Technology

Gizmodo reports that NEC, a Japanese tech company, has unveiled a product that will leave you and your fellow advertisers drooling. A camera mounted above a 50-inch display panel can instantly determine the age and sex of anyone standing in front of it. Then it displays content pertinent to said consumer.

Use that direct mailer you're working on to wipe your chin.

We first saw (a higher tech version of) this technology in the Tom Cruise flick, Minority Report. NEC's device doesn't scan eyeballs (as far as we know). But it does provide interested consumers a way to access the content being displayed. The user simply holds his/her cell phone up to the display, and a QR code instantly sends the phone a hyperlink to the given products.

See the Gizmodo story here.

According to Adweek, Sony Pictures has announced that they will be making selected titles available for download to cell phone users. Like Ghostbusters and Stand By Me.

Consider how small your cell phone screen is. If you're lucky, the width of a movie viewed on your phone might be 3 inches wide...and probably 1.5 or 2 inches tall.

What does this mean for advertising?

Well, it's a fairly new medium in the history of ad-making. We've been able to upload media to our iPods and hacked PDAs for a while now. And there's been a dabbling in watching programming over your phone from a couple of cell phone carriers.

Soon, video will be watchable even on the crappiest of phones. Everyone will be able to walk around and watch B-movies on 2-inch screens. Or... perhaps they can watch something else.

For me, this brings up the question: is it appropriate to watch a movie on a 2 or 3 inch screen? Films were never intended to be watched that small. Just like bad TV ads were never meant to be watched on giant movie screens before a film.

Perhaps it's time to take each format's size a little more seriously. Things that seem funny on YouTube aren't always funny when made larger. And some movies aren't just as funny when they're the size of a postage stamp.

As we move forward, developing advertising for a variety of sizes of screens, it might behoove us all to not just shoot one ad and assume it can be watched anywhere. Every format has its own personality.

Even if it's really tiny and gives you a headache.