Imagine a world where brands are able to hijack a human being’s optical cortex; where we’re able to feel, see and taste things that aren’t really there. This is the Brave New World World Dino Burbridge, director of innovation and tech at WCRS, says we’re heading towards.
In fact, the technology needed to take us there is actually much closer than many realise.
Speaking at the 2016 DailyDOOH Media Summit on Tuesday, Burbridge described a Matrix-style era where tech has the capabilities to manipulate memories, augment human beings into someone else’s reality and allow advertisers to control what we see.
Burbridge showed off a camera that can be inserted directly into a human eyeball – “so you won’t need real eyes anymore,” he explained, rather unnervingly.
“So Spotify, for example, will be able to give consumers a super-cool eye for free and upgrade it every two years, as long as just before you go to bed you let them run a few ads on it…likewise with out-of-home media.
“What this really questions is whether what goes into your eye is real reality anymore.”
However, the “neo” world that Burbridge describes also includes technology so advanced that it could revolutionise – “possibly in a good way, possibly in a bad way” – or even end out-of-home media: the ability to block physical ads in the real world.
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Burbridge cited a hacktivist competition in which virtual reality glasses were hacked to dynamically “fuzz out” adverts.
“So imagine you’ve now got augmented eyes, with dynamic impulses going into them…it’s up to [the person in control of the tech] to decide what you see,” Burbridge said.
“Likewise, I don’t really need an out-of-home banner anymore – all I need is a space to project it on to…or not even that. So it’s the end of out-of-home media.”
However far-fetched these ideas may seem, out-of-home, the world’s oldest advertising medium, is fast making a transition to digital, which is forecast to account for more than half of all OOH adspend by 2018.
The move is clearly not without its challenges, however, with news emerging just last week that a billboard had been hijacked by porn.
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