Will The Advertising Arms Race Be Resolved Peacefully?

Warning: Tom’s column this week contains potential spoilers for the new Steven Spielberg hit “Minority Report.” If you haven’t yet seen the movie, but plan to, you may want to skip this column.

“I can’t take Lynn to these things,” said Dan as we retrieved our tickets to Minority Report from the machine in the movie theater lobby. “They’re just an $8 nap.”

Dan was referring to his wife’s inability to avoid falling asleep during every movie they’ve ever seen together. Only a couple of years into the marriage, Dan has accepted Lynn’s little quirk and avoids taking her to the movie theater. He takes me instead.

I have been secretly dying to see Minority Report since it came out. Normally, I’m not a fan of movies featuring Tom Cruise, but I am a big Steven Spielberg fan. Since Minority Report hit the big screen, I’ve been reading reviews about the film that mention Spielberg’s hiring a team of futurists to paint a picture of how the world will look in 2054, the year in which the story is set. Many of these reviews call particular attention to the way Minority Report depicts advertising.

It isn’t easy to be in the ad business and see the film with someone who works outside the industry. In several scenes, advertising in the mid-21st century is portrayed as overly invasive and intrusive by today’s standards. For instance, there’s the scene in which Tom Cruise’s character, John Anderton, enters a shopping mall and is assaulted from every angle by personalized holographic billboards. “John Anderton,” one billboard shouts at him, “you look like you could use a Guinness.” The ads use a device to identify passers-by via an iris scan and presumably, personalize accordingly.

Then there’s the scene in which Anderton is munching on some breakfast cereal in front of his computer. The cereal box is made from a material that can carry animation and sound. Anderton gets so annoyed by animated characters on the box that he throws the box across the room.

Later in the film, Anderton gets an eye transplant to avoid detection by government authorities. As he walks into a Gap retail store, a holographic sales associate scans his eyes and recommends product based on past purchasing behavior. Because of the eye transplant, the sales associate misidentifies him and the audience gets a laugh.

Like I said, it’s tough to see this movie with friends from outside the ad business. After the film, while wading through the crowded parking lot, Dan immediately asked me what I thought about how advertising was portrayed. He got an answer he probably wasn’t expecting.

“I don’t think that people would tolerate that kind of intrusion into their personal lives,” I said. “I would have emptied that cereal into the 2052 equivalent of a Tupperware container and gotten rid of the animated box pretty quickly.”

“Why?” asked Dan. (Dan challenges me. That’s why I like hanging out with him.)

“Cereal boxes are pretty passive,” I said. “I’ll sit down and read the back of a cereal box when I have my morning bowl of Fruity Pebbles, but animated product packaging with a soundtrack would just be a chafe.”

“And the holographic billboards?” asked Dan.

“I think the ‘Big Brother’ aspect of it would drive people away from retail outlets,” I said. “If people started getting annoyed or put off by those types of ads, they wouldn’t come to the mall. Not to mention that there would probably be a legal backlash against invading people’s privacy.”

Surprisingly, Dan continued in his role as Devil’s Advocate.

“Maybe people would come to expect that kind of advertising at stores,” he said. “I don’t see what would be illegal about it.”

After thinking about this a while, I thought that if the technology were available tomorrow, there would probably be a bunch of advertisers that would be willing to give the holographic personalized billboards a shot. If the ads gradually learned about customers from purchase behavior and used an opt-in approach, maybe they would help drive sales. I came to the conclusion that objections to this type of advertising wouldn’t necessarily be on legal grounds, but would stem from people’s expectations of privacy and anonymity.

I see some interesting parallels between Minority Report’s view of advertising in the future and things going on in the Interactive advertising industry today. We seem to have problems with determining appropriate time, place and manner for our ad campaigns. Things like spam, spyware and database-driven ad servers probably shaped Minority Report’s take on the evolution of advertising.

Technology will no doubt present some interesting possibilities for advertising in the coming years. As with any significant advances in technology, we need to ask ourselves whether the fact that we can execute ad programs that are personalized and “in your face” inevitably leads to the notion that we should execute them.

Technology in advertising is leading toward a sort of arms race, in which the benefit of using new technology in new ways is pitted against appropriateness of time, place and manner, as well as against privacy concerns on the part of consumers. A personalized ad that actively engages a consumer without concern for privacy might help drive sales, but will almost certainly erode brands with consumers who are privacy-conscious and enjoy an expectation of freedom from ads they want to ignore.

At the very least, emerging ad technologies will present some interesting ethical dilemmas. Marketing directors will have to decide whether a boost in sales is worth being at odds with the consumer expectations I’ve outlined above. Undoubtedly, some advertisers will make poor ethical choices, but such choices will pave the way for delineation of what is and isn’t appropriate.

By Tom Hespos
Courtesy of http://www.MediaPost.com