1. Home >
  2. Extreme

The future of high-tech advertising

Advertising -- the art and science of diverting and targeting attention on a specific object or service -- is one of the oldest and most mature industries in the world. But where will technology take it next?
By Sebastian Anthony
Time Square advertising

Advertising -- the art and science of diverting and targeting attention on a specific object or service -- is one of the oldest and most mature industries in the world. For as long as humans have had anything to trade, be it crops, tools, or even their bodies, advertising has existed. Today we think of advertising as annoying pop-up ads and massive, digital billboards in Times Square, but the hand-painted shop signs of yesteryear and the monumental cathedrals that reach to the heavens are also adverts.

Back then, of course, advertising was only a shadow of what it is today. Bight colors, imposing columns, and stained glass windows were the state of the art. Today, advertising is a trillion-dollar industry that utilizes behavioral psychology, crowdsourcing, viral marketing, semiotics, stereotypes, and dozens of other sciences, arts, and skills to persuade an audience -- sometimes numbering into hundreds of millions for large sporting events, but increasingly just a single person -- into doing something new. The other big change is the scale of advertising: Historically, ads would be local -- signs, leaflets through doors -- but today, due to globalization and the commercialization of everything, almost every channel of communication is saturated with advertising. TV, radio, billboards, websites, newspapers, video games, movies -- you name it, almost everything that receives your attention for more than a few seconds is a prime target for ads.

Malt Shovel InnThe advertising of the future, then, will hinge entirely on new communication channels. In much the same way that highly-targeted advertising couldn't exist before the internet, web browsers, and tracking cookies, future ads will leverage the mediums by which we consume content and communicate with others.

To start with an easy example, look at advertising in Minority Report, which uses two novel ideas: biometric retina identification and digital signage. By tracking you in the real world, digital signs can display relevant ads. If you're a vegetarian standing outside a restaurant, the digital sign will show the tastiest vegetarian options. If you're outside a clothes shop, the sign will show you what it thinks is suitable clothing -- or, if you've shopped there before, it will know exactly what to show you. We're actually very close to this kind of advertising already, though with facial recognition rather than retina.

What about the cell phone? With GSM and now 3G and 4G, we are looking at one of the most exciting advances in communication ever -- and yet, as far as advertising is concerned, all we have is a few banner ads on apps. 400 million smartphones were sold last year, and they produced almost zero advertising revenue. I guarantee that, right this minute, thousands of highly paid advertising execs are trying to work out a way of monetizing smartphones.

Face UnlockWith Ice Cream Sandwich, we have a hint of how mobile advertising might play out. In ICS, there's a feature called Face Unlock -- it unlocks your phone when it recognizes your face. Imagine if every time you picked up your phone it took a quick snapshot of your face. Imagine if your identity was then made available to apps, websites, and advertisers; it would be like Minority Report, but on a much smaller and more intimate scale. We already have the tech to do this; it's just a matter of getting it approved (which will be hard).

The scary thing is, though, Google can already do the same thing, but simply using tracking cookies and your Google account. When you buy an Android phone, you have to link it to your Google account -- and now, with Google's unified privacy policy, your search and surf habits will be available to mobile advertisers and vice versa. In short, it's very easy for Google to see that you regularly search for something -- beer or video games, say -- and then to plaster the Android Market on your phone with relevant ads (or ads from competitors). This will be just the beginning of mobile advertising, I assure you.

Meanwhile, back in the comfortable realm of couch surfing, the push to bring internet connectivity to television sets threatens to shake up an area of advertising that has been mostly stagnant for 50 years. Flingo, for example, is a piece of software that effectively creates a TV-watching cookie; it takes note of what you watch, when you watch, and how long you watch for -- and then sends that cookie back to advertisers. Google TV linked into your Google account and YouTube videos with pre-roll ads are basically the same thing. In other words, instead of being blanketed with banal ads for crap you're probably not interested in, the Fringe of the future might be interspersed with highly-targeted, useful ads.

Ultimately, then, advertising is about being as personal as possible. It makes sense: Everyone has different buttons. In trying to persuade someone into doing or buying something, the more specific the buttons you can press, the better your conversion rate will be. At first advertising wasn't targeted at all, then it was probably segregated into gender, then age group and ethnicity, and finally, today, advertising can target specific individuals at an incredibly granular level. Facebook advertisers, for example, can advertise to 18-year-old men who like beer and girls and dislike Star Trek.

Emotiv brain-computer interfaceThis trend won't change. Scatter-gun, untargeted advertising on the radio and in the cinema isn't going to go away any time soon, but the value and effectiveness of targeted and cost-per-click ads is so much higher that, eventually, everything will be personalized. When you log into Xbox Live or Steam, the game recommendations will be targeted (and potentially sponsored by an advertiser). When you stick a DVD in an internet-connected TV (or stream a movie via UltraViolet), the pre-roll ads will be targeted. Internet radios, like Spotify, Pandora, and Rdio, will play targeted ads. Looking even further into the future, to a time where we interact with technology using brain-computer interfaces, it might be possible for advertisers to read our minds and display the perfect ads at the perfect time.

The future of advertising, then, is hyper-targeted -- and as technology becomes steadily more ubiquitous (smartphones, in-car entertainment, face recognition in shop windows), the targeting will simply become more and more accurate. Whether that's a good thing or not, I leave as a question to you.

[Image credit(Opens in a new window)]

Tagged In

Google Tv Surfing Advertising Society Targeted Advertising

More from Extreme

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of use(Opens in a new window) and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
Thanks for Signing Up