Here’s a concept a little removed from the advertising arena until someone sees a route to deliver a media application. Sometimes the very best advertising media ideas come from thinking a little out of the box around quirky ideas like this.

New Scientist reports a paper presented at the 2008 Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC). Scientists at the University of California have developed an application that gathers people’s music tastes in a room and creates a dynamic playlist that delivers the most popular music for those in the room. Each user’s mp3 player sends out its playlist via wi-fi to a central dj box. This computes the location of users by triangulating the strength of their signals. The Smart Party was developed by Kevin Eustice and Peter Reiher.

So you might be thinking how the hell am I going to make this a media buy? Strip it to the core elements and you have the essence of some great interactive possibilities for an ad campaign. The elements are:

• location detection by triangulating a device’s wi-fi (or bluetooth) signals
• Identifying preferences from those devices
• calculate a dynamic list of most popular, fastest rising, all time favourite, best in the past hour etc.

You could apply this principle to many, many things beyond music and have great fun at your next big event.