Companies developing the systems include Paris based Quividi and US based TruMedia Technologies.

Naturally there have been privacy concerns but all involved are insisting that the targeting is remaining completely anonymous and is only trying to target and measure OOH better.

“no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network.”

he went on to say this specifically means:

“no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

You can watch the whole interview over at the Washington Post

I don’t agree with him, buy the way. Newspapers are certainly declining fast and the business model for any printed product including books will have to evolve. But the printed product won’t disappear, it just may be very different from today. In segmentation, size, content, distribution method and frequency of publication amongst others.

The joint industry organisation that looks after radio measurement, RAJAR, might be looking at a new online diary system, with testing taking place in July.

Apparently the main problem was getting the panel to put accurate data into the machines at breakfast time.

The electronic meter trials started in London in early 2007 but one of the key sponsors, the television measurement body BARB, left after a year. This made the project costly for the remaining partner, RAJAR.

Impressive as it is, it’s certainly not the first live tv commercial in the UK. Back in the early days of television, most commercials were shot and aired live.

C4 sales director Andy Barnes tells us:

“We wanted to create something unmissable and what better way to produce something ‘must see’ than to stage the first live ad event on TV. It’s about creating talkability on a big scale, managing the risk and being seen as pioneers for it.”

The follow on for the campaign features skydivers over the USA’s Mojave desert, creating shapes that depict the Honda Accord’s features

There’s no reason to disagree. Increases in bandwidth makes the rise in revenues for mobile tv inevitable. Couple it with the unique targeting opportunities mobile has and you have a goldmine.

Before this happens, Juniper thinks idle-screen advertising will hold court, with revenues moving from $7m in 2008 to over $500m in 2013.

Report author Dr Windsor Holden tells us:

“While adspend in the mobile environment is still extremely limited when compared to the budgets allocated to media such as magazines, television, cinema and the Internet, the opportunities it offers -personalized advertising with very high response rates, delivered to a device which is always in close proximity to the individual - will make it an increasingly attractive proposition for leading brands.”

Juniper also thinks that advertisers will hold back until issues like poor inventory, reach and common metrics are addressed by operators and content providers. That may be so, but the time to experiment with this stuff is now.

OK, it’s going to be a slightly biased report talking up the net ad industry. But even if it is slightly close to the truth it is an astonishing milestone. The revenue shift is going to come from so much tv output appearing through the web, with back catalogue material appearing in archive form that is easily searchable, coupled with increasing broadband speeds.

Researchers at GE have come up with the latest production developments.

NeuroFocus applies brainwave, eye-tracking and skin conductance measurements to try and track the effectiveness of advertising, branding, packaging, pricing and product design across a range of consumer touchpoints.

Medical electroencephalography (EEG) technology is at the root of the analysis process. Respondents wear a special baseball cap embedded with sensors that track brain responses about 2000 times a second as they interact with advertising or marketing materials. NeuroFocus can determine what parts of the messages they pay attention to; how they emotionally engage with them; and what is actually moved to memory. In addition, NeuroFocus blends eye tracking, skin conductance measurements and other physiological parameters to support the brain wave analysis.

Greg Harris, CEO of Mobile Visions, tells us:

“If a mobile site owner wants to know what percentage of their visitors support streaming video, Mobilytics can tell them. More importantly, Mobilytics can show you exactly where your advertising dollar is going. Are you paying for ads that are clicked on by search engine crawlers? Are they desktop pc users? Mobilytics can answer all this and more.”

Web site owners using the free version of Mobilytics have to join the Mobilytics Ad Network. A small text ad is shown to their visitors. In return, the publisher gets the full suite of analytic tracking tools and a share of ad revenue generated by their site.

On the advertiser side of the fence, the Mobilytics Campaign Tracker follows mobile ad campaigns, goals, revenue and ROI for those investing their marketing budgets in the medium.

The $3.5 million venture is being done together with the US Committee for Research Excellence which is an independent forum created by Nielsen and is a grouping of agencies, media and clients. Nielsen staff will literally following panel members around all day. From waking up in the morning until closing the bedroom door, the panel members will be tracked every 10 seconds and watched with all their media consumption habits logged onto handheld computers.

Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer for The Nielsen Company, tells us:

“In a world where people increasingly watch programming online, on mobile devices and outside the home, this study will help us better understand how people are changing the way they consume media so that we can make informed decisions on how to measure it.”

The whole excercise is focused on screen use, whether it’s tv, computer screens, digital billboards or mobile phones or anything else that’s a screen. Panel members will also get the chance to buy new media gadgets cheaply. Nielsen reckons that this will help them predict future consumption patterns, particularly drops in tv audiences.

Of course, in the old days with simple mass media, this was a reasonable goal. But not now, with fragmentation and segmentation of audiences this way and that, plus the onset of so many new media vehicles, it’s tricky as hell. As Nielsen have found out. So the holy grail is consigned to the waste bin. Measurement takes a step back. And maybe truly integrated, innovative, creative media strategies comes further out into the spotlights.

The GSM Association will test its practices in the UK first. A working group will work out metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising. It’s unlikely that major players like Google will sit back and watch quietly. Expect a measurement battleground to develop quickly.

The GSM association’s CEO, Rob Conway, tells us:

“The commitment of all five UK operators to this initiative is critical for the development and future success of mobile as an advertising channel. The working group and the GSMA will facilitate crucial engagement between mobile operators, advertisers and agencies, to help ensure that mobile advertising realises its full potential for the benefit of all players in the ecosystem.”

Note that Mr Conway fails to mention the poor old content providers or operators…

• Television viewing outside the home
• Time-shifted and on-demand viewing
• Radio
• DVDs, audio CDs
• Theatrical films, live concerts and sporting events
• Mobile phone videos and games

But kind of misses out on quiet stuff like magazine reading and internet browsing.

The system was developed by three guys at British universities. Nick Pears researches Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition and Robotics in the Advanced Computer Architectures Group at York University whilst Patrick Oliver and Dan Jackson are at Newcastle University.

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.

I’ve long predicted that voice calls on mobile are approaching zero cost. As average revenue per user (ARPU) inexorably declines, cash for mobile companies will increasingly come from advertising.

And of course, by knowing where the trolley is travelling around the store, relevant ads can be placed just as the consumer is passing the right spot. The east coast ShopRite supermarket chain will get the test this summer.

Scott Ferris, general manager of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Microsoft, tells us:

“Digital advertising opportunities are expanding rapidly into new areas, as many of consumers’ daily activities, such as shopping, become increasingly ‘connected,’ and Microsoft is committed to working with advertisers and agencies to take advantage of these opportunities as they unfold.”

The shopper will get promotions based on location within the store but that’s the least of it. The whole thing works with loyalty cards, so the store will also deliver suggested shopping lists and promotions based on previous habits. Expect more crashed trolleys and tumbling displays of tall canned goods pyramids as shoppers no longer look where they are going in your local supermarket.

Gear Factor have done a number of indoor executions with their remote controlled advertising blimps. Now things move to the great outdoors, starting with a little piece for Adidas a few months back in balmy Venezuela. Word is that these things can now withstand a Beaufort force 4 breeze which should make them suitable for a larger range of environments, if not wind blown north west europe. Check out the flying car video over on their web site.

If you’ve just arrived at the cinema, your friends can then see where you are and you can see how far away they are. They can also get an SMS if they are in the same area so they can get in touch and join you for the movie.

The radars also shows other users in the same proximity. A quick look at photos and profiles and who knows where it may lead. Privacy functions allow you to become invisible or selective about what data you give out. You can even pretend to be somewhere you aren’t if you’re not supposed to be where you actually are. Trust the French to come up with that!

Nice enough, but it’s missing a critical element. Where’s the RFID or Bluetooth signal? With that, the trolley would deliver timely promotional messages in the right aisle. It needs a new level of infrastructure both in terms of hardware and in store management. But I’m sure it’s what clients will be demanding.

The agency group is claiming client flexibility as the key driver. Clients will dictate whether Burnett, media agency Starcom or digital agency Digitas takes the lead role in any particular relationship.

Publicis CEO Maurice Levy tells us:

“The new Leo Burnett model truly breaks the mold. In today’s opt-out world of consumer choice and control, clients need deeper, more measurable and more actionable insights to engage individuals at the right time and place, with the right content. (Leo will be) giving them customized service teams they can access through a single source. No other marketing partner is offering this scope and scale of benefits and options.”

It being my old shop, I have a soft spot for Leo. This is a sensible move but it lacks guts. Yes, it’s time for teams to work together again after being in separate silos for the past decade. But to work together means to be together. No matter how much technology you use to create virtual teams and the like, there’s nothing to beat creating advertising strategies and creative concepts face to face.

I suspect it’s still internal politics and power mongering that’s stopping the true full service agency appearing again. And because of these power bases, maybe the status quo will be with us for a long time yet. Uh well, at least it’s a start.

And they have the cheek to call the paper ‘The end of advertising as we know it’.

Here’s a taster from their press release:

Imagine an advertising world where… spending on interactive, one-to-one advertising formats surpasses traditional, one-to-many advertising vehicles, and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad, and pay based on real impact rather than estimated “impressions.” Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.

If you want to bore yourself with the rest, download the full 25 page pdf report here. To be fair there are a handful of nice charts and factlets in there you could borrow for your next presentation.

Gilbarco Veeder-Root’s vice president of global retail systems, Kirsten Paust, tells us:

“We believe consumers will prefer convenience stores that deliver useful information and ultimate convenience. Retailers who use these tools will make themselves more valuable to consumers and gain the competitive edge.”

Brands are able to have their own pages on Facebook and they can create widgets for people to play with.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells us:

“Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people. It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.”

This is probably one of the first mass market social recommendation opportunities for brands. Word of mouth has come of age.