Fact+or+Fiction+-+Interactive+Ads

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The video above is from the Tom Cruise 2002 movie Minority Report and shows a future in which retinal scanners identify you by your eyes (which are unique to you like fingerprints) and then nearby ad screens and holograms are tailored to you (call you by name, say things likely to generate your interest in the product). This may be science fiction, but the director Steven Spielberg did not make it up. In preparing the movie he called together futurists and asked them to predict the world 50 years in the future in all sorts of areas, including marketing. A group from MIT suggested that personalizing ads by somehow scanning people and linking them to a database of their shopping habits and demographic data was not far off.

Fast forward about 10 years and technologies similar to the ones depicted in the film are becoming a reality - including:

Face recognition that makes your face the one for the model in an ad:

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Store window ads that you interact with:

media type="custom" key="13581592" Interactive billboards just like those in the movie! media type="custom" key="13581596"

This news story from 2010 shows how close this technology really is - and when you consider it, don't specific ads based on your likes and previous purchases already pop up on your Facebook or Amazon, and we don't seem to mind those all that much, despite saying that we do. The fact that marketers are finding that when such online advertising is personalozed, consumers are more likely to make a purchase makes it clear that these technologies are not going away. If anything we can expect to see them become more prevalent.