5.Personalized Radio And Television Ads

While radio and TV advertising remains a significant source of revenue for many advertisers, its one-size-fits-all approach ensures that a great number of ads will fall on uninterested ears; to name just one example, diamond engagement ring ads—common in most radio markets—are not very helpful to those who are already married. At least one company hopes to optimize this form of advertising by providing web-style targeted ads to terrestrial radio and television broadcasts. The technology, developed by tech company Gracenote, is available in over 50 million cars today. It develops a profile of a user by identifying songs played on CD and radio, the type of car being driven, frequent locations, and more; it then uses this profile to dynamically insert relevant ads in place of local programming. The company has been developing a similar application for televisions for over 10 years. It uses video recognition to identify commercial breaks, swapping the broadcast content for more relevant content based on its user profile. We can expect this type of targeted advertising to proliferate quickly. Gracenote is owned by Sony, a major manufacturer of televisions and audio equipment.

4.Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality, or AR, has exploded into the public consciousness over the past year due to the success of the mobile game Pokemon Go. AR uses electronic devices to overlay the real world with digital elements. Among other things, a consumer could easily find more information about a product simply by pointing their smartphone at an advertising display. AR displays have already popped up on storefronts, bus shelters, and billboards—one famous British Airways advertisement used a giant video billboard featuring a child who would point to actual planes as they flew overhead and call them out by flight number. It may be easy to imagine this technology run amok, but there is no need—Japanese filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda has already imagined it for us. The above video, titled "Hyper-Reality," gives us a glimpse of what a future dominated by AR marketing might look like.

3.Neuromarketing

Although consumers are typically able to give marketers good feedback on the types of products they like and how much they are willing to pay for them, they are less able to delve into the underlying reasons behind these feelings. Enter the emerging field of neuromarketing—using data gleaned directly from the brain to discover what aspects of a product or marketing campaign generate a positive response, and why. In 2008, Frito-Lay hired a neuromarketing firm to gauge consumers' responses to Cheetos. Examining EEG patterns, researchers determined that many subjects got a subversive thrill from the messiness of the product and its famous finger-coating orange dust. This information was incorporated into the next Cheetos marketing campaign, which featured the Cheetos mascot encouraging people to do subversive and weird things with Cheetos (such as sticking them up a sleeping airline passenger's nose).

2.Computer-Generated Ad Campaigns

Advertising agency McCann Japan made waves in 2016 when it formally appointed an artificially intelligent robot as its creative director. The AI was fed data from previous advertising campaigns and directed to creatively produce an effective ad for Clorets breath mints, shown above. A human director was tasked with producing a competing spot; the two ads were then shown side by side on Japanese television and put to a vote as to the best one, with the public unaware of which ad was the robot-produced one. The human-produced ad won—but only by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. This proof of concept illustrated the capabilities of AI to crunch massive amounts of data in a far shorter time than humans can, and to use this data to identify meaningful trends and suggest how to improve a campaign's performance. This relatively new AI application will doubtless be quickly refined, but many consumers don't realize that AI is already a major player in advertising—largely through Facebook, whose targeted ads are already driven by an artificially intelligent machine learning algorithm.

1.Making You Do The Advertising

And speaking of Facebook, a carefully calculated, gentle nudge may be all that is required in order for consumers to do the marketers' jobs for them. This is known as "User Generated Content," and in the current climate of online reviews, "unboxing" videos and consumer product-oriented blogs, advertising firms are just beginning to find ways to leverage this massive amount of content. A 2013 study of adult behavior online helped solidify this trend. While only around 1 in 10 people find banner ads or direct advertising to be trustworthy, fully 70 percent of those responding were likely to trust product reviews from peers. This points the way toward a new model of advertising, in which brands partner with top online "content producers" to most effectively disseminate their messages. This could mean a near future in which the line between consumer and marketer becomes so blurred as to be difficult to spot—and in which advertisements are so ubiquitous, personal, and highly targeted that we don't even think of them as advertisements anymore.