A Potential Future of Interactive Indoor & Outdoor Advertising

The interactive ad technology in the movie Minority Report is truly inspirational. The movie is set in 2054. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is walking through a mall, and the ad display units know who he is and are advertising the products directly to him. Here’s the clip:

Let’s examine all four components from the Minority report clip: the ad unit / medium,  identification / targeting, interaction / message, and tracking.

1. The Ad Unit/ Medium

1947  – Holography is first discovered by a Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor. Flash forward about 61 years to a recent holographic TV appearance on CNN — though the technology needs to be improved, holography and 3D television are a reality today.

2. Identification / Targeting

Note that the ad units and the interactions are activated by John’s mere presence through biometrics. Highly advanced biometrics e.g. fast and accurate iris scans are still a technical challenge but facial recognition is a definite possibility today.

Now, let’s focus on targeting. The biggest issue with this technology is privacy but let’s put all the privacy issues aside for the moment. The ad units suggest that they recognize and “know” each person e.g. a credit card company ad does a quick database lookup and renders the personalized “member since” year, while other units personalize the message by calling out John’s name. These units are either working off of a corporate/customer or a government biometric database.

We obviously don’t have a central biometric database aside from a criminal database so targeting / identification is a challenge.However, we currently have Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla and other location-based “check-in” social networks that are becoming more and more popular. These location-based social networks require a significant effort on ongoing basis to identify a person at a venue e.g. you have to run the app, login and “check in” using the built in GPS.

Now imagine if each cellphone could somehow be identified via a unique CDMA/GMS modulation/RF signature…

If  a cellphone’s RF signature could be identified by an RF reader when someone “checks in” into a location-based social network, the surrounding ad units can be notified and detect the cell phone RF signal to personalize the ads based on the information in the location-based social network database. The combination of identifying the person when they “check-in” and locking in their cell signature is a very powerful idea.

Let’s think big — assume that we have a global network of interactive ad units connected to a central database. The database stores all the cellphone signatures and allows the ad units word wide to identify the person based on matching cellphone signatures on ongoing basis.

Just imagine — if you ever check in at a venue in NYC, the ad units anywhere in the world can easily identify you and then personalize & serve ads directly to you as you pass by them or, for example, simply send you a text message  letting you know about a new restaurant that just opened around the corner (assuming you’ve opted-in be notified of this via the location-based social network of your choice).

3. Interaction / Message

Personalized messages are very easy to create as long as we have identification / targeting working.

4. Tracking

Given the ad interaction database described above, the ads can keep track of each person on ongoing basis. This is a huge data mining asset for the advertisers, who can keep track of every single person and their interactions with their units over time. The aggregate metrics are even more powerful, when reviewed by the advertiser.

The above could work pretty well for indoor advertising. However, the cell phone companies can also use the cell tower data to triangulate the tracked cell phone position and share the data with advertisers for targeted interactive outdoor unit advertising as well. This could give indoor and outdoor advertising the same, if not better, targeting capabilities than what we have today with online advertising.

According to OAAA, in 2008, advertisers spent $6.99 billion on outdoor advertising.

So, how far off is the above technology?

All the above components are available today and it’s just a matter of time before we see someone put all the pieces together to produce highly improved interactive advertising solutions based on this innovative technology.

This could give indoor and outdoor advertising the same, if not better, targeting capabilities than what we have today with online advertising.

Advertisement