IPTV and Consumer-Controlled Advertising

Recently, I came across a video where I saw Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, talk about the future of IPTV and consumer-controlled advertising. I was intrigued to learn what he had to say.



Essentially, the whole idea of consumers initiating the entire advertising experience and the technology automatically being there to facilitate consumer's curiosity about a product they see is something new. Today, we are bombarded with links, banners, and all sorts of ads that don't really apply to our lives. We have habitually learned to ignore them, so even when they MIGHT help us find what we are looking for, we subconsciously choose to ignore them based on past experience. So the first step is to make ads seem as either relevant or not-clutter in the eyes of consumers. Product placement achieves this by embedding the ads INTO what we consider "important" and as a result, the ads were no longer seen as mere clutter. This way, we don't simply ignore them. Cerf's insights go one step further: in addition to us not ignoring them, we will also see these product placement ads as reliable entry points into the consumer shopping realm. We will be able to take our initial reactions of "Oh that laptop is nice..." or "Cool mp3 player" to the next level by seeing the specs, price ranges, and customer reviews, etc... simply with a press of a button (or touch to the screen!) And the best part is WE will initiate the entire process, and in the future, technology will be set in place to facilitate this.

With technologies like TIVO and consumers simply fast-forwarding through ads in online videos, product placement is becoming more and more popular. Fusing this concept with the seamless touch-screen based human-computer interaction could completely change the way consumers interact with advertising.

Connecting Mind and Machine

I was browsing through the web today, and came across this fascinating article by Forbes.

[Link to article]

I genuinely believe this is the next big advancement in human computer interaction, impacting our day-to-day lives at a very large scale. As we immerse our lives with technology each day, there is a constantly growing need to make all the clutter more manageable and easier to use!

As a prospective for an Electrical Engr/Computer Sci and Brain/Cognitive Sci major combination at MIT, seeing this kind of exciting research being done in this area really inspires me to learn as much as I can about the field.