Digital Advertising Needs To Grow Up

There's an old saying amongst Marketing Directors "Only 30% of advertising is effective, I just want to know which 30%", because like everyone else they have to fight for budget to pay for advertising and want to optimise revenue growth.

Recently, Facebook, YouTube and Google have all faced criticism for incidents where brand damage has been caused when respectable businesses have had their advertising messages placed on pages which are associated with terrorists, hate sites and other disreputable content. The upshot being that they are paying money to organisations (for views on their pages) with whom they would regard any association as "Brand Contagion".

There are other issues too, such as manipulation of Search Engine Optimisation and boring people to death with nauseous adverts for "rip off" services are damaging consumer interest in on-line advertising.

So it was interesting to see Raconteur reporting Marc Pritchard's (Chief Brand Officer, Proctor & Gamble) comments, when he told the digital advertising industry that it needed to grow up. This is long past time and a wake up call to the industry. There's plenty of opportunity with both machine learning and proper filtering of "acceptable advertisers" to clean this up.

Human AI Integration Gets Closer

In another mind-blowing breakthrough TNW (the next web) reported on an AI which reads and interprets human brainwaves to understand what you are seeing.

Although this is early days, as a proof of concept it is very powerful, showing that the ability to read and interpret human thoughts and senses reliably is not as far away as you would think.

Obviously there is still a lot to do to refine this particular example, as it focuses on sight and recall of images only, but it definitely puts Elon Musk's vision of direct HCI integration into the next twenty years of achievability (allowing for the need to deal with volumes of data and presentation, psychological and ergonomic issues, as well as security and miniturisation.

But it's definitely coming. So there's an ethical debate to be had too around privacy and safeguards.

Also, recently there have been reports on brain hacks to use AI to control electrical stimulation of the brain and improve its performance.

More prosaically, adoption of implantable chips in people is growing; at present, see Brian Jonhson's video, the chips are for single function usage, e.g. access control or train tickets, but the potential is there for multi-functional  implantable chips with flexible reprogramming. So the seeds are being being sown for full human computer integration, and the potential for embedded AI enhancement.

This leads to the question of how obsolescence and technical upgrades will be managed as current approaches to patching are likely to be inadequate.

Updated 9th Feb 2018