In a world inundated by advertising, with marketers spending more and more money to grab consumers' attention, it's becoming more and more possible to target "smart ads" specifically to people who want them - for a fraction of the price of mass-market - writes Inc.com in a longish feature (via Slashdot) that paints a futuristic picture, with shades of the movie Minority Report: "Perhaps just five years from now, companies will be able to routinely and inexpensively embark on ad campaigns that hit exactly the right prospects - and hardly anyone else - with entertaining, hard-to-ignore messages that can follow people via new high-tech media into their cars, offices, living rooms, and bedrooms."

The art of advertising is apparently becoming "persuasion engineering" using a combination of super-segmentation to find target audiences, psychology and research to find hot buttons that trigger certain behaviors, "machine-learning" techniques to predict online behavior, and there's even talk of concepts such as "mental click-through" as television and internet begin to merge and morph into a new viewer/participant experience.

The mobile phone, too, figures large in the minds of marketers and advertisers aiming to reach specific targets: "the ultimate smart-ad tool would enable a marketer to hit any individual with a low-cost, interactive message any time of day, any place - a platform for a campaign that could identify and follow prospects through the world as if they were continuously online. Forward-thinking marketers even have a name for this dream medium. They call it… the mobile phone."

However, there will always be an element of uncertainty about how to most effectively reach consumers - so long as one cannot read another's mind. But just wait a bit… "Neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology and Baylor College of Medicine are already using high-tech brain scans to measure people's responses to marketing messages."