Truemors
Opinion
Barry Artiste, Now Public Contributor
Catchy title isn't it? Advertisers do this daily to get you to pay attention to them. Like most spam advertisers the headline has little truth in what they wish to hook you with.
That little question mark absolves most transgressions.
Advertisers take a backseat to no one when it comes to annoying us, whether it is annoying television ads, ads put into movie rental video promos, home telephone spam, computer spam, fax spam, door to door salesmen spam, flyer spam, people standing on the street corner handing out a flyer spam, billboard spam, political spam, mail spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,spammitty spam, spammitty spam. It seems the only spam which is harmless nowadays comes in a sandwich.
But wait, "don't change that channel", because Political and Medical naysayers spam us with health warnings over eating spam, yet no one in the political and medical profession tries to ban emotional spam in which we are bombarded with daily from advertisers.
"Spam Hell" is a global equal opportunity annoyer, regardless of race, creed, customs, spam like an insidious parasite will ultimately infect your mind, hoping to attract, distract, influence, brainwash your buying or intellectual decision making processes.
Beside our dreams,the last bastion of non invasive spam privacy for some was the cell phone apparently, "But wait! ""Theres still more!" Advertisers have now found a way to delve into that little bit of privacy as well.
Bell Canada's Motto "Reach out and touch someone" has a new adversary in town. Advertisers seem to have taken a cue from Bell Canada's age old motto of "Reach out and Touch someone" and replaced it with "Reach out and Spam someone" for Bluetooth users. Technological advances in Communications technology, such as Call Blocking, Caller ID freed us from those pesky and relentless advertisers who would ring us up at dinner time at home have sunk to a new low, since they cannot get us at home, Advertisers have developed yet another annoying way to get us to listen to them in their quest to get us to buy or sell Penis, Breast, Hair, Viagra, lose weight enhancement or de-enhancement creams, pills, equipment. Products, advertisers state we need in order to live, function, work, love, consume in order to fiunction in todays society. The Bluetooth technology on our cell phones will now automatically "Ring" you relentlessly when you walk in Shopping malls for great deals and promos, pass by a store and "Ring, Ring" no is is not a friend or family emergency, it is the stores advertising promo alerting you to their once in a lifetime sales pitch.
Now imagine if you will this Christmas holiday season, you have no choice, you have to hit the malls to buy a gift.
Just imagine thousands of Bluetooth equipped shoppers walking in a single mall, with various ringtones going off at once constantly for hours and hours, with everyone scrambling to see if it is their phone ringing and in unison all saying in various languages "Hello?, Hello? can you hear me? Hello? WTF?
My Final Thought
Advertisers state, if you do not want the spam adverts, youjust have to turn off your cell phone. My response is that pretty much eliminates the convienince of having a cell phone in the first place if you cannot recieve incoming calls in the event of an emergency or from friends and family. But then, what about the other thousands of people in the shopping mall, theatre, restaurant, car etc who opt to keep their cell phones on out of necessity?
We have become slaves to technology, I think it was Martin Luther King who once stated "Let my people go"!
I would like to state to advertisers "Let my people alone".
Nowhere to hide - How advertising hits your cellphone screenLatest technology rings up potential customers as they pass stores
by Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, December 05, 2007
VANCOUVER - The next time you're walking down Robson Street and your phone rings, don't assume it's a friend calling.
In shades of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, it could be the Bluetooth-enabled advertising display in the shop or bistro you've just passed recognizing your Bluetooth wireless phone and beaming you a message: Would like to receive an advertising offer?
You then have take a couple of seconds to decide whether you think it is mobile spam to delete, or a cool new way for businesses to tell you about deals.
Vancouver-based iSign Media is betting it will be the latter. iSign sells the advertising system, called Bluetooth proximity messaging, as an add-on to the flat-panel advertising displays it has around the city.
It is "the final frontier for advertising," William Urrea, iSign's vice-president of business opportunities, said in an interview.
The company is sensitive to the possible perception of the advertising messages as just more spam, so it is working on making sure they are attractive incentives rather than generic promotions.
"It's consumer-permitted advertising," Urrea said. "Whatever it is, we want to make sure it's an actual invitation to participate in something," whether it is a coupon, a discount or some other giveaway.
One of its restaurant clients, for instance, offers a free plate of chicken wings if the recipient shows their server the ad.
However, if the person being buzzed with the message declines it, Urrea said the system won't send that ad to him again, and all the ad boards in its networks will not send other messages for a prescribed period of days, or weeks.
"We're tweaking the system," Urrea said.
And when a recipient accepts an ad, they won't receive the same one again, nor will the same board send another ad message from its rotating roster of ads for an hour or two if the person stays in the same location.
Urrea added that in acknowledgment of privacy concerns, the system doesn't collect personal information such as your name or phone number. It does, however, record the phone's identification number to build a profile of the user.
The 19-month-old iSign has 25 of its ad display panels in Vancouver, 15 in Calgary and plans to put up 300 more across the country.
However, the question is whether iSign's messages can break through the virtual blizzard of ad messages that fly around consumers every day, according to Tom Shepansky, a partner in the Vancouver advertising firm Rethink.
"It is literally thousands [of messages]," Shepansky said. "What are you going to remember? A handful, at best."
However, Shepansky added that the move towards putting content on mobile devices, the so-called "third screen" following television and computers, is evolving into another medium to which advertising must adapt.
Still, Shepansky said it is a case of "more isn't better." However, if iSign can deliver more customized and targeted ads, "maybe it's better. You would have to test drive it."
iSign president and chairman Alex Romanov said the technology does build profiles of which ads phones accept, and which they reject. That tells advertisers which promotions are effective.
He added that young people, in particular, are getting more used to communicating and doing business with cellphones.
"In Germany and Japan, people use cellphones to pay bills and shop," Romanov said, and the potential audience for its ads is growing.
Romanov said company research tells them that there are more than 13 million cellphones in Canada, and 2.5 billion worldwide, with the number that are Bluetooth-enabled rising every year.
Urrea added that if people keep the Bluetooth option on their phones turned off, they'll never receive ads.
depenner@png.canwest.com
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