Will You Ever Be Able To Look At A Space Without Advertising Again?

Bleeding Edge

from the your-ad-here! dept

Certain advertisers are starting to realize that any blank space that people look at, for any length of time, can be used for advertising. All those blanks walls in stores? Wasted space! And, now they’re looking to take what they (haven’t) learned from advertising online, and make sure that the advertising you’re inundated with is personalized to you. It may not be long until you’re walking around a store and discover that an ad targeted directly at you is following you around on the wall. Sound creepy? Hell yes, but it appears not everyone has figured that out yet. Perhaps some people should take a step back and look at just how well this sort of “plan” has worked out online. Every blank space is filled with flashing, squawking, bleeping banner ads – and everyone ignores them. What about personalization? Well, so far, despite plenty of information on what I surf, it doesn’t look like any of these “sophisticated” advertising systems has any idea what’s remotely interesting to me. So, now they expect that this will suddenly work if the ads are shown on the walls of stores? Seems doubtful. And, how do they plan to know who you are and what you might be interested in a real world devoid of deposited cookies? They have lots of ideas, from monitoring your mobile phone (you can fill out a “survey” which your phone will broadcast to all the advertising projectors surrounding you) to doing face recognition on the fly.