We all knew that as the cost and size of hardware decreases, in the future we would have computing and connectivity everywhere. What I never expected is that computing and connectivity would come hand-in-hand with advertising everywhere.
Today it's a magazine ad with 15 days of sponsored WiFi. At the rate we're going, it's only a matter of time before we have Free Happy Meals with hallucinatory ad-sponsored connectivity delivered over the network straight to the visual cortex.
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Edit: corrected "15 minutes" to "15 days," which is what I actually meant to type. Thanks JimmaDaRustla!
I bought a book from Amazon couple of months ago - The envelope had an ad for a movie (forgot which one). For a second I thought, it was the DVD for the movie - but no, it was my order alright, except it had an ad for the movie, right on the packaging. This is after I paid for the book.
There used to sometimes be ads in paperback books. In the middle of the book would be a thicker page, with a full color ad. I remember cigarette ads were common.
Terry Pratchett found that one of his publishers had actually changed the text of his books to insert
Advertisements, something along the lines of "and at this time our heros enjoyed a hearty bowl of $SOUP"
This would be a terrible trend if it returned - even in ebooks. I imagine there would be some software that you could run it through to strip all ads though.
If the ad is on a separate page (both sides) we can tear it off. If it is part of a page, then :(
Internet has trained people not to pay for things, for more than a decade. Most people wouldn't think twice about dropping 5$ on a single cup of starbucks coffee, but would not spend the same 5$ for an email account (without ads). It's not going to be easy to change this behavior, especially on the net.
On one side, I'm not sure how to feel about such disposable electronics. How will you feel when you throw out a quad-core processor and the birthday card it's powering?
On the other side, I'm a little surprised nobody's developed a mini-quadcopter billboard yet. Think of an array of small flying devices, each hockey-puck sized device would hold a battery, 3-color LED, radio, and maybe a processor -- they would auto-arrange into a grid, and light up in patterns to make images when seen from afar.
(This should be possible with current technology, and the business applications are undeniable.)
The worst offender I've seen so far was on Hulu I think. You could either watch the 1 or 2 minute advertisement, or type the company's slogan into a text box. That really weirded me out...
Ticketmaster just changed their captchas to this format as well, you enter a captcha like "Who's coming with me" while viewing an ad about their social features. Until a few months ago it was a normal, unrelated captcha.
Have you seen the Happy Meal toys & some of the boxes lately? With all of the various movie tie-ins and whatnot, it's only a matter of time before Happy Meals are completely subsidized by the toys included.
When my kids were younger, it became a Disney tie-in vehicle. My all time favorite was one happy-meal toy line with each Disney character from an animated movie standing on a rollable (wheeled) video-cassette case for the movie.
I suspect the movie makes money from the toy's vs paying for that advertising. Plenty of kids will beg for a happy meal because they want that cheap plastic, and the parents eat where the kids eat.
Today it's a magazine ad with 15 days of sponsored WiFi. At the rate we're going, it's only a matter of time before we have Free Happy Meals with hallucinatory ad-sponsored connectivity delivered over the network straight to the visual cortex.
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Edit: corrected "15 minutes" to "15 days," which is what I actually meant to type. Thanks JimmaDaRustla!