Hear Voices? It May Be an Ad - Advertising Age - News:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, “It’s not your imagination.”
Indeed it isn’t. It’s an ad for “Paranormal State,” a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it’s another story.
No Holosonics is not a company from Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, or plot device for a PK Dick novel. Nor is it a CIA front company (at least as far as we know). But we do know that they supply the latest and creepiest marketing technology that allows advertisers to blast audio into our innocent craniums. Is it not enough that ads are shoved in front of our eyeballs every minute? I know this technology has been justified as being great for museums, which may be true, but beaming from a billboard? This is downright unethical. As Gawker put it,:
So when they hit your head, it sounds like the call is coming from the inside the brain-house.
The billboard says 73% of Americans believe and I’m assuming that that means 73% of Americans believe in ghosts. So if that’s true, why try to convert the skeptical/not crazy 27% by beaming voices into their heads? That’s just greedy. Also it leads to a lingering sense of serious mental violation. How soon will it be until in addition to the Do Not Call list, we’ll have a Do Not Beam Commercial Messages Into My Head list?
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