I agree that indiscriminate advertising is intrusive (and as I mentioned, frequently irrelevant). I agree that people have the right to initiate a search.
The point I wanted to make is that it doesn't need to be indiscriminate and that people don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for what they want. There has to be some common ground between companies that have products and services to offer and individuals who have needs to be met.
It's going to take more than a GPS receiver in OnStar to understand what my needs are as a consumer. The only way that's going to happen is if I tell them what I want. And it's not going to make me spend more, just help me find the things that I'm going to buy anyways, while saving me the time of querying databases all day or viewing boring, mindless ads.
Ads on OnStar, or any other application for that matter, will always be pointless unless we take a more proactive role in how they're relayed. Oh, and I think it's "all or nothing".. Either ads should be informative, or not sent at all.
That's a good point.. can they target ads to an individual car? If so, this could be a great service.
The evil of advertising is not that it's so frequent or intrusive, but that it's so frequently intrusive and *irrelevant*.
If OnStar kept a database of my likes and dislikes, and only targeted ads based on my preferences.. that's not spam, that's valuable information! I like Seafood. If I drive into a new city, and I get a list of seafood restaurants nearby with Zagats reviews, that's VALUABLE! If it shows me McDonalds Filet-o-fish ads, it's history. Even more valuable would be listing the closest stores that have a particular product I'm looking for *in stock*.
I doubt very much that this is what the OnStar ads will be like today, but you can imagine such a service being implemented in the not so distant future.
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I agree that indiscriminate advertising is intrusive (and as I mentioned, frequently irrelevant). I agree that people have the right to initiate a search.
The point I wanted to make is that it doesn't need to be indiscriminate and that people don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for what they want. There has to be some common ground between companies that have products and services to offer and individuals who have needs to be met.
It's going to take more than a GPS receiver in OnStar to understand what my needs are as a consumer. The only way that's going to happen is if I tell them what I want. And it's not going to make me spend more, just help me find the things that I'm going to buy anyways, while saving me the time of querying databases all day or viewing boring, mindless ads.
Ads on OnStar, or any other application for that matter, will always be pointless unless we take a more proactive role in how they're relayed. Oh, and I think it's "all or nothing".. Either ads should be informative, or not sent at all.
That's a good point.. can they target ads to an individual car? If so, this could be a great service.
The evil of advertising is not that it's so frequent or intrusive, but that it's so frequently intrusive and *irrelevant*.
If OnStar kept a database of my likes and dislikes, and only targeted ads based on my preferences.. that's not spam, that's valuable information! I like Seafood. If I drive into a new city, and I get a list of seafood restaurants nearby with Zagats reviews, that's VALUABLE! If it shows me McDonalds Filet-o-fish ads, it's history. Even more valuable would be listing the closest stores that have a particular product I'm looking for *in stock*.
I doubt very much that this is what the OnStar ads will be like today, but you can imagine such a service being implemented in the not so distant future.