Interactive advertising, augmented reality, gps aided shopping, and your privacy/sanity.

                                                                                                  The big ideas of AT&T via 1993                                                    

     This was AT&T's take on the future of computers, the internet, and interactivity from 1993. Although no one is renewing their driver's license from an ATM, many of the then lofty aspirations that AT&T had laid out for our tech marriages have come to fruition in some way shape or form. Many handheld, touchscreen, wifi connected things that we take for granted have been around for less than five years and the relationships that we have with our devices and our Internet person as are growing at an astounding rate. In turn, the amount of information a person knowingly or unknowingly gives to outside entities is staggering. From a live stream of a persons location throughout the day to the most intimate details of how we spend our money everything we do while connected to the Internet is being used to tailor a market to our personal likes, dislikes, and habits. The following will explore some of the good, the bad, and the interesting bi products of our constant interconnection with everything and the ideas that marketers and advertisers are producing that are changing the way things are made, and the way we are targeted. 

Interactivity: a really cool way for someone to get in your wallet. Advertisement is about trying to stand out from the rest of the crowd's neon glow in order to prevail as the most interesting 'thing' to consumers. Advertisers are engaged in a constant battle to compete within their own specific product markets where they can predict the viewing and buying habits of their audience. The advertisements that you will find in a copy of Car and Driver are fairly predictable; websites to buy parts for your wanna-be sports car, cool tires to put down all of that horsepower from you wanna-be sports car, and cool beer to drink in your wanna-be sports car(some alcohol warnings are even specific to the types of media they are in, e.g. don't drink and drive). Advertising in these specific markets is fairly predictable, and is often the same from one magazine ad or tv show commercial to another. In comes the Internet(boom goes the dynamite?). A portion of a person's time on the Internet may be spent in easily definable and predictable websites like CarandDriver.com  for instance, or they may be stumbling around Tosh.O's website, a website that has no real relevance to anything other than the Internet itself. The Internet is full of random, seemingly meaningless sites like Tosh.O and swaying a random viewer's attention to your brand of printer paper over some other guy's wanna be sports car is a challenge, and advertisers are coming up with more and more complex ways in which to capture people's attention. In the past advertisement has been a one way street. Your looked at, watched, or read what Company A was trying to sell to you and that was the end of the line. Using this one way advertising is only good for as long as your ad can keep a consumer's attention. As communication goes this is akin to the long lectures your parents would give you, preaching about this or that, stuck in the back seat of the lecture van  your dad is driving, winding down a seemingly endless road of one way rhetoric that you had long ago stopped paying attention to because you had no interaction and quickly lost interest. This is the same reaction that most people have with an average advertisement. The Internet and mobile devices have seen a rise in a new form of advertising that breaks the you sit and listen while I talk kind of ads. Many ads have taken on a more proactive style of engaging their audiences by either involving the consumer in the ads or their products, or by involving themselves with the consumer. 

Nike UNICEF Billboard

     Interactive Ads: These ads provide some way for the consumer to be in the ad, alter the ad, or tailor it to their own liking. The draw that these ads create are a complete novelty, but the curiosity that these ads generate through the ability to see your own input is very effective. Interactive billboards like  are also starting to become more common, turning what would be just another billboard into something that grabs a person's attention on the street enough to make them stop and view the ad for a period of time that would be unimaginable with a regular  billboard. Nike took the idea of   interactive billboards one step further when they

Mini Radio Billboard

 fully enclosed a treadmill within one of their billboards in Argentina to help raise funds for UNICEF.  Nike would donate a set amount for every  kilometer that was ran on the treadmill, allowing anyone to run and raise money. Nike's billboard was useful and effective, but there are many that are just plain cool, such as Honda's blue tooth interactive billboard and Minni's billboard that sent personalized messages to Mini owners based on the information about themselves that was radio transmitted from the car's key to the billboard. Another interesting billboard was by he BBC where you could cast your vote that displayed a counter on opposing sides of relevant political issues. 

BBC Text-In Billboard

     The video world has seen its own share of interactive commercials. AT&T ran a Valentine's Day series of ads where people could text a Valentine to a 'Mountain Man' and he would shout it during a following commercial break. There have also been a number of interactive web video ads that have featured some sort of interactivity including the Tip Ex viral spoof "A Hunter Shoots A Bear" where the viewer gets to decide the course of action of the hunter by typing suggestions above the video.

     AT&T's Interactive Valentine's Day ads.                          Tip Ex Interactive Video.

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     Augmented Reality: This is a genre of programs that splice your real world with an electronic one using your mobile device or a computer. AR programs typically use one of or a combination of your device's  accelerometers, camera, and GPS sensor to incorporate reality with some sort of electronic situation. This technology is a largely unused resource, but has a lot of promise in marketing and advertising. Augmented reality has been somewhat novel so far, but a few companies like USPS have figured out practical ways to apply AR technology in order to provide a customer some sort of practical application. Their box size simulator uses your web cam to visualize in real time how big a box will be, and you can even see how many of your own items will be able to fit in different size boxes. Smart phones and tablets are the more common platforms for AR apps and tools. There have been a number of apps that let a person visualize what a product will look like in real life, whether that meant wearing a pair of electronic sunglasses or visualizing a 3d couch in your living room. Converse had launched an AR app called the I Sampler that let a person visualize any pair of converse as seen from above. Ar apps don't stop at letting a person visualise a product. There are a variety of apps that  aid a person in finding products or places by combining GPS with cellphone cameras in order to further hold a person's hand in finding their way about town. More inventive uses have been displayed by the Museum of London, which made an AR app that would guide you to historical sites within the city where the app would help you frame up a shot of the historical site and it would overlay historical images on your own. While not always augmented reality, there are also a host of apps that are around for the sole purpose of telling other people your location. Some combine your location with your phones imaging sensor to give you a live view of stores or other places of significance such as Layar and Wikitude.

Museum of London AR Picture.

   What do I think? So, now that I've rambled on about all of these different kinds of advertisements what does all of this mean in terms of the advertising approach? I think that this is an entirely different classification of persuasive technique. I think that these ads are using people's own curiosity and urge to interact instead  of playing on some sense of emotion or feeling like hidden fear, or bandwagon appeal. I believe that this is no different than placing a person in an empty room with only one toy in it. No matter the age of the person, or the type of toy the person will eventually play with it. Novelty is useless except in it's sense of novelty, and people love when things are good for nothing but stupid fun. I think that every human has the urge to tinker, or play with things and advertisers have hit the nail on the head with these types of ads. The strength in these types of advertisements lies in their ability to immediately capture and hold a person's attention in a way that normal advertising fails to do. If a person walking down the street sees a person running on a treadmill that is withing a Nike billboard they are going to stop and look. If a person realizes that a billboard or sign is actually interacting with them they are probably going to stop, look, and take time out of their day to interact back and that one billboard has just managed to do what every other plain old billboard has been trying to do since they were invented; to capture that person and make them think sole about their product. This same person's engagement with the advertisement will be seen by other passers by, who will most likely be turned into more people gawking at an ad, and they will more than likely remember the ad at the end of the day.

  The downside: Interaction is a pretty cool thing when you can control it. I am perfectly happy with occasionally running into an ad that talks to me, or takes my picture, or even says my name and the specific car I am driving. I am not happy if every single billboard or storefront is going nuts trying to stop me so I can look at an interactive display for pregnancy tests, or Preparation H. I am also not okay with my cellphone giving me a notification every time I walk within ten feet of a product or business. The amount of personal information that it takes to see if you have won a free Coke from the little number inscribed under the cap is bad enough, I can only imaging what kinds of corporate shenanigans will take place as more and more of our identity is being sold, and companies are trying harder and harder to grab our attention. 

Interpret

Conclusions

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