The March of Commerce

When Phillip K. Dick wrote “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the idea of display advertising invading public (and occasionally private) spaces at random was still science fiction, but by the time the movie based on the novel (“Blade Runner”) was made it was already starting to happen, and by this point most people will have encountered display ads in some very odd places. Ads on shopping carts make sense, in a way, since the advertiser can try to convince the person pushing the cart to buy their product, but we’ve also seen ads projected or even painted onto the sides of buildings, towed through the air by airplanes, painted onto the sides of cars, trucks and buses, carried on billboards mounted on the back of trucks that don’t carry anything else, transmitted from the screens of giant television sets mounted on buildings, billboards and trucks, and stuck to the walls of public restrooms and the insides of toilet stalls. But there’s a new Clear Channel project that will take all of this to a new level…

According to a story which broke last week , Clear Channel Outdoor is hiring a company called Mirrus to create a new kind of bathroom mirror which is actually a screen for display ads. When somebody approaches the sink, the ad being displayed shrinks to one-quarter size and moves into the upper corner, leaving the rest of the surface to display your reflection; when you step away from the sink, the ad snaps back to full size, covering the space. The system can also keep track of how often the mirror (and sink, one assumes) were used, basic characteristics about who used it and so on; the ads can also be changed, rotated, updated, or whatever remotely. In theory, this should be more interesting and more engaging than a conventional above-the-urinal ad, and also generate useful data about the number of times an ad was seen close-up. In practice, there are a number of questions that remain to be answered…

First of all, how accurate is the information that these smart mirrors can gather? If they’re as reliable as the hands-free sensors you usually find in public restrooms it seems likely that they’ll ignore the user half the time (thus disabling the mirror function altogether), and switch on randomly half the time (thus generating records of thousands of people using an unused sink over the course of a single hour). Then there’s the issue of targeted content. The company that is developing these things claims that they will be able to deliver gender-specific advertisements, which is fine as long as you don’t send the wrong content to the wrong mirror address. However, the comedy potentials of gender-inappropriate ads turning up in the wrong restroom (imagine how some female travelers would react to the sight of strip-club ads, to take the obvious example) alone make this sort of failure a near-certainty. Attempts to target the ads by other demographic categories would create even more opportunities for unwanted mirth, and the question of how they would determine which ads to present has not been addressed…

Now, I don’t have a problem with advertising as such; I’m able to just ignore most of it, and the spread of advertising over every available space doesn’t offend me the way it does a lot of consumers. In business, nothing happens until somebody makes a sale, and it’s much harder to do that if people aren’t aware of your product, its applications, or where to buy it. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that there are some places which the March of Commerce should really think twice about marching into, and some kinds of void that I’m really not comfortable having stare back at me when I look into them…