The Future Is Now

Watch the video first or none of this will make sense. Watch the video first and most of it still won't make sense. How did we get to this point? Am I the only one that thinks this is scary? Really? A brain implant in 10 years?

Anyways, the guest speaker at Miami Ad School this week showed us this video and it's an interesting video to analyze in the context of advertising. I feel like our entire job as creatives is to create perceptions of what brands are in the mind of our consumers so that when consumers are faced with a choice of products they will refer to the perceptions we have implanted for them, and make the decision based at least in part by advertising (sorry run-on sentence..whatever take a breath). But isn't the whole aspect of perception building eliminated by this device projecting onto products what products truly are? If a consumer can really get all the facts about something then advertising might be less effective. What if I'm trying to position something as environmentally friendly and the sixth sense technology shows that a competitor's product is more eco-friendly? Well there goes all that work.

So like anything in this world, this technology is a gift and a curse. While it may feel threatening to me right now, I'm sure advertisers felt threatened when the internet came out. Well print and TV advertising is still around and so is radio despite podcasts and satellite stations. The question lies in how will advertising adjust to this new form of media to communicate to consumers. And for those of you who thought that you would be able to use this device free of advertising, you are sadly mistaken. I'm almost 100% sure we will find a way to target you through this. It's what advertisers do.

If people can find out exactly what they need about products when they are faced with them then we need to target advertising directly on the products. This brings me to a whole series of hypothetical ethical questions. If a consumer gets facts about a product on the product, then maybe us advertisers need to start altering these facts to influence them differently. Don't lose your mind. I'm not advocating this. I'm just saying it could happen. If a customer gets Amazon ratings when looking at a book, then maybe ad agencies will start giving really good ratings on Amazon to books they want to sell, which will actually skew reality for these consumers thinking they are getting the truth.

The concept of an entity having the ability to skew reality reminds me of The Matrix. People will never know that they're not in control or that they are being lied to if the way they are getting their information seems like it's accurate. I know I'm reading really deep into this, but seriously this technology is revolutionary. A sixth sense that will cause yet a whole new generation to render part of their brain obsolete. I feel like we're going to forget how to think because everything is already thought out for us. And what will happen if our technology fails us?

Our desire for instantaneous information is changing human behavior. She also showed us a video that brought up a funny point. There are over 200 million searches on Google a day. Who did these questions get addressed to before Google? We are becoming an impatient species. We used to have to wait until someone was home to speak to them, now we just tweet them. Don't get me wrong. I love technology and I consider myself an early adopter, but in the past 5 years technology has been on steroids. Somebody give this tech boom a drug test.