Advertising in the Future: A Primer

For young children, users who choose to block all advertising, and those not wearing their Reality Enhancement Glasses, one dimensional advertising is still the only way of finding out about new products arriving in the marketplace and even rediscovering the products they have already come to know and love. One-dimensional ads must attract the user through their physical appearance since they contain no enhanced components. However, because people who see these ads are either making an effort to avoid intrusive advertising or are by law protected from aggressive advertising, such ads are generally straight forward and contain little extraneous information. In fact, many one-d ads these days tend to be still shots of enhanced ad campaigns. These are less likely to influence children who have not been exposed to the ads but still have the effect of reminding a higher level user of the larger campaign.

Two-dimensional ads are essentially one-d ads with minimal enhanced features. For instance, a two dimensional version of an ad containing a picture of a ball may cause the ball to spin or even bounce around inside the ad space. People in an ad may move around or even speak. Two- ads may even contain a link leading you to more information about the product, but they are rarely, if ever, interactive in that user behaviour cannot alter the ad’s behaviour.

Three-dimensional ads are becoming increasingly popular in the highly competitive world of marketing. A three-d ad either overlaps an enhanced appearance over a real-world object (for example, by making a plain, concrete building look like a medieval castle), or it creates a noncorporeal object that looks real to any enhanced user (such as a person standing in from of a store). Some three-d ads are obvious, making no effort to integrate itself seamlessly into the user’s experience. Most three-d ads, however, are much subtler. Instead of telling a user directly that they should use a product, use a service, or visit a location, an ad may place characters into a user’s environment to inform them indirectly of their availability.

Four-dimensional ads are essentially interactive three-d ads. As an example, if an ad consists of two individuals discussing how great Product X is, a user may ask the ad questions about the product and the ad will be able to answer. The most well done of these ads can be difficult to distinguish from corporeal interactions. The subtly of such advertising is extremely in a world with increasingly sophisticated users.

Targeting Your Audience

Because most users make much of their information readily available to make day-to-day tasks simpler and more convenient, advertising is becoming increasingly customized, targeting narrower audiences, even customizing itself to the individual user.

Let’s take the example of a clothing store trying to attract a passerby to come into the store. A man walks by whose REGs identity him as John Smith. The tags in his clothes indicate he is wearing a suit. His schedule indicates that he has a lunch meeting in half an hour. The clothing store can use stored pictures of him or, if the store is so equipped, take a picture and create a three-dimensional image of him dressed in a suit they sell inside. It might go something like this:

Ad: Hey, John. Afraid of ruining a good suit?

Being called by name often attracts people’s attention. This opening line, called a “hook”, will, at the very least, give the user pause. The ad must take this opportunity to introduce its product.

“This suit doesn’t stain. It’s low maintainance, and it looks great on you! Don’t you think?”

If the ad is interactive, the user may inquire further about the product. Or, if he feels he does not have time to go into the store, the ad may ask to add an itme to his to-do list to remind him to come back when he has more time.

As you can see in this example, various pieces of information about a user can be utilized to produce a customized advertisement that is both informative and relevant to the user’s needs.

Ethics

With the wide availability of information both for and about users, the line between acceptable and unacceptable advertising practices is not always clear. For instance, you can find out that a person is taking medication for anxiety. As an advertiser, you can use this information to market alternative treatments for the same condition. You cannot, however, use this knowledge to produce a customized ad that will scare them into using your product if other users not known to have anxiety would not be exposed to similar sales tactics by the same ad space. Some places have laws requiring ad spaces to use milder advertising techniques with high-risk users including children and people with diagnosed medical conditions. Some companies even voluntarily refrain from individualized targeting of these types of ads.

To protect their privacy, users will sometimes categorize information as private for all but group Y. For instance, medical information can be restricted to all entities except hospitals and doctors. Though there are still ways of accessing this information, it is considered extremely unethical and in some cases illegal to violate these restrictions without express user permission.

Summary

Advancing technology is increasing the sophistication and types of tools available to advertisers for reaching their audience. Used correctly, marketers can target only those who are potentially interested in a product without inconveniencing those who have no interest in a product. However, a balance must be found between user privacy and efficient advertising.