Microsoft is waving its NUads at the world with a video that shows off the Kinect-powered interactive advertising system in action.
I’ve often thought that the one thing my daily online experience really needs is a new and better way for insipid advertising to intrude upon my time. Passivity is for chumps, after all, so why not encourage people to spread the brain-numbing chaff as far as they possibly can with nothing more than a voice command? That’s just one of the new features of Microsoft’s new Kinect-powered advertising system. Got a thing for Sam Elliott’s latest Dodge Ram voiceover? Tweet it to every one of your followers with a simple spoken word!
Or maybe you’re sitting on your couch watching that ad that your “friend” has so thoughtfully dumped on your lap and you’re thinking to yourself, “My goodness, I surely would like to go out and purchase one of those shiny new Dodge Ram trucks. If only I knew where to find them!” Well, fret no more, my fellow consumer, because with the power of Kinect you can look up local information relating to national ads, including such things as the location of your nearest Dodge dealer. And if you’re sick of taking crap from all those Bob Seger-loving Chevy types, with just a wave of your hand you can vote for Dodge as the best super-duty truck manufacturer of all time. Of all time!
There’s more, but I don’t want to spoil the whole video for you and you probably get the idea anyway. So instead, I’ll let Microsoft’s Mark Kroese lay it out for you. “Typically when I talk about new technologies, I try to avoid hyperbole,” he wrote on the Microsoft Advertising blog. “But in this case of NUads and Kinect, I’m here to say that it will change television as we know it – forever.”
Kroese is a highly-paid expert in the field who can make terms like “social advocacy” relevant to television spots about Coke-sucking longhairs and I certainly don’t want to appear as though I’m challenging his authority in such matters. But I do feel compelled to point out that I spent a lot of money on a PVR so I could dodge ads on the TV and I will generally skip online videos, no matter how awesome my friends promise me they are, if I have to sit through a 15-second promo spot first. Maybe I’ll learn to love the marketing machine once I can properly embrace it by waving and yelling at my set. But honestly, I’m not holding my breath.
Published: Jun 22, 2011 04:47 pm