GM Patents Minority Report-Style Billboards
One of the more memorable bits of futurism from Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report was the individualized advertising. As you made your way down the street, ads positioned on the surrounding walls would read your retinal pattern and shout product pitches at you by name.
“Hi there, Frank McGilicutty. How about another trip to Maui this summer?” Or, “Say, Finwick Armbrooster, have you tried Valtrex?”
For Minority Report, it was a sharp satire of ad culture and an entirely too believable guess at what the future might hold. And now, the future is here…sort of. Jalopnik reported that GM filed a patent for billboards that would offer up personalized advertising to drivers.
Thankfully, it’s not nearly as invasive or unsettling as Minority Report‘s tech. Instead, GM will be using its OnStar navigation service to provide only the destination you’ve entered into the GPS to target specific ads at you via the billboards.
So, like in Minority Report, you might see an ad for businesses near your destination or related to that place in some way. No doubt, anticipating the hue and cry over privacy concerns, GM also explained that the information would immediately be deleted from the server. It’ll still likely make those who like to stay off the grid nervous, but such is the price of living in our increasingly invasive culture. Right?
Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, released in theaters on June 21, 2002 and went to the tune of about $360 million at the box office. In the movie, Cruise played a detective of sorts. Set in the future, it imagined a world in which crimes were “solved” ahead of time, and it was only law enforcement’s job to actually stop the thing from happening.
Intrusive police state in Minority Report? Sure. Everything is looking good until the crime about to be committed is Tom Cruise’s character himself. Now, the chase is on to figure out the truth behind this program. It offered a dystopian view of the future, though there are aspects of current culture that are getting a bit too close to what the movie was actually positing.
As for the GM Billboards fashioned after the Minority Report future? Well, while advertising online has become a target-rich environment, drilled down pretty acutely on a user level, we aren’t seeing these kinds of user-specific road signs all around us (yet).
