Advertising is a fact of life and there is nothing that we can do about it. Without online advertising Web 2.0 would have been dead in its tracks as it is the necessary evil required to fuel the incredible wealth of a small number of people and to give us supposedly free stuff.
It seems though that advertisers aren’t just happy polluting both our online and offline world they now want to start targeting the insides of our heads with some new technology. This technology from a Canadian company called Holosonic Research Labs is able to direct sound waves directly to a certain spot and in such a fashion that only the person on that spot can hear what is being said while around them is silence.
As Ken Hardy a professor of marketing at the University of Waterloo is quoted as saying in the Ottawa Citizen article
"It’s a tool well worth investigating," said Ken Hardy, a professor of marketing with the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. "People are substantially suggestible. I think this has quite a bit of potential. The directionality makes it much more acceptable."
All I can say is that Ken might find it an interesting tool but as far as I am concerned this is just wrong on so many levels. If there is one last place where I should be able to have some quiet and privacy it is within my own head. This kind of thing for me is a total invasion of privacy at a core level and my first reaction to any company using this would be a great big fuck you - stay the hell out of my head and no I will now never buy your product.
This idea should be stamped as a great big fail for advertisers - period.
Conversation Tags: advertising
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