p2pnet - rss feed: You think Net SPAM is bad?
True horror story.
You think online SPAM is bad? Imagine mobile SPAM. And you can’t escape.
Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy, is telling Wired’s Daniel Terdiman here that the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise’s character is "besieged by video advertising targeted directly at him as he walks down the street" isn’t science fiction. It’s now - "It’s just a matter of finding people willing to pay for it."
Advertising execs are having trouble finding new ways to ‘persuade’ consumers to consume. Buy. More. Junk (sorry! valuable merchandise) they don’t really want certainly don’t need and will forget about 10 minutes after they’ve bought it.
But, Terdiman says, Shane Booth, a researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, or MERL, "believes he’s found one approach that works. When it comes to market, it could change the way in-store merchandising is done.
"Booth’s team is developing a system that projects product information onto a wall. As a customer approaches the wall, the system senses that someone is getting closer and alters the message it projects, incorporating data about the person gleaned through facial-recognition technology. The closer the customer approaches, the more specific the information gets. Eventually, the message would focus on the actual product the person is handling."
If you, "put that data to use, it’s a big amount of data about who’s looking at (products), for how long, what they’re looking at, and it’s all real-time data," the story quotes Booth as saying. "Imagine being the store manager in the back, seeing this display. If (messages) aren’t working, the displays learn who’s looking at it, and can cater the message."
Right. Imagine.
"Perhaps more scary, admits Booth, is that the system also can tailor messages to individuals based on demographic information it gathers about them as they walk around a store," the Wired article goes on. "That is done through facial-recognition technology built into the system that can determine race, age and sex.
"Thus, demographically tailored messages can be projected instantly onto a wall near specific customers.
"The goal, explains Booth, is to find new ways of luring customers and keeping them engaged with marketing messages and products. The more time they spend looking at a video product display, the more likely it is that they will buy that product."
However, Underhill says he often finds merchants have spent so much money on digital technology that they don’t have any cash left for the software they need to keep it up-to-date.
Another common problem is that the technologies that excite marketers commonly repel the people they’re trying to target.
"Often, consumers find ultra-targeted marketing frustrating, a reaction exacerbated by the fact that there’s not much they can do to make it go away."
Really?
Terdiman’s report concludes:
"As Underhill puts it, ‘One of the poignancies of our era is that our technology has moved at lightning speeds past what our privacy laws are.
" ‘One of the realities of our lives is that we have a consumer base out there that is reacting very badly to some of the ways technology and marketing have met,’ he says."
Don’t worry, Pete. DBT (direct brain targetting) can’t be far away.
