Microsoft has released information about some of the new forms of intereactive advertising they are researching and that you may be seeing coming to an XBox near you – which they are calling NuAds – Natural User Interface Ads. Microsoft is exploring different ways users can interact with ads using voice, gestures and integration with the web and social media. Here is a video that Microsoft released.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSk5DhxQHLo
This type of interactivity does have the power to change how we consume television, play games, or interact in immersive environments. This also leads to many questions too. Will the user’s interaction with interactive ads be tracked? How? How will the data be used? Who owns the data? With facial recognition and voice recognition as part of the Kinect, who will have access to this data?
Interactive technology may be one more step toward fulfilling the marketer’s dream of laser beam targeting but it also leads to a lot of new questions. We will certainly be watching how this all evolves.
Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
Interesting indeed.
We’ll be seeing much more of this, especially from services like Valve’s Steam servers.
Just about any new PC/Mac game has on-line features, Steam already knows what color your socks are before you do, won’t be long before we see interactive entities, virtual doorways, even viewpoint triggered events i.e. the Player looks at an ad in the game for more than 2 seconds which will trigger an event. (The Valve Source engine already supports this on Steam.)