Advertising and surveillance make fine friends. They always have I suppose, but these days the hysteria over the partnership has reached new heights. Beware the applications you add on Facebook! But I am really much more interested in physical advertising (that is in real environments, such as billboards) because that is advertising you don't have much control over. Not you the audience, nor the broadcaster. It's based on not very detailed ideas of most of the type of people that would walk past it on MOST days. No variations, and well, not much tracking.

But things are about to change, according to this article in New Scientist here.

Now you have surveillance that can access who you are, how long your attention span was for this or that add, etc. That way you can start seeing patterns in audience behavior at different parts of a road, in different areas of a mall, how people respond to a 50 percent sale sign, etc.

But what I feel would be cool are interactive ads on the train or bus. The other day I was on a tube with signs that showed you the meaning of different musical terms and had little biographies of famous musicians. They were adverts for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and I really liked it. I feel ads should be able to give you REAL MEANINGFUL parcels of information (for example, bank ads for investments could do that). Of course, how this information is parceled out has to be altered depending on the time of the day (people have less time during rush hour, for example).

People get really edgy when you talk about such things. Personalized advertisement? That would be an invasion of privacy. There's all this fear surrounding it, but you know, what do you care? What was the worst they could do with having captured some information about you, such as whether you are male or female, and how long you stared at the thing? It just means less spam and more relevant information, doesn't it?