Microsoft Introduces Crowd Sourced Ads on Xbox Kinect

Kinect which officially became the hottest selling gadget, will now be used by Microsoft to serve social and interactive ads on the Xbox platform. According to NYTimes, Kinect users will soon be able to interact with and share ads with friends using voice and motion commands. Microsoft is naming the new ads NUads, an abbrevaited form for natural user-interface ads. The new ads will use the Kinect’s built-in voice and motion controls and will enable users to send out messages about an ad to Twitter by saying “Xbox Tweet.” Similarly, if a user wants to share more information, he/she can say “Xbox More” and the system would send out an e-mail with all the information that the user wants to send out. Advertisers are already excited about using these new and more interactive ad formats. According to John M. Lisko, the executive communications director of Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, part of the Publicis Groupe: The new ad units really epitomized the level of engagement that everyone is working towards. You can text, you can tweet, you can vote. That’s phenomenal. Mr Lisko further said that his agency is absolutely considering using the new capabilities. Microsoft presented the new advertising options yesterday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, an annual conference for advertisers and marketers. Although the NUads technology is extremely promising, the new features still face a few challenges. The gesture recognition technology in Kinect for example could at times be slow to respond to gestures. Similarly, some analysts have raised questions about potential privacy issues based on images recorded by the Kinect camera during the game play. Needless to mention that these and other issues with gesture recognition would definitely spill over into the ad domain as well. However, even with these short-comings, what Microsoft is essentially trying to do is to transform ordinary users into marketers for the Big-Cos. If successful, this could very well lead us into an era of crowd sourced advertising. Do take a look at the video intro of NUads below:

Social Pro Daily

Microsoft Introduces Crowd Sourced Ads on Xbox Kinect

Bilal Hameed

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Bilal Hameed