Tech that will change advertising

1) Ads in the aisles

One problem with today’s location-based advertising is that consumers can cheat. On services like Foursquare, users can perform ‘fake’ check-ins, indicating that they’re in a shop when, in fact, they’re only nearby, so they can gain points without having to go in. A service in the US called ShopKick gets around this by using wireless sensors that detects when you enter a store. It means you don’t have to check in, but you do have to actually go inside the shop. The Near Field Communication sensors are so precise that they can tell not just what shop you’re in, but what products you’re near, and can then send appropriate adverts to your smartphone.

2) Visual search

We’re used to typing words into a search engine, but Google has just introduced Google Goggles, software that lets you perform a visual search of the web, by taking a picture of something in front of you with your phone’s camera. Fancy finding out some history about the Eiffel Tower on your trip to Paris? Or how about seeing the trailer of the film advertised on the bus shelter? Just take a snap with your phone.

Google is testing display ads on Goggles, and the advertising potential could be huge – think targeted ads in the palm of your hand fusing with the world around you. The technology is still in its infancy and mainly works on objects with text on them, like books and wine labels. But Google hopes to advance it to recognise things like food and plants. Goggles has been on Android phones for a while and became available in September for iPhone users with the new iOS4 update.

3) iAd

This year, Apple head Steve Jobs announced the company would branch out into mobile advertising. The iAd system allows developers to include advertising within their apps for the first time. Most mobile ads kick you out of an application when you click on them, which can be annoying, but iAd keeps users in the app, and even lets you buy things through the ad. Apple estimates that the average iPhone user could see 10 ads per day. iAds use HTML5, the new standard for presenting content on the web. It allows for design flexibility through animation techniques like 3D rendering.

4) TaintDroid

Wonder how much information your phone could be giving away to advertisers? There’s an app for that. Researchers at Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University have developed a monitoring service that reports on how apps use your sensitive information. When you download an app, the TaintDroid operating system uses what’s called dynamic taint analysis to mark private information with an identifier so it can then be tracked.

It lets you know if and where your data has been sent as soon as you close the app. It seems there’s good reason for this: using TaintDroid, researchers found that half of 30 popular Android apps that use location, camera and microphone data, send users’ location information to remote advertisement servers. TaintDroid is still at the prototype stage for Android phones at the moment and makers plan to make it publicly available.

5) Augmented reality

Described as the ‘killer app’ mobile advertisers have been waiting for, augmented reality (AR) is the superimposing of computer-generated images or text on the real world as seen through your mobile phone camera.

The technology’s been around for a while, but comes into its own on a portable screen. AR adverts are highly interactive and highly personal. While AR undeniably still has novelty kudos, only two per cent of advertisers plan to incorporate it into their Christmas strategies. Its longevity will depend on whether AR ads can be made genuinely useful. It could even revive the fortunes of print advertising, because an AR code on a page can be scanned to reveal multiple products within an ad the size of a postcard.

Find out more

• Google’s 7 predictions for ads in 2015
• Internet Memes