The Filtnib’s Progress

There’s a brilliant scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report where the fugitive Tom Cruise runs through a shopping mall and some adverts on the wall start to talk to him. Not only do they know his name, they also speak directly to his circumstances: “Need an escape? Blue can take you”; “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now”.

I was reminded of this the other night as I waited on my bike for the lights to go green at the top of Great Eastern Street.

Ok, so no-one was calling my name, but AEG Electrolux’s huge black billboard certainly got my attention, especially as the fluorescent numbers kept changing; 71, 72, 74, 70. What was the trigger?

Noise. As a massive lorry careered past me, the number rose; as the lights went green for pedestrians and cyclists, it fell. Maybe I was tired but there was something hypnotic about watching the ad respond to its environment in this way.

The billboard is nominally part of a campaign to publicize noise awareness (with identical decibel counters in Milan, Brussels, Madrid and Berlin) but it seems more importantly a good excuse for a domestic appliance company to write themselves into the urban landscape. It’s also a tiny step towards the future imagined in Minority Report, where marketing is smart enough to interact with its locale.

It got me thinking about another ad I was drawn to recently, for a new range of Sony Vaio laptops. My macbook has been playing up and, well, its white casing has ne’er looked so grubby than when I compared it to these babies:

Say you’ve got $1160 (£588) going spare, you can choose from three colours, three patterns and four keyboard fonts to design your very own laptop/ style accessory/ comprehensive digital statement of identity.

The brand name may not be cool – ‘Graphic Splash Expression‘ (could it sound any more try-hard?) – but there’s something seductive about personalizing your hardware.

A bit too much? You could always stamp your ID on your stuff in a more subtle way; try Apple’s option to engrave your own ipod (but first check this amusing list of the inscriptions already rejected).

The success of Apple’s free engraving service (Microsoft U.S. recently unveiled their competitor, the customizable laser-etched Zune original- see below) shows consumers fall for a mix of functionality and character. Boiled down, personalization allows you to get more intimate with the things you buy.

So, personalization sells. And a little bit of research shows intelligent ads are much closer than I thought. Back in February last year, marketing blog The Beam Team reported that Mini were trying out a new breed of billboards, which would flash personalized messages to drivers as they get close. Apparently, “the messages from the Mini billboards are personal and based on questionnaires that owners fill out. For example, the boards may say to a lawyer: ‘Moving at the speed of justice’ or ‘The special of the day is speed’ for a chef.”

And there was me thinking Minority Report was sci-fi.