copy of your CV right away, they said you sound like management material.
An older NewScientist story describes another system that beams ads directly to phones, also via Bluetooth.