Comparisons to the "Minority report" scene of targeted advertising have surfaced again with IBM's claim to be working on combining RFID technology and outdoor advertising.
The well quoted scene involves the star of the movie being prompted by offers and advertising based on his current mood and preferences - true relevance.
Three years ago a friend blogged of a trial in the US with Mini, using keyfobs which were encoded RFID tags this information was used to then display messages on interactive billboards as you drove around the city. This caught my eye as being a neat way of engaging with consumers, albeit in a limited fashion which was specific to the brand.
The rub
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Identifying users is only part of the challenge - understanding their actual needs and desires at that particular point in time is a different matter all together. Quite how IBM proposes to accumulate the required data from each of us in order to fuel the decision engine that will eventually drive this advertising will be interesting.
RFID is being pushed on a number of fronts around contactless payments in credit cards with Barclaycard and Ericsson making statements that they are to incorporate the chips in future phones, so actual devices in the wild should be enough to make this viable in the near term.
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So with these devices creating transaction information and history this is ready source of information that could be leveraged to drive such systems - but it this really viable?
Will we the consumer allow this valuable information to be used in such a public space to drive offers and advertising.
Or will we have to revert to completing profile's which would then be used to filter and drive such content - very tedious.....
So while we have to consider dwell times and exactly how to advertise to many people in close proximity, the challenge of profiling and exactly how and what data can be leveraged remains the key hurdle in all of this - not the ability to electronically detect a tag.
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