Outcome

You receive a text message from your friend! 

But right as you are about to respond to your friend... 

The mobile app ad kicks into gear.   It noticed that your friend had used the word "movie" and plays a trailer for an upcoming film.  You can only respond to your friend once the trailer has finished.  

Thrilled by this trailer, you can now make a suggestion of what movie to see with your friend! 

• Brief/Problem Statement: The problem that Hexing wanted to solve in this proposal was how to make advertisements that are tailored to our interests. If ads aren’t interesting to us, we tend to ignore them if we can by closing a window, muting the sound, or not paying attention until it is over. The question of how to tailor this content has been a huge question for advertisers. With mobile phones collecting large amount of data, we should be able to customize ads specifically for each user. Also if the ads were designed in a way that forced the user to experience it in its entirety, then it would bypass the issue of keeping the user’s’ attention.

• Approach - This problem was difficult for me to solve because I personally am not interested in making ads, nonetheless making them more custom fitted. I feel at some point it is violating a user’s privacy by mining data for things that they might find interesting or robbing them of their time. I also don’t believe that every moment is an opportunity for an advertisement to be displayed. Perhaps people don’t like advertisements because they want to make their own decisions and don’t need suggestions on what to do, buy, etc.

• Process - To reflect on my feelings of customized ads, I chose to map out a speculative phone app, through a series of drawings, that steps on the boundary of privacy and ad overload. In this environment, the program would read your incoming and sent text messages to search for key terms. If someone was sent “movie”//”film”//”Netflix”, the phone would display a trailer for an upcoming movie. This trailer would not give you the possibility of closing out and you can only respond or send your message once you have watched the entirety of the ad.

• Next Step Proposal - I do not believe that this project should be fully realized unless in a manner that is critical of existing systems. It would be interesting to present this project in a way to mobile phone users or companies as a possible method of advertisements and receive reactions.